I have an agency This is my first time using Airtable. And i want to ask can i build a crm for each client and give them access their crm only under my Airtable account??
What you’re looking for is called a “customer portal” or a “client portal”. This is where external users can view and/or edit their own personal information in Airtable, without seeing anybody else’s information.
There are 4 ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in your Airtable base. 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.
I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
- (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 show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
- Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
- Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
- (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 demonstrate 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
Yeap, but costs vary. Chances are you’d want to have one single Base that all your clients have access to instead of one base per client (Imagine needing to update every base if there’s a new feature you want, probably not something you want to do)
If the clients don’t need to modify data you could accomplish this with one Business account, you’d be able to invite your clients as readers (no additional cost), show them only their records, and hide them from seeing each other. (You could do this with a Teams account, but then they’d be able to see each other and you probably don’t want that)
If they do need to modify data, then your costs go up a lot as you’d have to pay per seat. You’d either pay the normal Airtable price or use Portals (https://support.airtable.com/v1/docs/using-airtable-portals-for-external-collaborators), comes up to 150 bucks for 12 seats. If you don’t want to pay then there are various workarounds for this like using Fillout or using Airtable Forms to handle it. These get pretty clunky if you’ve got a big system though
After that, you’ve got your third party tools, Softr, Noloco etc. Costs vary for these, some are like 50 dollars for 20 users or something, but bear in mind the additional cost of having to learn / use these other pieces of software. You sometimes have to tweak your base structure in order to display stuff properly on these tools too so factor that into the time cost too
What you’re looking for is called a “customer portal” or a “client portal”. This is where external users can view and/or edit their own personal information in Airtable, without seeing anybody else’s information.
There are 4 ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in your Airtable base. 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.
I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
- (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 show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
- Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
- Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
- (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 demonstrate 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
Thank you soo much that's helps alot. I’m setting up Noloco portals for my agency, which serves multiple plumbing businesses. I wanted to clarify:
Do I need to create a separate paid Noloco account/portal for each client, or can I manage all my clients under a single paid agency account?
Essentially, can I use one paid account to host multiple client portals and bill them individually?
Thanks for your guid ance!
You would not create multiple client portals. You would create one client portal that all of your clients access. if you need help setting this up, you may want to reach out to one of the Noloco Experts that are listed on their website.
- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant
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