How to: allow viewers to edit records

2025 Update:
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.

Your best bet is #3 below:

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 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.
    

   Fillout also 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.
    

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 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

Fixed it for you Scott :grinning_face_with_sweat: :crossed_fingers:

Lol, thank you for the correction! :stuck_out_tongue:

There was/is an Option on this.
So should i join beta?

Unfortunately, that was a mistake on Airtable’s part. That option is no longer available: