An Airtable overview: A guide to the flexible database in 2025

If you’ve ever tried to manage a complex project in a spreadsheet and felt like you immediately hit a wall, you’re not alone. That’s pretty much why a tool like Airtable exists. It’s become a favorite for teams that need to organize… well, just about anything. By blending the easy-to-use feel of a spreadsheet with the power of a real database, it’s earned the trust of over 500,000 organizations for tasks ranging from mapping out marketing campaigns to tracking product updates.

So, what exactly is it? And is it the right choice for every single task? This Airtable overview will walk you through its core features, what people typically use it for, and where it has its limits. We’ll cover everything from its basic structure to its pricing so you can get a clear picture and decide if it’s a good fit for your team.

What is Airtable?

At its heart, Airtable is a cloud platform that lets you build and share databases without needing to know any code. If you’ve ever found yourself wishing your spreadsheet could do more, you’ll understand why that’s a pretty big deal.

Here’s a simple way to think about it: tools like Google Sheets or Excel are fantastic for numbers and calculations. But when you need to connect different sets of information, say, linking a customer list to their purchase history and support tickets, you’re really talking about a database. Databases are designed to handle relationships between data, but they usually require some technical know-how (like SQL) to get them working.

Airtable fills that gap. It gives you all the power of a database but wraps it in a simple, grid-like interface that feels familiar. More recently, Airtable has started calling itself an "AI-native app platform." This just means it now has built-in AI tools that can help with things like summarizing text, brainstorming ideas, and organizing your information, turning what was once static data into a custom app.

Key Airtable features and components

To really understand what makes Airtable work, it helps to know its main parts. It’s a bit more organized than a spreadsheet, and that structure is where all the magic happens.

The building blocks: Bases, tables, fields, and records

Everything in Airtable is organized into a clear hierarchy:

• Bases: Think of a Base as a single database for a whole project. You might have one for "Marketing Content," another for a "Sales CRM," or one for the "Product Roadmap." It’s the main hub for all the related info for that one thing.

• Tables: Inside each Base, you have Tables. A table holds a list of a specific type of item, like "Campaigns," "Contacts," or "Assets." It’s pretty similar to having different sheets in a spreadsheet.

• Fields: Fields are the columns in your table, but they’re way more powerful than standard spreadsheet columns. You can set them up as checkboxes, dropdown menus, date pickers, or even file attachments. The most important one is the "linked record" field, which lets you connect entries from different tables. This is what makes it a relational database and not just a fancy spreadsheet.

• Records: A Record is just a single item in your table, or one row. In a "Campaigns" table, for example, each record would represent one campaign, with all its details filled out across the different fields.

Visualizing your data with views

One of the coolest things about Airtable is Views. A view is just a different way to look at the data in a table without messing with the original information. You can create and save a bunch of different views for the same table, each one customized for a different purpose.

Here are a few of the most common ones:

• Grid view: This is the standard spreadsheet-style layout you see when you first open a table.

• Kanban view: This is perfect for managing workflows. It shows your records as cards organized into columns. You can just drag and drop a card to move it from "To-Do" to "In Progress" and finally to "Done."

• Calendar view: If your records have dates associated with them, this view plots them on a calendar. It’s a lifesaver for managing deadlines or content schedules.

• Gallery view: This view turns your records into big visual cards, which is great for highlighting images or attachments. It’s perfect for things like product catalogs or a team directory.

Building custom apps: Interfaces and automations

Airtable is more than just a place to keep your data; it lets you build simple applications on top of it.

With the Interface Designer, you can create interactive dashboards and pages for your team or clients. Instead of sending them a link to a massive, complicated base, you can build a clean interface that only shows the important stuff and lets them update records without getting lost in the raw data.

Automations are there to take care of repetitive tasks for you. You can set up simple "if this, then that" workflows right inside Airtable. For example, you could set up an automation that sends a Slack message to your team every time a project’s status is changed to "Complete."

While these automations are handy for internal workflows, they aren’t built for more complex, conversational AI tasks like handling customer support. For that, you’d need a tool designed specifically to connect your knowledge sources (like an Airtable base) to your help desk and respond to customers.

Common Airtable use cases (and where it falls short)

Airtable is incredibly flexible, but it’s not the perfect tool for every single business problem. It’s brilliant in some areas but has some clear limitations, especially when it comes to talking with customers in real-time.

What Airtable is great for

Teams use Airtable for all sorts of things, but it really shines when it comes to:

• Project management: With its Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and timeline views, it’s a flexible and powerful way to keep projects on track.

• Simple CRM: Small and medium-sized teams can easily build a lightweight Customer Relationship Management system to keep track of sales leads, customer conversations, and deals.

• Content operations: It’s a go-to for marketing teams who need to manage editorial calendars, plan content, and keep all their digital assets organized.

Airtable’s limitations for customer support

You could probably rig Airtable to work as a basic ticketing system or an internal FAQ, but it’s important to remember that it’s not a dedicated customer support tool. Trying to make it one often creates more headaches than it solves.

The main issue is that Airtable is fundamentally a system for storing and organizing information. It doesn’t have the core features of a modern help desk like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom, which are all built from the ground up to manage live customer conversations from many different channels at once.

Then there’s the AI gap. Airtable’s built-in AI is made to work inside the base, it can summarize data, help generate content, or tidy up your records. It can’t act like an independent AI agent that reads incoming customer tickets in your help desk and gives them an accurate answer right away.

This is where a specialized AI platform for support can make a huge difference. A tool like eesel AI is designed to do exactly that. It connects directly with your help desk and all your knowledge sources, including Airtable bases, Confluence wikis, Google Docs, and even your past support tickets. eesel AI pulls all of that knowledge together to automate frontline support, draft helpful replies for your human agents, and sort incoming tickets. These are the kinds of workflows you just can’t build in Airtable by itself. So instead of replacing Airtable, eesel AI makes all that well-organized data useful for your support team.

eesel AI's Copilot drafts helpful replies for your agents directly within your help desk, using knowledge from sources like Airtable.

Airtable pricing plans

Airtable prices its plans in tiers. There’s a free plan that’s great for individuals or small teams, and then paid plans that add more features and capacity as you grow. The paid plans are charged per user (or "seat"), so the final cost will depend on how many people are on your team.

Here’s a quick look at the main plans:

As you can see, the features that larger teams usually need, like more admin controls, single sign-on (SSO), and a higher number of automations, are only available on the more expensive Business and Enterprise plans.

It’s also worth pointing out that Airtable’s AI tools work on a credit system. This can make your monthly costs a bit unpredictable since your usage can change. In contrast, platforms like eesel AI typically offer more straightforward pricing based on a set number of AI interactions, so you don’t have to worry about a surprise bill after a busy month of support requests. This makes it a lot easier to budget for support automation as you grow.

This video provides a helpful Airtable overview, explaining what the tool is and who can benefit from using it.

The right tool for the right job

Airtable is a fantastic platform for anyone who needs to organize information and build custom internal tools without having to write any code. Its real power is in how it structures data, lets you create unique workflows, and gives teams a single place to find all their important project info.

But its greatest strength is also its main limitation: it’s a general-purpose tool, not something specifically designed for the fast-paced world of customer support.

So, what’s the bottom line? Use Airtable for what it does best: as a beautifully designed source of truth for your company’s important data. Then, you can get even more value from that data by connecting it to a purpose-built AI support platform like eesel AI. By doing that, you can turn your organized knowledge into automated resolutions, quicker response times, and a happier, more efficient support team.