AIRTABLE ALTERNATIVE

The Airtable alternative that follows the links.

The same idea you already like: tables, linked records, views, automations. Built for the part that gets hard once a base grows up. A value three tables away is one field, a field can be hidden from one person everywhere, the people who only read are free, and your base comes across with its links and attachments.

Start free See what comes across Watch a base move 2 min

30 days free · no card $29 per editor Viewers free No record tiers

RowFold's Orders grid. Each order shows its customer, the customer's region, the suppliers its order lines depend on, a count of items and an order total, with a totals row at the bottom. — **Region** belongs to the order's customer, two links away. One field reads it.

**Order lines → Product → Supplier** is three tables away. It was added to this view only, so no table gained a field.

**Order total** is rolled up from the order's lines. The totals row is worked out over every matching record, not the rows on screen.

The product itself, photographed on a demo workspace. Not a mock-up.

WHY PEOPLE START LOOKING

Four walls. Which one did you hit?

Most people searching for an alternative are not unhappy with the idea. They have run into one specific limit. Find yours, and see what it looks like here.

The value you need is two tables away.

So you add a lookup whose only job is to pass it along, and the table carries it from then on.

One field, up to 5 links 02

The bill follows the headcount.

More people need access, and each one turns into a question about seats and tiers.

$29 per editor, viewers free 03

Somebody should not see one column.

Margins, salaries, a client's terms. The choice becomes sharing everything or splitting the data in two.

Hide a field from one person 04

Moving looks like a lost weekend.

CSV exports turn links into text and leave the files behind, and the team cannot stop working while you rebuild.

Import, then mirror

01 · RELATION DEPTH

A value three tables away is one field.

Every tool in this category links two tables. The difference is the second and third link. In RowFold you click through the links and pick the field at the end: Order → Customer → Region. That is the whole job.

Up to 5 links in one lookup or rollup, forwards or backwards.
Conditions travel too: total only the shipped orders, or only the lines whose product is Coffee.
A formula reads a linked field directly, as in {Customer.Region}.
Need it once? Add it to one view and no table gains a field.
Click a total to see the records behind it.

Watch a value come from three tables away 1½ min

RowFold's Add field panel. A Lookup named Regional manager, with the route Order, Customer, Region chosen and the fields on Regions listed to pick from. — The field editor, mid-pick. Three clicks out, then the field you want.

THE SAME JOB, BOTH WAYS

“Which suppliers does this order depend on?”

An order has lines, a line names a product, a product comes from a supplier. Three links, and nothing exotic about them.

One link per field How a lookup works in Airtable

Orders OrderCustomer Suppliers from Order lines

Order lines OrderProduct Supplier from Product · helper

Products ProductSupplier

Suppliers SupplierCountry

2 fields on 2 tables. One exists only to pass the value along, and it sits on every row of Order lines from then on. Ask for the supplier’s country as well, and it is three more.

One route How it works in RowFold

Orders OrderCustomer Order lines → Product → Supplier

Order lines OrderProduct

Products ProductSupplier

Suppliers SupplierCountry

1 route. 0 helper fields. Nothing changes on Order lines. Switch a product's supplier and every order that ever used it follows.

How a lookup is set up in Airtable, per its own documentation: it needs a linked record field on the same table and reads a field from the records that field links to. Sources.

02 · THE BILL

The people who edit pay. Everyone else just looks.

RowFold's whole price list is one sentence: $29 a month per editor, from the first one, with unlimited free read-only viewers. No tier above it, and nothing charged for records, tables or relationships.

A viewer opens every table, view, report and dashboard your permissions allow, comments, gets mentioned, filters and exports.
Permissions, audit history, API, automations and single sign-on are on every account.
AI is included: 500 actions per editor each month, pooled across the account.
30 days of the whole product, no card.

Start your 30-day trial Put your own invoice beside it

5 editors× $29

47 viewersfree

Every month $145

The same $145 with 4 viewers or 400, and with ten tables or a hundred.

Airtable does not bill a read-only collaborator either. The difference is what the free seat can do: by Airtable's own account of its billing, whether somebody who only comments takes a paid seat depends on the plan (sources). Here a viewer comments, and there is one plan.

