Airtable vs Rows

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.

Rows was a spreadsheet platform from Portugal, originally launched as DashDash, that combined familiar spreadsheet formulas with built-in data integrations, an AI analyst and publishing. In February 2026 Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly, agreed to acquire Rows; the team moved on to strengthen Coda, and the Rows product was wound down, with rows.com fully shutting down on May 31, 2026.

While it ran, integrations pulled data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Stripe, HubSpot, Salesforce, Facebook and Google Ads, databases and APIs into tables that refreshed automatically. The AI analyst summarized data, built pivot tables and charts, wrote formulas and answered questions in plain language, and any spreadsheet could be published as an interactive web page or embedded dashboard. It was sold as a freemium product with paid Plus and Pro plans.

Former users need a new home for the KPI dashboards, marketing reports and investor updates that relied on live data. Coda, now in the same company as the former Rows team, is the closest successor for teams that want docs and tables with integrations; Equals focuses on SQL and startup finance; Google Sheets with connector add-ons is the cheap default; and Airtable suits operational databases. Do not start new work in Rows, since the product is no longer available.