External collaboration - ways to accomplish?

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:

1. (PAID) Use Airtable’s portals, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.
    
2. (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.

   
   I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
    

3. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   I demonstrate some of the advanced features of Fillout in this Airtable podcast episode.
    

4. (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.
   
   I demonstrate how to do setup these custom webhooks in this Airtable podcast episode.
   
   Note that my podcast episode demonstrates this in the context of putting the custom webhook URL inside of an email, but you can skip that step.
   
   If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

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

Hmm try creating an Interface with a button and I’ve set it up here for you to check out

1. Get your customers to create Airtable accounts
2. Invite them to an Interface as read-only users you’ve created where you’ve set it up to filter by the Current User / Email (https://support.airtable.com/docs/interface-designer-permissions#using-interface-designer-permissions)
   1. Read only users aren’t billed
3. 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:

1. If you’re on a Business and above plan, you can prevent them from seeing each other: https://support.airtable.com/docs/managing-and-sharing-interfaces#setting-collaborator-visibility 
2. 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:

1. 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
   1. The downsides to doing this are:
      1. 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
      2. 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?
         1. This is surmountable by creating an automation to log the changes whenever they come in though

         2. 

            

             

   2. 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
      1. The downsides to this are:
         1. 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
         2. 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
         3. Need an automation to link things up
      2. 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.

Taha, Airtable Advisor

Hi ​@DanHarry 

You can try my extension, which generates QR codes for records and tables. Users can scan the QR code to edit specified fields in a record.

The extension requires a paid subscription, only $9.9 per month, with unlimited users.

Extension link: https://airtable.com/marketplace/blkXDrTHClNCQbf2O/bulk-qr-code-barcode-generator

Demo video: https://youtu.be/r-070QjkWgE?si=e-W9jjwkIjrz3r5J

Hey ​@DanHarry!

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.

You can check some of the differences between Airtable native forms and Fillout forms in this article.

I’d be happy to show you around if you need any help setting this up.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation