Re: Embedding 3rd party interface on a website?

Hyde_Phillips · ‎Nov 17, 2023

Hey all!

I'm trying to embed some search functionality on my personal training website, so that users can search for trainers in our team by postcode or specialisms, and then click through to the URL of that trainer once they've found them.

My understanding is you can't currently embed interfaces using Airtable.

I've started using Glide recently, and it offers this functionality but unfortunately it looks like you have to pay for the whopping £250/month business plan for the privilege. Eek.

Does anyone know of any other platforms that offer this functionality, e.g. Softr etc? It may be worth a small subscription fee if I can find the right platform.

Thanks in advance!

ScottWorld · ‎Nov 17, 2023

I have some ideas of websites for you below, but before I get to that, I just wanted to agree with you that yes, sadly, as you discovered, Airtable won't yet let us embed interfaces into our websites.

Some people have tried to workaround this limitation by embedding Airtable's "shared views" into their websites — which is functionality that Airtable DOES allow.

But the gigantic problem with Airtable’s embedded shared views is that they ONLY function properly when visiting them on a desktop or a laptop. Airtable's embedded shared views will NOT FUNCTION on phones or tablets, because will not allow searching, sorting, filtering, grouping, or any other Airtable functionality on mobile devices.

It's a really strange decision by Airtable to make their product not work on mobile, but they have consistently emphasized to us over the years that their primary focus is desktop/laptop computers. No idea why.

I know several businesses who left Airtable for FileMaker because of these limitations imposed upon us by Airtable. FileMaker has fantastic embedding capabilities that work perfectly on both desktop & mobile. I used to be a FileMaker developer for 30 years before becoming an expert Airtable consultant, so if you want to explore FileMaker, I can put you in touch with some great FileMaker developers... just contact me through my website.

So, as you've already discovered, using Airtable on its own is "essentially useless" for embedding anything into a website.

If you know how to write your own programming code with JavaScript, your best bet is to simply write your own custom JavaScript programming code for your website, which would enable your website to pull live data from your Airtable database into your website.

However, for a no-code/low-code way of doing this, you would need to turn to a portal app.

You mentioned Glide. They're pretty good, but they don't actually offer full support for all of Airtable's field types or field options.

Besides Glide, a few of the top Airtable portal tools are:

Noloco is probably the most powerful portal available for Airtable, and Noloco offers full support for all of Airtable's field types & field options.

I gave a brief tutorial of Noloco on this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast.

And I also presented a full one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

Hyde_Phillips · ‎Nov 18, 2023

Hi Scott, thanks so much for this in depth reply - super useful and much appreciated.

looks like embedding via noloco or using custom javascript to draw data from airtable might be the two potential avenues.

before exploring these avenues further, would you be able to share what noloco plan i’d need in order to embed a very simple search portal onto my website? I couldn’t find the answer on their pricing page. Also I checked out the beginning of your noloco customer portal vid but wasn’t sure whether there would be an answer to the website embeds question on there.

alternatively, if I went down the custom js code route, what sort of budget would be realistic to have some js code written to pull data from airtable onto an existing web design?

I don’t have much budget currently, but would be useful to understand options.

p.s. if these questions are beyond the remit of this forum I totally understand!

many thanks,

hyde

ScottWorld · ‎Nov 18, 2023

I'm not an expert at Noloco's pricing plans — I would chat with Noloco about their different pricing plans, and see which one offers what you're looking for!

I don't work on Javascript projects, but you could chat with @JonathanBowen of Dragon Drop for help with that.