Using Airtable to create a client portal

HI @Normunds,

My name is Scott, and I'm one of the experts in the community who has a ton of experience in building customer portals using Airtable.

The first step would be to choose a customer portal for yourself.

A few of the leading customer portals are Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

JetAdmin is probably the quickest one to setup (although their customer support is slow), while Noloco is probably the most powerful & customizable portal with great customer support.

The CEO of Noloco gave a demonstration of his product on this Airtable podcast episode.

And I gave a brief tutorial of Noloco on this Airtable podcast episode.

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

Thanks Scott for the information. However let me clarify. I'm looking to see if Airtable can create a client portal on it's own without the use of other software such as the ones you mentioned. Do you know if this is possible?

Hmm, you could do this but the main limitation you need to consider before you proceed is price

Specifically, if each customer / client needs to be able to edit the data in your base, you'll probably need to pay for an account for them, and so at the cheapest plan, if you've got 10 customers that need edit access, that's something like 264 a month

There are various workarounds for this, the most simple being giving the customers forms to submit if they wish to update / edit data in your table.  However, the UX of this is definitely worse than if they were just using Airtable directly

Assuming the price isn't an issue, then yeah, you could totally do this

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Edit: There's now a feature that allows Business and Enterprise plans to hide external Interface collaborators from each other! 
 
https://support.airtable.com/docs/managing-and-sharing-interfaces#managing-interface-share-requests

@NormaGPanetta 

Yes, that is possible using Airtable's interfaces, with these 2 limitations:

1. Everybody will need to signup for their own Airtable account. If they are read-only users, you won't have to pay for them. If they are editable users, you will need to pay for each editable user.

2. There is no privacy in Airtable's interfaces. All of your customers and clients will be able to see the names & email addresses of all your other customers and clients by clicking on the "Share" button and choosing "Manage Access". If you need to shield your customers' names & contact information from each other, then you wouldn't be able to use Airtable's interfaces to do this.

@TheTimeSavingCo Price is only one of the two major issues.

Hi Scott. Regarding point #2, is there a possibility to create a login page or link certain pages/tasks to particular clients to restrict viewing? 

Thanks everyone for the quick replies. I'll bring this conversation to my manager who was asking about this and determine next steps.

Right, your clients will only see their own records, which is the key reason to use a portal. So your clients will only see their own pages/tasks.

If you need help setting any of this up, please feel free to contact me through my website.

What did you end up doing for this? 

My solution is to create different views in your table:

Make sure you have a column with the "Client Name"  and filter the new view to only show records with "Client name"

Then share that specific view link to your client. (Shorten the link with billy or something to make it easier because it's quite long). They will only see what is in that view. 

I think depending on what plan you're on, you can even set a password for that page.

G&C

Hi Scott - I followed your advice on this one. Noloco is next to look at but the pricing is a concern. 

Softr, you are correct I learned that the hard way. 

Pory looks like they havent been active in a couple of years and their facebook pages are very quiet, so Im concerned about long term support?

Glide looks very expensive straight away, but fully featured

Mini Extensions did most of what was needed pretty fast, but it's got some password and login features lacking. 

Enjoying the process. All up though, Airtable rocks.

Hi everyone, Hannes here from the miniExtensions Team!

I just wanted to add to this conversation that we also offer a powerful client portal. As others have pointed out, Airtable is not a great option for this natively, so using an external tool makes a lot of sense. Feel free to try it out with a free account and let me know if you have any questions! It's easy to get started and we don't charge you for the number of end users, sessions or anything like that.

You can also find a quick demo video here!

It's too expensive. That's why we are 😆 kg for air table as a portal.