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We were looking for ways to expand Airtable access to internal teams without adding everyone as a paid collaborator.

Shared views were too limited, and Interfaces still required collaborator access for anything interactive.

So we built a front-end portal where team members can log in, view just their data, and update records if needed. No Airtable seat required.

It’s now evolved into a tool called ClientlyBase — useful for internal dashboards, forms, and lightweight access across teams.

Curious if anyone else here has dealt with this — how are you managing access for non-collaborators?

How are you managing access for non-collaborators?

Congrats on the new tool!

To answer your question, I share the knowledge with my clients that there are 4 ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in their Airtable bases. 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 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.
     
  4. (FREE) External read-only users can also edit Airtable records for free by triggering a custom webhook in Make, which would then run an Make automation that can edit the record.

    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 Make automation.

    I demonstrate how to 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 the emailing 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

That’s a smart approach! Creating a front-end portal really seems like the best way to give team members access without needing full collaborator seats. I’ve run into similar issues—shared views and interfaces are often too limited for interactive tasks. Curious if others have tried something similar or have alternative methods for letting non-collaborators view and update data safely.

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