Alternatives to Airtable
The base filled up.
Airtable is a superb database. The searches start when the record limit lands mid-quarter, when everyone who can edit turns out to be a seat, or when the person who built the whole thing hands in their notice.
CRM
Contacts, pipeline, follow-ups
Finance
Estimates, invoices, payments
HR
Org chart, time off, reviews
Support
Tickets, SLAs, portal
Inbox
Channels and direct messages
What actually pushes people off Airtable.
Two limits and one structural problem with building your own software.
Records and runs are capped per tier
Each tier caps records and attachments per base, and you cannot add more until you upgrade. Automation runs and API usage are capped at the plan's limit in the same way. So the growth of the thing you built is metered, and the upgrade arrives on the database's schedule rather than yours.
Everyone who can edit is billed
Anyone with edit permission on at least one base is a charged seat. Read-only collaborators and form submitters are not, which is fair, but it means the practical question is how many people need to change a single field, and in most teams that answer is nearly everybody.
You built the software, so you maintain it
A base that models your business is genuinely impressive and it is also a system with no vendor behind it. Formulas break, someone renames a field that an automation depended on, and the interface stops matching the data. When the builder leaves, the company inherits an application with no documentation and no support contract.
What a Spodus seat is instead.
Products that already know what a customer, an invoice and a ticket are.
Records are not a limit to manage
Unlimited records, views, boards and pipelines on every plan. Storage is what differs between plans, not how many rows you are allowed. Nothing about growing your data forces an upgrade.
The common shapes are already built
You do not model a deal, an invoice with a tax rate, a ticket with an SLA or an employee with time off, because those are five finished products. Custom objects and custom fields are there for the things nobody sells, on top of a system that already works.
Nobody inherits a puzzle
When the person who set up your workspace leaves, what they leave is configuration on a supported product rather than an application they wrote. Object-level permissions are on every plan, so who can see what is a setting rather than a base-sharing convention somebody has to remember.
What you would be giving up.
Airtable is a better database than Spodus and it is not particularly close. Its field types, its linked-record modelling, interfaces, sync from external sources, extensions, scripting and the sheer speed of shaping something new all exceed what custom objects and custom fields do here. If your job is to model something nobody sells software for, Airtable is the right tool and Spodus is not. What Spodus is for is the opposite case: the base that has slowly turned into a CRM, an invoice tracker and a support queue, all of which somebody sells software for, and none of which is anyone's job to maintain.
Side by side.
| Spodus | Airtable | |
|---|---|---|
| Records per base | Unlimited on every plan | Capped per tier |
| Automation runs | Monthly allowance, generous | Capped at the plan's usage limit |
| Interfaces, sync and extensions | ||
| Field types and modelling depth | Custom objects and fields | |
| Purpose-built CRM | Build it yourself | |
| Invoicing, tax rates and recurring schedules | ||
| Help desk with SLAs and a portal | ||
| HR, time off approvals and org chart |
Airtable's pricing structure above was read from their own pricing page on 28 August 2026; check it for current rates, which we deliberately do not quote here. Spodus is priced per seat on both Growth and Business, billed annually, with no seat minimum. Customers in the support portal are free.
Tables map onto objects.
An Airtable table exports to CSV and imports as a Spodus custom object with fields mapped and duplicates caught on the way in. Linked records need the related object imported first, so do the parents before the children. What does not transfer: interfaces, extensions, scripts, formula and rollup fields, and sync connections. Anything computed in Airtable has to be rethought rather than moved, and that is usually where the time goes.
Questions, answered.
Is Spodus a database like Airtable?
Are there record limits?
Who counts as a seat?
Can we import our bases?
Thinking about the rest of the stack?
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