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?
Airtable
Powerful apps that connect your data, workflows and teams
Notion
A unified workspace with tables as databases.
Coda
Coda brings all your words, data, and teamwork into one powerful doc.
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) 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.
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.
Data Visualization
Data visualization is transforming the database values into visual graphs like a bar chart or a pie chart.
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.
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.
Writing surface
What if you want to communicate with words and data in the same place?
Native Automations
Automations have triggers and actions, triggers are usually time-based or row-change based.
Forms
Using a form is one of the best ways to bring data from a forms you share to your database.
Coda brings all your words, data, and teamwork into one powerful doc.