Airtable's prices are not printed here on purpose. Plans change several times a year, and the number that matters is on your own invoice. The switching calculator takes yours and shows both, including the case where staying costs less.

03 · WHO SEES WHAT

Hide one field from one person. Everywhere.

Marcus edits sales and can read purchasing, but he should not see what a product costs. That is one setting: Unit cost, Hidden, for him. The rest of the table is still his to use.

GridsLookups & rollupsReportsSearchAI answers

A field is read-only or fully hidden, per person, and stays that way through everything that reads it.
Folders carry access. One grant covers every table inside, and links still cross between folders, so you never split the data to split the access.
A Contributor can create records and edit only the ones they created.
Every change lands in the audit log, including the ones an automation made.

RowFold's permissions page for one person. The Products table is read only for him, and its Unit cost field is set to Hidden. — One person's access, table by table. Products is read-only for him, and Unit cost is hidden.

Airtable's own documentation says its field and table permissions “do not affect who can see information in the base”; they limit who can edit. Sources.

04 · THE MOVE

Your base, moved. Without a cutover weekend.

The import reads your base through Airtable's API, not a CSV export, so the links between tables and the files on your records survive. Then it can keep reading, hourly or daily, while your team carries on where it is.

1 Connect
Two permissions, both read-only: how your bases are built, and the records in them. Nothing is written back.
2 Import
Every table arrives as a real table. Runs in the background, up to 100,000 records per table in a run.
3 Mirror
Hourly or daily. New and changed records flow in while you build views, reports and automations here.
4 Switch
On a day that suits you, stop the mirror. Until then, both tools are live and current.

Comes across

Tables, fields and records, with their types
Linked records, rebuilt as real relations from Airtable's own record ids
Attachments, copied into RowFold's storage while Airtable's file links still answer
Select options, and dates with their times

Arrives as its value

Formula, rollup and lookup columns: the value they last worked out, as text. The import report names each one, and you rebuild the ones you need as RowFold fields.

Does not come across

Automations. No tool can honestly port another product's scripts.
Interface pages and views. You build those here.

The Airtable connector's card in RowFold's Integrations page, labelled import and sync, with a Connect button. — Where it starts: Manage workspace, Integrations, Airtable.

Start free and import a base The move, step by step

Bending Spoons completed its acquisition of Airtable on September 4, 2026. That is a fact and not a forecast: this page makes no prediction about what it means for the product. A change of owner is a sensible moment to check your exit is real, and a read-only import is the cheapest way to find out.

AND THE REST IS HERE TOO

Everything you would miss on day one.

Views, dashboards, automations, forms, an API and webhooks. Three of them, as they look on the same workspace.

Dashboards

A RowFold dashboard: four totals, revenue by week, revenue by status, lifetime spend by tier, units sold by category and revenue by region.

Tiles read rollups. Revenue by region here is a total that travels lines, orders and customers to get to a region.
Click a bar and the board narrows to the records behind it. Click again and it is back.
Viewers open dashboards free, and a report can be published at a link of its own.

Automations

RowFold's automation editor: a trigger for orders whose status becomes Shipped, then an email step and a webhook step, with the other step types listed below.

No cap on how many automations a workspace runs.
Tokens follow links: the email goes to {{record.customer.email}}, read through the order's customer.
Rehearse before you switch it on: replay a draft against the table's own history and see what it would have sent.

Schema map

Every table and every link, drawn, built in, and draggable.
Folders are regions, and a link that crosses between them is drawn crossing.
Add a relation from the map, or ask it what it would change about your model.

AT A GLANCE

RowFold and Airtable, side by side.

Compared on how the two are built, because that is what stays true. The Airtable column is what its own documentation said in October 2026.

Capability	RowFoldRELATIONAL GRAPH	AirtableFLEXIBLE BASES
How far one lookup or rollup reaches	✓ up to 5 links, either direction	the records one linked field points at
Conditions on what a rollup counts	on routes of several links too	✓ on the linked records
A column from a linked table, in one view only	✓ no field added to any table	a lookup field on the table
Stop one person seeing one field	read-only or hidden, through lookups, reports, search and AI	field permissions limit editing, not seeing
How many automations you may have	✓ no cap	capped per base, by plan
A free seat for somebody who does not edit	✓ unlimited viewers, who can comment	read-only is free; commenting is a paid seat on some plans
Price	$29 per editor, one plan	see their pricing page

Airtable's column describes publicly documented behaviour, read in October 2026: lookup fields, rollup fields, field and table permissions, automations, who is billed, how long file links last. The acquisition: announced August 4, 2026, completed September 4, 2026. Deliberately absent: Airtable's prices and plan limits. They change several times a year, and a stale number here would be worse than none.

