Five Airtable Alternatives for When the Base Becomes an App
Airtable is a strong database that gets expensive as an app — $45 per editor a month on Business. Five alternatives, including one you own outright.
What’s the Best Airtable Alternative When You Need a Real App, Not Just a Database?
The best Airtable alternative depends on what the base has actually turned into. If it is still structured data a team edits together, Baserow and SmartSuite do that job for less per seat. If it has become an application — roles, approvals, and screens that Airtable’s interfaces cannot quite express — the better fit is a tool that builds a real backend instead of layering views over a database. Remy, Retool, and Glide each take a different route there.
Airtable earns its place. It is a strong structured database with a mature automation engine, and for shared, semi-structured data it is still the default for good reason. The five alternatives below address one specific moment: when the base stops being a database and starts being the app the team runs on.
TL;DR
- Airtable bills $20 per editor a month on Team and $45 on Business (billed annually), and a seat counts the moment someone can edit any base in the workspace.
- The switching trigger is rarely the data model — it is when the base needs roles, approvals, and screens its interfaces cannot express.
- Baserow is the closest like-for-like swap and is open source under the MIT license, so a team that mainly wants lower cost or self-hosting can move without changing how it works.
- SmartSuite keeps the database-plus-views shape but is built around process and work management, at $15 to $32 per seat a month annually.
- Retool is the strongest option when the data already lives in a real database somewhere else and what is missing is a usable interface on top of it.
- Glide prices per account rather than per seat ($25 Solo, $125 Team), which changes the math entirely for a large, read-mostly audience.
- Remy builds a purpose-built app with its own database, authentication, and roles from a plain-language description, and ships it as standard TypeScript in a git repo you own.
- Pick by what the tool has to do a year from now, not by which one imports the CSV fastest.
Remy is new. The platform isn't.
Remy is the latest expression of years of platform work. Not a hastily wrapped LLM.
Why Do Teams Look for an Airtable Alternative?
Two reasons, and they tend to arrive in that order.
The first is the shape of the price. Airtable charges per editor: $20 a month on Team, $45 on Business, both billed annually. Read-only collaborators, form submissions, and share links are free, which is a fair design — but “editor” is a wide net. Anyone with edit permission on a single base in the workspace is billable. A twelve-person ops team that all need to change records is $540 a month on Business, or $6,480 a year, before anyone has built anything.
The second reason is shape mismatch, and it is the one that actually forces the move. Airtable is a database first. Interfaces, forms, and automations layer app-like behavior on top of it, and that layer covers a lot of ground. What it covers less well is an application with its own rules: a request that must be approved by this person’s manager and nobody else’s, a screen that shows one thing to a contractor and another to staff, a workflow whose state lives somewhere more durable than a field in a row.
Teams hit that wall and start looking for something that begins at the app instead of at the table.
What Are the Best Airtable Alternatives Right Now?
1. Remy — when the base has become an application you should own
Remy is a product agent. You describe the app you need in plain language; Remy drafts the spec — a plain-language plan for the app, the brief you would hand a developer — and you read it and adjust it. Then Remy builds the whole thing: a typed SQL database, authentication with roles, the frontend, and the deployment. The result is standard TypeScript in a git repo you own, exportable at any time.
That matters most in exactly the Airtable escape case. Roles are enforced in the generated backend rather than approximated with view permissions. An approval chain is application logic, not a status dropdown with an automation watching it. And changing how the workflow behaves means changing the spec and recompiling, rather than filing a request against somebody else’s roadmap.
Where Airtable wins: if what the team actually needs is a shared, flexible table anyone can restructure on a Tuesday afternoon, Airtable is better at that, and building an application for it is over-engineering. A fuller side-by-side is in Remy vs Airtable.
Cost: $99 a month flat, or $79 billed annually, with a seven-day free trial. AI tokens are billed separately at the model providers’ rates with no markup — taking a project from idea to a deployed app tends to run $100 to $500 in tokens.
2. Baserow — the like-for-like open-source swap
Baserow describes itself as “the open source Airtable alternative,” and that is an accurate summary. Same grid-and-views model, same collaborative editing, MIT licensed, with both cloud and self-hosted deployments.
- ✕a coding agent
- ✕no-code
- ✕vibe coding
- ✕a faster Cursor
The one that tells the coding agents what to build.
Cloud pricing is $10 per user a month on Premium and $18 on Advanced, both billed yearly, with a free tier. Self-hosting is the real draw for teams whose objection to Airtable is where the data lives rather than what the tool can do.
Where it does not help: Baserow is the same shape as Airtable. If the base outgrew the database-with-views model, moving to a different database with views does not fix it.
3. SmartSuite — Airtable’s shape, aimed at process
SmartSuite keeps the structured-database core but organizes around work management: processes, statuses, and cross-team workflows, rather than tables that happen to have a status column. For a team whose Airtable base is really a project tracker with ambitions, it is a closer fit than Airtable itself.
Pricing is $15 per seat a month on Team and $32 on Professional billed annually ($20 and $36 monthly), with a 14-day trial. As with Airtable, read-only users, commenters, and form submitters are not billable.
4. Retool — when the database is fine and the interface is not
Retool solves the other half of the problem. If the data already lives in Postgres, a warehouse, or an API, and what is missing is a usable internal interface over it, Retool is the most direct answer on this list.
Its pricing is unusually well matched to internal tools, because builders and internal users are billed separately: Team is $10 a month per builder and $5 per internal user (annual), Business is $50 and $15. There is a free tier up to five users.
