How to decide between Airtable, Coda, Notion, and Sheets if you need a database

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How to decide between Airtable, Coda, Notion, and Sheets if you need a database

A guide to help you choose the right software for your database

This guide will help you decide what’s the best cloud-based software for your database depending in your use case, whether you simply want to have a list of all your tasks or if you want to bring all your company’s data and create a dashboard.

Here are five questions you should ask yourself when deciding what’s the best tool to store and customize your data:

Does your team need to edit your database and collaborate?

Do you need to bring your data from other data sources (like Shopify)?

Are you using formulas to calculate outputs and customize your data?

Do you need to visualize your data and add text to explain what it means?

How large is your database? Will you have 1,000 rows or 100,000 rows?

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Airtable

Powerful apps that connect your data, workflows and teams

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Notion

A unified workspace with tables as databases.

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Coda

Coda brings all your words, data, and teamwork into one powerful doc.

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Google Sheets

Spreadsheet, with individual cells.

What do these platforms have in common?

They are all cloud-based software. That means that they load directly on your browser and you don’t need to download any desktop application.

You can collaborate and invite other editors to your database.

You can have rows and columns with different types of data (text, numbers, dates, user, etc)

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Formulas

Formulas allow you to use data in the table and calculate outputs. You can use formulas to calculate the sum of sales in a column or to build custom outputs like a string of text with data.

✅ Basic

Basic formulas included.

✅ Basic

Basic formulas included.

✅ Advanced

Advanced formulas included.

✅ Advanced

Advanced formulas included.

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Integrations

Integrations is how you can bring data from other platforms (like Salesforce or Gmail) to these platforms and also push data to other platforms. All these platforms have an API that can be used to create custom integrations.

✅ Yes

You can find 30+ integrations or build your own.

✅ Yes

You can find 30+ integrations.

✅ Yes

You can do it by creating custom-code integrations using Google App Script.

✅ Yes

You can find 300+ or build your own integration.

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Data Visualization

Data visualization is transforming the database values into visual graphs like a bar chart or a pie chart.

✅ Yes

Pie charts, line charts and bar charts are native features.

🚫 No

Can’t create charts natively in the platforms, you need to install an integration.

✅ Yes

You can add custom charts.

✅ Yes

Pie charts, line charts, timeline, word cloud and bar charts are native features.

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Pricing

All of these platforms offer a free tier and have a subscription-based pricing model. The difference between platforms relies on who has to pay for collaboration, sharing and commenting.

💰 Collaborating, sharing and commenting is paid

Starts at $12/monthly per seat

💰 Collaborating, sharing and commenting is paid

Start at $5/monthly per seat (for anyone in the team)

💝 Collaborating, sharing, commenting, and viewing is always free

Free for anyone creating or editing.

💝 Collaborating, sharing, commenting, and viewing is always free

Starts at $12/monthly per Maker (the ones who create or add pages to a doc)

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Performance

Performance is the combination of capacity (how much data can be stored) and speed (how fast calculations run). All of these platforms are cloud-based, so your computer’s capacity could also affect performance.

The larger the database, the slower the software can be; so if you’ll have tens of thousands of rows, you might want to use a platform that can support that.