Airtable vs Baserow

Airtable is a cloud platform, founded in San Francisco in 2012 by Howie Liu and two co-founders, that blends the familiar interface of a spreadsheet with the structure of a relational database. Tables link to each other, fields have types such as attachments, single selects, lookups, rollups and formulas, and the same records can be viewed as a grid, kanban, calendar, gallery, form, Gantt chart or timeline.

On top of the data, Interface Designer builds dashboards and lightweight apps for people who should not edit raw tables, automations run actions on triggers and schedules, and syncs bring in data from other bases or tools. AI fields categorize records, summarize text and generate content inside the base. The free plan allows unlimited bases with 1,000 records each and five editors; Team raises limits to 50,000 records per base and adds Gantt and timeline views; Business adds 125,000 records, premium syncs, an admin panel and SAML SSO; and Enterprise Scale is custom-priced with HyperDB and enterprise APIs.

Airtable powers content calendars, product catalogs, lightweight CRMs, inventories, applicant trackers and production schedules at thousands of companies, and it shines when non-developers need a structured database they can build themselves. In recent years it moved upmarket and raised prices, which pushed small teams toward open-source or cheaper options such as Baserow, NocoDB and Grist, or to Notion databases for document-heavy work. Per-seat pricing, record limits per base and automation run limits are the main constraints to check before adopting.

Baserow is an open-source no-code database and one of the most complete Airtable alternatives. It is developed by a company based in the Netherlands and offered both as a hosted cloud service with EU data storage and as a self-hosted application you can run with Docker on your own servers. The core of the product is MIT licensed.

Data lives in tables with typed fields, links between tables, lookups, formulas and rollups, and can be viewed as a grid, gallery, form, kanban or calendar. On top of the database Baserow adds an application builder for simple internal tools and portals, automations, an AI field that generates or classifies content from a prompt, row comments, and a REST API with webhooks. The free self-hosted edition has no artificial row limits; paid Premium and Advanced tiers, priced per user, unlock extra views, AI, admin controls, audit logs, SSO and role management.

Baserow suits teams that like the Airtable model but need data ownership, GDPR-friendly hosting or predictable costs at large row counts. It falls short on ecosystem: Airtable has far more integrations, templates and a more mature Interfaces layer, and its community is larger. NocoDB is the closest rival, source-available rather than open source since 2026, and sits on top of an existing SQL database, while Grist is stronger for spreadsheet-style formulas. For many European organizations Baserow is the easiest open-source option to adopt.