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Question

Scaling Successfully in Airtable

  • May 2, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 116 views

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Hi Everyone,

I’m reaching out because we’ve hit the automation limit on a base that has grown into a key tool for our team. What began as a course-to-community partner matching system has since evolved into our Master CRM and now also includes evaluation workflows.

As we consider next steps, we’re wondering whether to split our workflows into separate bases to reduce strain or to consolidate further using scripting or other advanced methods. One of our key challenges is that our data is highly interconnected, which makes us hesitant to break it into separate systems without a clear strategy for preserving those relationships. Additionally, we plan to add further workflows to Airtable, so scalability is becoming even more of a concern.

If anyone here has experience successfully scaling departmental or multi-functional tasks in Airtable, we’d be grateful to learn from your approach. Please reach out to me on Teams, and we can set up a meeting to talk more about our work and explore possible solutions.

 

With gratitude,

Leah

3 replies

Mike_AutomaticN
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Hey ​@Leahray,

Hitting Airtable automation limits is pretty common. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that all your automations are as efficient as possible, and check whether some of theme could be merged together or triggered less often.

However, unless you are reaching max amount fo records per base (different Airtable limit, which is currently at 500,000 records per base on the enterprise plan), I think that you still have a lot of room for scalability.

Unfortunately, there is no workaround for the automation limits above, so you would need to migrate existing automations, and/or create all new existing automations/workflows on a third party tool such as Zapier, Make, or n8n. I go through the differences between each of these tools on this other article.

I would personally choose n8n (self hosted) given that it is really cheap and powerful. However, Zapier and Make have a smaller learning curve.

Hope this helps!!!! Please let me know if you need any help further scaling your system.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation


TheTimeSavingCo
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Sigh yeah this is a pretty tedious thing to deal with

Assuming you’re talking about hitting the 50 automation per base limit:

For me I identified all of the automations that weren’t time sensitive and pretty simple (e.g. general notification emails) and moved them all into another base by basically creating a whole bunch of synced tables in there, resulting in a sorta synced base

The caveat to this is that automations in synced tables have a bunch of limitations and the data doesn’t sync unless you ping / open the base

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Do you have multiple teams using Airtable in fairly specific ways?  Maybe you could split the bases out based on each team, and then sync the data to each other where needed?

As automations would be created for each team’s flows they would generally only be touching their own (unsynced) tables, and so the automation limitations wouldn’t be an issue.  And since the bases would be actively opened and used the data would sync as expected too

If you’re talking about exceeding your run limit, then the main avenues would be to:

  1. Review the automations and replace things with repeating groups / scripts where possible
  2. Use a third party automation tool like Zapier, Make, etc

ScottWorld
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  • Genius
  • May 21, 2025

Hi ​@Leahray,

Regarding your request to setup a meeting with someone who can help you scale your Airtable system, I can definitely help you with that.

I am an expert Airtable consultant — please feel free to contact me through my website:

Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Best,
Scott