Hi folks - been an Airtable user myself for years (love it), and finally we’re going to roll it out to our organization. 25 users roughly. Going to be paying for Pro for all users (nonprofit pricing), for a few reasons.
The challenge I’m trying to get feedback on is how do you handle the idea of managing Workspaces and user licensing and permissions? The way it’s set up in Airtable is basically I have two options.
I can add people as collaborators to the Workspace. Then they can see every database there. But if I want to have some databases restricted to only some people, and some available to all, that won’t work. I could create additional workspaces, but that’s no good, because I’d have to license people multiple times. Or have some on the free plan, which feels ridiculous since I’m paying for those users and all I’m trying to do is subdivide.
I can add people individually to bases they should have. That has 2 problems. First, no one can create bases except me. Second, I have to do a lot of work managing user access in individual bases.
The second option is the only viable one I see based on the licensing structure of Airtable. It’s sort of odd that the license is not a user license, but a user + workspace license. Theoretically if you want to use Workspaces to subdivide things, you could pay the licensing fee multiple times.
My plan is basically to just have to wade through the complexity of managing user access one at a time on all those bases, and then if people want a base to request me to create it and share with appropriate people. Out of curiosity, has anyone else come up with a better way of dealing with this?
