Does anyone else struggle with Airtable forms once workflows get complex?

Hey @CarsonC,


You are absolutely not alone here. Airtable’s native forms are ok for simple intake but the moment you need more robust features (e.g. parent child record creation) they are really really limited.

It’s a pity, and I keep pushing this as a feature request (please make sure you submit the form as well!). One day we’ll get it!

You’ll want to look at Fillout for anything beyond basic forms. It integrates directly with Airtable, supports full conditional logic, hiding and showing sections, creating linked records across multiple tables, and even repeatable sections (multiple linked records). Plus the free plan is super generous.

Feel free to reach out if you need any help setting this up! I’d be happy to show you around.


Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

​@CarsonC 

One of the best recommendations that I can give you is the same recommendation that ​@Mike_AutomaticN listed above, and is the same recommendation that I give to all of my Airtable consulting clients.

For all of your advanced form needs, your #1 best bet is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it communicates directly with Airtable and can easily do everything that you requested.

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to:

• update Airtable records using a form
• create custom PDF files from a form submission
• accept payments on forms
• pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record
• customize the style and branding of your form
• customize a theme for your form
• display Airtable lookup fields on forms
• create multi-page forms with conditional paths
• create new linked records on a form
• add a login page to your form
• perform math or other live calculations on your forms
• collect signatures on a form
• connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously
• add CAPTCHAs to your form
• and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Ah I know this can be a challenge, especially when it comes to advanced logic where you may want the form to take multiple branches and not just a simple submission.

The responses above have some great ideas to get around the struggles you face when using Airtable forms.

Another suggestion that I might add is to use Airtable Interfaces.  Interfaces creates a little bit of UI/UX format and can allow for some conditional visibility and might help when it comes to internal team workflows but can fall short when trying to help external users or have a multi-page experience.

Anything with a step by step process, or creating and updating records requires more of a “workflow UI”.

Luckily you can likely connect that form source to Airtable either directly or through an automation service like Zapier to still have it automated and time efficient.

What kind of form are you building?  That would make it easier to determine what the best path could be.

I’d echo the recommendations for Fillout as well, from the user/admin side. I’m at a nonprofit and we invested in Fillout because we needed to be able to have parents submit applications for their kids, creating the record for the enrollee as well as linked records for the household and the individual parents, all as part of one submission. There was no way to accomplish this within the Airtable forms, but Fillout has this functionality.

That said you should be able to do things like conditional formatting pretty easily in Airtable, we only needed Fillout for that kind of more advanced functionality (creating multiple linking records within the same form submission). 

I’ve also been successful using pre-filled forms in Airtable, which allows external users to see and update the information they submitted previously without having to do a direct record edit.

Are there any more specific use cases or issues that you can share?

​@CarsonC Fillout’s is an option for sure, but even on the free plan there will be additional complications in connecting two systems that might have to ‘talk’ back and forth. If your intake process is complex, meaning you need advanced logic and possibly automation in place in multi-step processes. This is accomplished by a combination of Airtable Portals and Interfaces.