Airtable vs Bolt.new

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.

Bolt.new is an AI app builder from StackBlitz, the San Francisco company founded in 2017 whose WebContainers technology runs Node.js entirely inside the browser. Bolt launched in October 2024, grew to an estimated $40 million in annual recurring revenue within months, and in January 2025 StackBlitz raised a $105.5 million Series B led by Emergence Capital and GV. Its core job: you describe an app, website or prototype in chat, and Bolt writes the code, runs it live in the browser and deploys it.

Bolt Cloud adds hosting, unlimited databases, authentication, custom domains and analytics, so small apps can ship without leaving the product. You can start from Figma, a GitHub repo or a template, connect Stripe for payments, and build mobile apps through Expo. Pricing is token-based: the free plan gives 1 million tokens a month with a 300,000 daily cap, Pro gives 10 million tokens with rollover and removes Bolt branding, Teams adds admin controls and shared capacity, and Enterprise is billed by consumption.

Bolt fits founders, designers and developers who want a working prototype or MVP in hours with real, exportable code. It is weaker on large, long-lived codebases: token usage grows with project size, and debugging loops can burn through allowances. Lovable and Replit target the same audience, Bubble and FlutterFlow are visual builders with their own runtime, and Softr fits simple internal tools.

Buying tip: start on the free plan to judge how fast your project consumes tokens; heavy users should take Pro annual, where unused tokens roll over.