Hi, I’m building a membership registry (list of names, addresses, id numbers etc per row) on airtable with either an interface or softr front end for different types of clients to see
I predict the number of row entries will easily pass the 100 000 limit in due course, so I’m worried about what to do next when that time comes.
Are there any workarounds or solutions to the ‘100,000 row limit’ problem?
If you have a limit of 100,000 records per table, you must have an Enterprise license.
If you expect that this limit will be quickly surpassed, Airtable may not be the right platform for you.
On the other hand, if it will take a couple of years to reach that limit, you can start with Airtable for your back end (given its ease of development), knowing that you will eventually need to migrate to a different platform. You could merge Airtable with something like Sequin to ease any eventual transition.
I’m just chiming in to agree with what @kuovonne said above.
Airtable is likely not the platform for you, even if you’re only going to be reaching as little as 50,000 records relatively quickly.
Airtable is optimized for small teams with a small number of records. Unfortunately, Airtable starts falling apart with large record sets.
My Enterprise clients who only have 50,000 records per table are already experiencing horrible slowdowns when trying to use the product, along with the inability to use important apps like the DeDupe App which no longer work properly with such “large numbers” of records.
Yes, these are Enterprise customers who are paying thousands of dollars to Airtable per month, and they are still unable to use Airtable effectively. Yes, we have also reached out to the Airtable support team who have been unable to solve any of these issues as well.
Needless to say, all of these clients are in various stages of leaving Airtable.
Given that I have a 30+ year background in the world of high-end enterprise database development using FileMaker Pro (soon to be renamed Claris Pro), I typically recommend that people look at FileMaker, because it is such a user-friendly platform with almost no limitations. My clients store millions upon millions of records in FileMaker, and it doesn’t even bat an eye.
If you want to explore the FileMaker path, I can turn you onto some great FileMaker developers, since I only do Airtable Consulting now. Just contact me through my website:
Many, actually. But increasingly, I sense Airtable adoption is based on a love affair with the UI; it is ideal for your “back-of-house” but not so ideal for “front-of-house”. These terms, which stem from the restaurant industry, refer to operational segments which have very different requirements. FoH is where the ambiance and service is created; BoH is where the chef and team support the FoH.
With Airtable we’d like to believe that it’s perfect for both operational segments, but sometimes there are mismatches and record limits is often one that rules out Airtable as the ideal choice. In my view, Airtable’s event handlers are getting good enough to pair it practically with other NoSQL data stores to create hybrid solutions that may make it suitable for a broader range of solutions.
The kitchen staff works from a collection of customer orders that it must prepare and plate with efficiency. It has no need to access yesterday’s orders. Similarities like this exist in every business and it may make sense to examine the true data requirements with operational segmentation in mind before determining Airtable is unfit.
