MiniExtensions + Airtable Portal

CKARC · ‎Jul 17, 2024

Im loving MiniExtensions and Airtable. It does exactly what is needed without clunkiness. Creates a portal for users to work with and see your data. Id looked at Softr, Noloco and others, but they get very pricey or very complex fast and need a lot of line by line field crafting. MiniExtensions is simple and does the trick.

Keen to see though, with anyone else using Airtable and MiniExtensions, how are you better managing login and front end access? Airtable creates users and magic links well, but Im hoping someone may have worked out a way to manage password or phone numbers to send the passcodes to? Users at my end are fairly simple so I need to dumb it down and keep it secure same time.

Mariam_Ispiryan · ‎Jul 18, 2024

Thanks for sharing your experience, totally valid review but I will have to disagree 🙂

Softr is by far the most affordable and feature-rich Airtable frontend. The pricing structure is fair, and a free forever plan with most of Softr's core features would let you build a fully functional web app ready to be shipped.

As for your request, Airtable has a few integrations with communication tools like SMS, Gmail, Email. Check out this page: https://www.airtable.com/integrations/sms

CKARC · ‎Jul 20, 2024

Thank you Miriam. Its appreciated. Ive managed to get SMS off the ground with your help from that link. The automations in Airtable were a bit slow to trigger so I went with Zapier to fill the gap.

On the Softr side . . . . Pricing of Softr didnt worry me. The way it works did though.

It starts off really well by creating out of the box a very good looking experience that I thought "wow, this is incredible", but once you start working in the environment the limitations come in. Specifically, I have 8 tables, each with a lot of fields. Softr required me to manually recraft a form for those tables and each individual field needs to be hand added and hand configured, one at a time, with minimal controls on what they do.

Mini Extensions already had them all loaded and I could immediately work with them, change or move or delete them, and get granular if I have to.

The linked records in Softr wasnt at all intuitive. Airtable is super fast for linked tables and is kinda why we are here and Mini Extensions does that at light speed out of the box. Softr didnt, a lot of manual work. Really long complex line by line work. It was almost like it was an after thought.

Lastly, Softr has this weird "lets use the smallest font we can straight away" approach then you need to manually edit every single field to change the font and size (the global template change can only go so far). So it was a lot of editing,

Softr has is a lot of affiliates and consultants making YouTube video's to sell their services. But many of the features they see as groundbreaking (there is a you tube video of people literally "exploding" with enthusiasm for conditional fields) are day one stuff.

A quick read of the community forum and a few people have raised the same questions about forms and linked records.

Out of the box, Mini Extensions just does what it says on the tin. But the password/code thing means a workaround im working on. Its basic in the front end so it's not as good looking as Softr, but it is super fast to work on.

The support people at Mini Extensions are also a plus. They are actual real humans who directly ask about your project and how they can help you. One of them chased me down for a couple of days to make sure I got help, no one does that these days. They are actual real people and im guessing also they are in the Dev team as well, they answer at all hours of the day and night. The support has been 100% off the charts good.

(I did also look at Jet Admin, it is absolutely incredible to work with BUT I cant get a person to respond to a question for a week now and the community forum is dead quiet, last post on Facebook is 2023), I also looked at Noloco but with 8000 users the price would kill our small charity at 50c per login per month) and a few others. All the interfaces were great but pricing was a killer).

Mariam_Ispiryan · ‎Aug 08, 2024

I'm glad I managed to help you with the SMS and would like to clarify a few things that seemed a bit unclear to me. 🙂

| "Softr required me to manually recraft a form for those tables, and each individual field needs to be added and configured one at a time, with minimal controls on what they do." We automatically map your Airtable data with the list blocks, and if you have the CRUD functionality enabled, your users will be able to make changes to the data right from the start. One of Softr's benefits is how easy, automatic, and fast it is to work with Airtable data. Especially with our new blocks, we made sure to reduce as much manual mapping and work as possible.

| "Lastly, Softr has this weird 'let's use the smallest font we can straight away' approach, so you need to manually edit every single field to change the font and size (the global template change can only go so far). So it was a lot of editing." I’m not entirely sure which block you were using, but by default, we have a medium font size. You can edit them once for the fields, and now you can make global edits for each list block (size, color, font, etc.).

| "A quick read of the community forum shows that a few people have raised the same questions about forms and linked records." I'm pleased to let you know that we have managed to address those issues and now support conditional forms (a highly loved feature). Could you clarify what you mean by linked records? In Softr, we have linked lists, which is a quick workaround: https://docs.softr.io/displaying-and-creating-data/vikC2AWEpQGkZd4jGyoVxo/linked-list/bWjTdKhbftofSE...

| "The support people at Mini Extensions are also a plus. They are actual real humans who directly ask about your project and how they can help you. One of them chased me down for a couple of days to make sure I got help; no one does that these days. They are actual real people, and I’m guessing they are also in the Dev team. They answer at all hours of the day and night. The support has been 100% off the charts good." I love to hear about the great support at Mini Extensions, as I know how much work it is to maintain excellent 24/7 support. At Softr, we also have an amazing team of smart, quick, and driven support staff, which is one of the main reasons people stick with Softr.

I’ve checked out Mini Extensions as well, and it’s indeed a great portal builder for Airtable. It’s wonderful to see so many tools available for various needs.