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We’ve been using Airtable as a backend for lightweight apps — like a project dashboard for clients, or a form submission portal that touches multiple tables.

Interfaces help a bit, but they don’t quite support login, user-based permissions, or multi-table forms.

 

We ended up building a role-aware portal layer that connects to Airtable and lets users view, edit, or create records based on their role — it’s now ClientlyBase, but it started as a personal workaround.

 

Just curious if others here are building similar “mini apps” on Airtable. What tools are you using — Interfaces, Softr, Glide, or something else?

These are the 4 different ways that I share with my clients that they can build “mini apps” for their customers:

  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) You can create a “mini portal” by giving external read-only users the ability to 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

I try to avoid third party apps and portals as much as possible. If I need to (usually the case given AT Forms limitations) I use Fillout to its fullest potential. 
 

If Fillout is still not enough, I use Softr!

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