I am trying to figure out an effective way to share a view with external collaborators. Companies like Smartsheets allow unlimited guest editors for no extra cost on their business plan, but it seems that with Airtable if I want to share my project plan with a customer just to mark tasks as complete we need to pay $10/mo/user for portals, or full price to get them into the company Airtable account.
Are there any alternatives here? How have you guys accomplished this effectively?
Page 1 / 1
Hi @DanHarry,
There are 4 ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in your Airtable base (such as marking tasks as complete).
Two of these ways cost money, and two of these ways are free:
(PAID) Use Airtable’s portals, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.
(PAID) Use a 3rd-party portal, which are typically less expensive than Airtable’s portals.
The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are: Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.
Fillout gives you a formula that you add to your Airtable base, which automatically creates a special URL for each record.
Read-only users in Airtable are free, and they are allowed to click on URLs. (They are also allowed to click on buttons that take them to external URLs).
So they would click on the the URL (or button) while looking at the record, which would take them to that record in Fillout.
(FREE) External read-only users can 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.
Same setup as #3 above. You would create a formula in your Airtable base, which would automatically create a unique webhook URL for each record.
Then, your read-only user would click on the URL (or button) while looking at the record in Airtable, which would then trigger the automation.
In the Interface, provide a button link that’ll open up a form that’ll let them update the data of that record
One of the main things you’ll need to consider is that users will be able to see each other if they click ‘Share’ then ‘Manage access’. To get around this, you can either:
If not, you can create one Interface per customer (which may not be feasible depending on the number of customers you have)
And if neither of the above options work for you you might need to look into a third party portal like Softr or something
---
For the form you could either use Fillout or Airtable forms to handle it. The gif above shows how an Airtable form would work with this, and here’s a gif of how it’d look with Fillout instead, and the linked base has the Fillout form set up too:
If you’re expecting <1000 updates a month you can try using Fillout’s free plan (https://www.fillout.com/) for this as it’s the simplest to set up
The downsides to doing this are:
You won’t be able to see who submitted the form. Fillout does have a login thing but I believe that’s on the paid plan, and you’d also have to build a system to track that
You’re reliant on Airtable’s revision history system to see what changed and when, and this data gets cleared out eventually (1 year on Teams, 2 years on Business, 3 years on Enterprise), and I imagine you’d want to keep accurate logs of customer updates?
This is surmountable by creating an automation to log the changes whenever they come in though
Using an Airtable form we can see the change log as one record for each changeUsing Fillout we can see it via revision history, which will be erased eventually
If you’re expecting >1000 updates a month / need to keep it in Airtable / don’t want to pay for another tool, then you could create a new table and an Airtable form and use that for updating the record. Airtable has a guide on this here
The downsides to this are:
Maintenance: You’re going to have to keep the two tables in sync as the fields that exist in the first table must exist in the second table, as well as keep the automation updated too
Longer set up time; setting up Fillout would probably take you like, 5-10 minutes, whereas setting up Airtable would take you maybe an hour depending on how many fields etc there are
Need an automation to link things up
The upside is you’ll be able to see who made the change and when as that new table basically acts as a historical log
Hi @DanHarry
I have written an article on different ways to share interface with external collabarators along with cost breakdown. Go through it and select the one that fits your needs and budget.
I would suggest you follow Scott’s and Adam’s suggestion and use Fillout. It is free, it is easy to set up, has a direct integration with Aritable, and their forms look nice.