Portals vs inviting collaborators or viewers with a link?

Portals are essentially the same as using interfaces, so you can test it out by sharing your interface with just one or two users who you would invite into your interface as Airtable users.

This could help you figure out if you want to start using portals at a discounted price over the price of full Airtable users.

However, even at the discounted portal price, it’s still pretty expensive compared to the 3rd-party portals on the market, so you may want to explore some of the 3rd-party portals which are much cheaper  

1. Some of the 3rd-party customer portals that communicate with Airtable are Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide. (I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.)

2. Also, for a free option, read-only users can edit an Airtable record for free by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which allows users to update Airtable records with a form. (I demonstrate how to do this in this Airtable podcast episode.)

3. For another free option, external read-only users can also edit your Airtable records for free by triggering a custom webhook in Make, which would then automatically run an automation that marks that task as complete. (I demonstrate how to use custom webhooks in this Airtable podcast episode.)

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

just want to show them a view without inviting them to the whole base as a contributor?

So they don’t need to edit anything?  If so, inviting them to an Interface would be fine, no?  Sorry, I think I don’t understand something about your use case!

​@TheTimeSavingCo -  yes, i’ll explain. I’m managing Brand Marketing internally for an agency. I have content calendars, creative assets etc. that I need other stake holders to be able to look at and review, but I don’t necessarily need them editing or changing anything to the records. (maybe creative needs to comment on the images) but other than that, I want to design an interface that the executives can pull up at any time to see the state of marketing, without making them log into Airtable. 

Hi ​@LaurenJade,

“I want to design an interface that the executives can pull up at any time to see the state of marketing, without making them log into Airtable.”

For the executives, you simply need to publicly share the interface page:

Copy the link, and send it to the relevant people.

Note that what you are sharing is one specific page, and not the entire interface. You can share more than one page, but users will not be able to navigate between them:

For the users that need to comment on images, they will each need an account with an active subscription. You can have multiple users share the same account if blame is not required.

For them, you’ll need to share your base with their account(s) and select the Commenter access level.

Hope that helps!

Ah yeah, then you’d just need to do what Tyler’s suggesting and make public links for the specific Interface pages, might get clunky trying to navigate through multiple pages though.  Maybe you could put buttons on each page that would let them go to the other pages?

Getting the executives free Airtable accounts would let them navigate the pages easily via the left sidebar, and would also let you create specific Interfaces for each executive, or show specific data based on the logged in person too.  Is it that logging in is too much friction because they change devices a lot or something?

You might want to look at MyCustPort. It’s built on top of Airtable and was designed exactly for situations like this, where you need to share project updates or specific views with external stakeholders without giving them full Airtable access.

Some highlights:

• No logins required: You can generate a secure link for each stakeholder so they only see what you want them to see.

• Custom branding: Add your logo, colors, and action buttons so it looks like your company, not Airtable.

• Unlimited stakeholders: You’re not paying per user, so you can share with PMs, creatives, clients, etc.

• Feedback loop: They can drop comments or confirmations right inside the portal instead of sending endless emails.

This way, you can share the content calendar or creative review boards as a clean portal  and it’s much more affordable than full-blown portal tools. You can check it out here https://www.mycustport.com/get-mycustport/