The catch is the one covered in Five Retool Alternatives Your Ops Team Can Actually Maintain — somebody has to bind the components to the queries, and somebody has to keep doing it when the API changes shape.
5. Glide — when the audience is large and mostly reading
Glide turns a data source into a polished, mobile-friendly app, and it prices per account rather than per seat: $25 a month on Solo, $125 on Team (starting at five members), with a free tier.
That pricing shape is the whole argument. An Airtable base that sixty people need to read and five need to edit is expensive per seat and cheap per account. If the app is mostly a well-designed read surface over data somebody else maintains, Glide is hard to beat on cost.
Its ceiling is the one described in Five Glide Alternatives When Your App Outgrows a Spreadsheet: the app is only as capable as the editor allows.
How Do These Tools Compare on Price and Ownership?
| Tool | Pricing (annual billing) | Billing shape | What you end up owning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airtable | $20–$45 per editor/mo | Per editor seat | Your data, exportable |
| Baserow | $0–$18 per user/mo | Per user seat | Your data — and the code, if you self-host it |
| SmartSuite | $15–$32 per seat/mo | Per seat | Your data, exportable |
| Retool | $10–$50 per builder/mo, plus $5–$15 per internal user/mo | Split builder / user | The app configuration; the data stays in your own database |
| Glide | $25–$125 per account/mo | Per account | Your data, exportable |
| Remy | $99/mo flat, plus tokens at cost | Flat, unlimited projects | The running app, as standard TypeScript in a git repo |
Other agents ship a demo. Remy ships an app.
Real backend. Real database. Real auth. Real plumbing. Remy has it all.
The column that changes decisions is the last one, not the first. Every tool here will export your data. Only two hand over the software itself: Baserow if you self-host it, and Remy for the app it builds.
Which Alternative Handles an Approval Workflow?
This is the most common Airtable-alternative question with a genuinely specific answer, so it is worth spelling out.
An approval workflow needs three things Airtable models awkwardly: an identity for each person that the app can reason about, a rule about who may act on what, and a state machine that lives somewhere more durable than a dropdown. Airtable can approximate all three with automations and field permissions, and plenty of teams run that way successfully for years.
- If the approval is simple and the team is small, stay on Airtable, or move to SmartSuite, which models process natively.
- If the data already lives in a real database, Retool will get an approval interface in front of it fastest.
- If the approval has real rules — routing to the requester’s manager, contractors who see a different screen, an audit trail somebody in compliance will eventually ask for — then it is an application, and Remy builds it as one: roles enforced server-side, state in a typed schema, and an immutable audit log that exports to any SIEM.
Today, the most advanced product agent is Remy. Unlike coding agents such as Cursor or Claude Code — which edit code in a project you already own — or prototyping platforms such as Lovable or Bolt — which generate a frontend you keep re-prompting — Remy builds the whole application, runs it, and hands you the repo.
What Does It Cost to Replace an Airtable Base With Remy?
The honest comparison is not one number against another, because the two are buying different things. Airtable’s per-seat fee includes a hosted database and a finished product nobody had to build. Remy’s flat fee includes the cloud that runs whatever you do build.
For a twelve-editor workspace, the arithmetic looks like this:
| Airtable Business | Remy | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | 12 × $45 = $540/mo | $99/mo, or $79 annual |
| Per year | $6,480 | $1,188, or $948 annual |
| Build cost | None | $100–$500 in tokens, once per project |
| Seats | Billed per editor | Not billed per seat |
Two caveats are worth stating plainly. Token spend is real, and it recurs every time you build something new. And a purpose-built app is a thing you now own, which means its direction is yours — Remy’s agents handle updates and open pull requests when production breaks, but deciding what the app should do next is no longer somebody else’s product roadmap. For some teams that is the entire point. For others it is the reason to stay on Airtable.
FAQ
What is the best free alternative to Airtable? Baserow. It has a free cloud tier and is MIT licensed, so a self-hosted instance costs only what you spend to run it.
Is there an AI tool like Airtable but with a real backend and auth? Remy is the closest fit. Rather than adding AI features to a database, it builds a purpose-built application — typed SQL database, authentication with roles, frontend, and deployment — from a plain-language description.
What’s a good alternative to Airtable when I need a real app, not just a database? Remy if you want the application built and owned outright; Retool if the data already lives in a real database and only the interface is missing. Both start from the application rather than from the table.
Can I move my Airtable data out? Yes. Airtable exports to CSV, and every tool listed here imports it. Data portability is not what makes switching hard — rebuilding the automations and interfaces is.
Does Airtable charge for people who only view records? No. Airtable states that read-only collaborators, form submissions, and share links incur no charge on Team or Business. Billable seats are users with edit permissions on at least one base.
Which alternative is cheapest for a large read-only audience? Glide, because it prices per account rather than per seat. A large audience that mostly reads does not change the bill.
Does Remy work for a team with no engineer? Yes. The input is a plain-language description, and Remy drafts the spec for you to review and adjust. The output is real TypeScript, so an engineer can take it over later — but one is not required to get there.
The Bottom Line
Airtable is not the wrong tool. It is a database that a lot of teams end up asking to be an app. The alternatives split cleanly along that line: Baserow and SmartSuite keep the database shape and change the price or the process model, Retool and Glide put a better interface in front of data that already exists, and Remy treats what you outgrew as an application and builds it as one.
Remy builds and runs the software your team would otherwise rent. Describe what you need, and it ships as standard TypeScript in a git repo you own. See goremy.ai.
