Both Airtable and Notion offer a unique combination of productivity features, which is why neither of them has competitors that can exactly replicate what they do. Airtable and Notion also don’t overlap with each other as much as you might think, although they can both be used for project management. In this guide, we will compare and contrast both Airtable and Notion to help you figure out which one might be a fit for your business.
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Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration tool that allows teams to build their own custom low-code apps and to create and share relational databases. Airtable can be accessed via your web browser, desktop apps for Windows and Mac or mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Notion is a productivity app that lets you track projects and create and organize notes. It can be accessed via a web browser, desktop apps for Windows and Mac or mobile apps for iOS and Android. A Notion widget is available for both iPhone and Android, so you can access it right from your home screen.
| Features | Airtable | Notion |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple project views | Yes | No |
| Project templates | 20+ | 560+ |
| Team collaboration | Yes | Yes |
| Native time tracking | Yes | No |
| Forever free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing plan | Starts at $10 per user per month | Starts at $8 per user per month |
Airtable offers four different pricing plans to suit a variety of budgets, from individual users to large businesses:
In addition to the forever Free plan, Airtable also offers a 14-day free trial of the Pro plan, so you can try it before you buy. For more information, see our full Airtable review.
Notion also offers four different pricing tiers. They are:
You can also choose to add the optional Notion AI to any paid plan for $8 per user per month, billed annually. Notion AI can be used to generate summaries, rewrite documents and brainstorm ideas.
You can request a trial of the Business plan and a demo or trial of the Enterprise plan, but you’ll need to contact the sales team to do both — you can’t sign up for either directly. For more information, read our full Notion review.
Like we said earlier, Airtable is a relational database management app, which means that it offers a flexible solution for creating and storing data. In Airtable, you can create a base (short for database) and a table and then fill the table with records (a.k.a. records). After that, organize the data in fields, create custom views of the data and connect linked records to your data. Use the Interface Designer and the templates to customize the look and functionality of your base.
If you’re looking for a big upgrade from Excel or Google Sheets, Airtable might be the solution you’ve been looking for. Airtable can be used for just notes management, but that app is meant to do much more than that, which is why we named it one of our best project management software for small businesses. However, you might get frustrated by its complexity if you want a simpler project and notes management tool.
Notion started as a notes app, and as such, it’s an excellent solution for creating and organizing text-based documents. In Notion, you can choose from more than 50 types of content blocks and assemble them into a well-organized page. You can then centralize the documents into either a personal or team wiki (Figure A) to keep them organized in a sensible hierarchy.
Figure A
These note management features are why you might see Notion compared to apps like Evernote, although Notion lets you do much more than just create notes. While Notion is a great solution for this kind of document creation and management, it does lack the more sophisticated data management capabilities of Airtablem, so it’s not a direct comparison.
By selecting the default project tracker template (Figure B), Airtable will automatically create a base and fill it with sample data to help get you started. There are also 20 additional project management templates that you can choose from if the default one doesn’t fit your needs, which is significantly fewer than both Notion and other competitors. Free accounts come with grid, calendar, form and Kanban views. You’ll need to upgrade to a Pro account if you want Gantt chart or timeline views, which is a bit of a drawback.
Figure B
Meanwhile, Notion offers 560 project management templates that you can take advantage of, so you’ll have to build much less from scratch. Project views include Kanban, calendar, timelines (a.k.a. Gantt charts, see Figure C) and table (a.k.a. a grid view). If you have used Trello or Asana, the Notion interface will be familiar to you, although it’s more minimalist and features less color and more whitespace than these alternatives.
Figure C
Airtable and Notion offer most of the fundamental task management features you would expect, but they aren’t as fully featured as powerhouse PM tools like monday and ClickUp. Both Airtable and Notion allow you to share a project with teammates, assign a task to yourself or someone else and set deadlines for tasks. You can also upload files in each tool, though it’s easier to do this in Notion, which allows for direct uploads. In Airtable, you have to create an attachment field before uploading your desired document, which adds an extra step to the process.
Airtable does offer native time-tracking abilities (Figure D), so you don’t need a separate platform, but it considers time tracking an extension (or extra feature), and lower-tier plans are limited in how many extensions they can use per base. For example, the free plan only gets one extension per base. For more information, see our article about how to use Airtable as a project management tool.
Figure D
Since it’s less complex, Notion has a smaller learning curve than Airtable, which is why we included it on our list of the best project management software for startups. Unfortunately, Notion doesn’t offer some critical project management features that major competitors do, even on its higher-tier paid plans. Native time tracking is the most glaring omission, although the platform does offer pre-built time tracking templates as a workaround. Some users also report that the software can become tedious to use if you are managing multiple projects or really complex projects, so it’s not necessarily the best choice for power users or enterprises.
Both Airtable and Notion allow you to comment on items (Figure E), tag colleagues in messages and reply to comments directly within the tool. However, Airtable does not allow users to react to comments with an emoji such as a thumbs up or smiley face, which is a feature that most other enterprise project management software provides. This means that you will need to leave a reply every time you want to acknowledge a coworker’s comment, which users say can be annoying. Notion does provide emoji reactions, which is a big plus.
Figure E
Furthermore, neither platform offers direct messaging like Asana or a native video chat option like Teamwork. While these additional features aren’t as standard as emoji reactions, they are still helpful if you are looking for an all-in-one project management tool. You’ll need to move to a different software like Slack or Zoom if you want to have an extended discussion, especially one that isn’t tied directly to a particular task.
To compare Notion and Airtable, we signed up for free accounts and consulted demo videos, product documentation, user reviews, and community resource forums. We considered factors such as pricing, interface design, ease of use and integrations, as well as features such as project views, task management, team collaboration and project templates.
If you are mostly looking to manage data and build low-code team apps in a single system, Airtable is the right choice for you. While its databases are formatted like spreadsheets, you can use the tool to do much more than run formulas or plan projects, such as gathering customer feedback and tracking sales. In fact, some teams choose to use Airtable for their data management needs and a different app for their project management needs since Airtable doesn’t offer as many project management templates.
On the other hand, Notion is better suited to notes management and creating wikis for both internal and external use. It also offers more project management features and templates than Airtable does, though it falls short of more robust PM tools such as monday work management. This combination of notes and project management makes it especially well-suited for content creators, marketing departments and other teams that work largely with text. You can actually integrate Notion and Airtable using Zapier, so if both of them sound useful to you for different reasons, then you don’t have to choose between them.
Still not sure if either Airtable or Notion is the right productivity tool for your team? Check out our list of the 10 best project management software and tools for 2023 to see what other platforms we rate highly.
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