For what it’s worth, I decided to give Airtable a shot a little under a week ago. A couple days later, I 86’d the JIRA instance I had (just the low level $10/month plan) and I’ve been going fullbore with Airtable.
There were a couple things I was using JIRA for.
- (shocker) tracking some software projects that I’ve more or less neglected a while back.
- Hacking together some custom issues and workflows for tracking some state based legislation.
- More or less general project tracking.
While I was able to accomplish these things, JIRA had a few big turnoffs for me.
The main one was the interface change that they did. I didn’t use it a whole lot (which may have been a contributor), but I just found it clumsy and difficult to navigate to the boards.
Another was not being able to publicly share a dashboard. This was in relation to the legislation tracking stuff.
Both of these issues I’ve quickly found to be, well, non-issues with Airtable. The ability to publicly share a view (or a base) is great.
In terms of project tracking, I’ve developed out a couple different approaches with Airtable (one for my full time job, and one for work I do for the flight school I rent my aircraft from), and both of those have been working great. When I find a data model/workflow deficiency? Much easier to fix than in JIRA in my opinion.
I’m sure JIRA is great for certain things, but in my case, I quickly found Airtable to much better for my needs.
Probably the best facebook ad to have shown up on my feed, really.
