Both are powerful, easy to use, and great for collaboration

But if you're looking to fully integrate AI into your workflow and tools, Airtable shows a lot of promise. Realistically, if you just want AI tools to use right now, Notion is the way to go. Multiple AI fields can be chained together, so you can make some pretty powerful apps with it, but it requires more thought and setup than it does in Notion. (It's also in a beta you have to request to join, so not as widely available.) Airtable AI works as an additional field in your base, and you can use it to do things like summarize, categorize, or analyze customer feedback, and generate any kind of text you like based on the content of the other fields. In the screenshots, you can see how I use Airtable to keep track of article pitches: it handles the important information really well, but even when you build a dedicated interface, it's not the best for large blocks of text.Īirtable AI can do similar things to Notion AI, though it's a tad confined by the structure of your databases. There's a fair amount of setup necessary to get an Airtable base to the point where it would work well as a notes app, for example, and even then, it wouldn't be as nice to use as Notion. To get an idea of how Notion's databases work, take a look at this article on building a second brain in Notion.Īlthough you can add as much text as you like to a record and create an interface or view that allows you to see it clearly, Airtable doesn't handle text as intuitively as Notion.

Notion's databases can work for an employee directory, but would probably be an inefficient way to handle, say, a 1,000-respondent survey with lots of different questions.

You can give each page properties like due dates, assign them to specific people, and view, filter, and sort through them as a database table-but you don't get anything close to the same raw power you get with Airtable. All its databases are collections of individual pages. With a bit of time and effort, you can legitimately build custom internal tools tailored to your organization's needs.Īnd while Notion does offer databases, they don't look anything like this. When you add in a few automations and connections to the other tools you use (features we'll look at in a moment), then calling the tools you can build 'apps' isn't really overselling things. The apps you can build with it are nice interfaces that let you see and work on your data in interesting ways. While Airtable talks a lot about apps, really, it's somewhere between a big programmable spreadsheet and a more user-friendly database. Airtable, on the other hand, is mostly databases (and apps built on top of them).

It's best to think of it as a very versatile multi-tool, rather than a single application.Īnd while it does support databases-or at least its own concept of databases as tables of pages with various assigned properties-it is still primarily a text-based app. (It's also why our roundup for its category of apps is called The best Notion alternatives-there's not a great name for it yet.) For some, it's a nice notes app for keeping track of ideas during meetings for others, it's the most important tool that's used to run the entire company. No two teams or companies are using it in exactly the same way, which means that no two people have exactly the same experience with Notion. This flexibility kind of makes Notion hard to pin down in specific terms.

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