Start free The full comparison, with Smartsheet, Notion and monday.com

THE OTHER SIDE OF IT

When Airtable is still the better choice.

A comparison that never concedes anything is an advertisement. These are the cases where we would tell you to stay.

You rely on a particular extension, script or integration. RowFold is the younger product, with a smaller template library and fewer integrations. Check the list before a trial, not after one.
Procurement needs a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report today. We have completed neither audit. What we do instead is written down.
You have dozens of automations and interface pages that work. They do not port. Rebuilding them is the real cost of any move, so count them first.
The base is small and nothing about it hurts. “It works” beats “it is a little better” almost every time.
You need a public app or tens of millions of rows. That is an engineering problem. Moving sideways to a similar tool will not solve it.

STRAIGHT ANSWERS

What people ask before they switch.

Is RowFold a drop-in replacement for Airtable?

It covers the same ground: tables, linked records, lookups, rollups and formulas, grid, board, gallery, calendar, timeline and map views, forms, automations, dashboards, an API and webhooks. It is not a clone. Your tables, records, links and attachments come across in the import. Formulas arrive as the values they last computed, and automations and interface pages do not port, so plan to rebuild those here.

What comes across when I import a base?

Tables, fields and records, with their types mapped: text, numbers, currency, percent, ratings, checkboxes, single and multiple selects with their options, and dates including their times. Linked-record fields are rebuilt as real relations, matched on Airtable's own record ids. Attachments are downloaded into RowFold's storage during the import. Formula, rollup and lookup columns arrive as text holding the value they last computed, and the import report names each one. A single run brings up to 100,000 records per table and says so if a table was larger.

Can we keep using Airtable while we move?

Yes. After the first import you can keep the base mirrored hourly or daily. New records appear in RowFold, changed records update, and Airtable wins on the columns the import brought. Columns you add in RowFold are never touched, a record you have posted through an approval is left alone, and a deletion in Airtable never deletes anything here. The mirror is one way: nothing is written back to your base.

How far can a lookup or a rollup reach?

Up to 5 links in one field, forwards or backwards, and a rollup can carry conditions on what it counts along the way. A view can also show a field from a linked table without adding a field to any table, so a column somebody needs once does not land on everybody's screen.

What does RowFold cost?

$29 a month for each person who edits, from the first one. Read-only viewers are free and unlimited, and they can still comment, filter and export what they are allowed to see. There are no feature tiers and no charge for records, tables or relationships. The trial is 30 days of the whole product with no card. We do not print Airtable's prices: they change, and your own invoice is the honest source, which is what the calculator on the migration page asks for.

Is AI an extra?

No. Every AI feature is on for every account, with an allowance of 500 actions per editor each month, pooled across the account. Past that you can choose to buy more in blocks of 100 for $5, or let the AI pause until the month turns. Everything else keeps working either way.

Airtable has a new owner. Is that a reason to leave?

Bending Spoons announced it would buy Airtable on August 4, 2026 and completed the acquisition on September 4, 2026. That is a fact, and it is not a forecast: nobody outside those two companies knows what it means for the product or its pricing, and this page makes no prediction. What a change of owner is good for is checking that you could leave if you ever had to. A read-only import shows you what a move would take without committing you to one.

Can I get my data back out of RowFold?

Yes. Every table exports to CSV, account settings include a full export, and the REST API returns relationships as links rather than flattened text. Deletes are soft and recoverable from the trash.

More detail: which wall you have hit, and whether switching helps at all · the move, click by click · pricing.

FIND OUT ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON

Import one base. See what it becomes.

Connect read-only, pick a base, and look at your own data with its links intact. Nothing changes in Airtable, and nothing is owed if you stop there.

Start free Talk to a person 30 days free · Full product · No credit card