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My organization seeks ability to create Airtable based apps with a proper user portal for external users to create/register and log into their profiles. 

 

Unfortunately, Airtable portals doesn’t fit our budget for the number of external users we might expect. (Approx 400). 
 

(we have business plan by the way)

 

Even Softr is pretty pricey, but it seems like a halfway decent option. 
 

I have looked into many different options from Pory.io, Zite, Stacker, Noloco, Glide, WeWeb, Bubble.io, Jet admin, etc 

 

even thought of possibly seeing if I could linked Airtable to a supabase and build portal in Bolt. 
 

I am not very technical, but I want to learn how to do this myself and help build a solution or find the right one.  
 

there are so many options, and let’s say the budget is $2000 per year for approx 400 external users.  This is on top of the existing seats paid for the business plan for internal users. 
 

what do people recommend, and why?  Please feel free to DM if you can offer more guidance. 

Hey ​@drnemer,

I played around with most of them. Softr, Noloco, Glide Apps, Stacker, so on and so forth.
To be honest, I try to avoid any kind of user portal integration as that means additional development, additional maintenance, and the integration itself which can always break for reasons out of your control.

Now, having said that. I would:
1. Use Airtable native interfaces/user portals. (seems this is not possible for you).
2. Use Airtable read only access, so users can navigate the portal, and include some Fillout forms for viewing/editing (really cheap, a bit clunky, not sure it will get the trick done for 400 users -that will depend on your use case).
3. Softr. No affiliation with them, I just believe they are the best option if I really need to build a user portal :D

Feel free to grab a slot using this link if you’d like to further discuss your needs.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel 
 

Yes, as ​@Mike_AutomaticN mentioned above, your #1 best bet for your customers to update their profiles is to use 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, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains or a list of email addresses stored in Airtable, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, 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:

For even more security, Fillout lets you create a login page for your form, which will give you these options:

  1. You can restrict the logins by SSO.
  2. You can restrict the logins by email domain.
  3. You can restrict the logins by password.
  4. You can restrict logins based on a pre-approved list of email addresses that you have stored in your Airtable base.
  5. You can verify & confirm that the user is typing in a valid email address.
  6. You can limit form entries to one entry per person.

After the user logs in using your login page, that will let Fillout know who the user is and what the user’s email address is.

You can use this information to automatically prefill other fields on your form based on who logged into your form, and you can even use this information to do other advanced tricks with Fillout.

For example, you could use Fillout’s advanced filtering features to filter your linked record fields to only show the user the linked records that they are allowed to see.

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

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