Webhooks workaround using Slack

Tod_Sacerdoti · ‎Jun 21, 2019

This has been an open item in the Airtable support community for a few years, see “Webhooks for Records” and here, & here, and we are excited to offer a free solution to the community.

Here is the high level solution:

Based on the transitive property (A=B and B=C, then A=C), Airtable supports Slack Notifications, and Slack supports webhooks, so Airtable supports webhooks! You just have to know how to set it up correctly.

With a simple integration via Pipedream into Slack, all Airtable users can now get near real time notifications of all updated fields and values in Airtable.

This is a game changer for anyone building automations based on Airtable because you don’t have to poll the Airtable API (which is what Zapier or Integromat do). Specifically, the benefits of webhooks (vs. all other existing solutions) are:

Automation Control. If you want to control the type of events you are receiving or do different things based on different types of events, webhooks give you unlimited flexibility.
Speed. With polling solutions, you are dependent on the vendor to increment the polling (which is usually 5 minutes or can be 1 minute if you pay). Webhooks happen when an event happens.
Cost. If you want to build automations off any field in your Airtable base (rather than the last modified column hack), costs can get out of control with the API polling vendors

Once this is setup correctly, you can use this webhook functionality in a wide variety of ways.
You can create a webhook to go anywhere (including sending it to your own infrastructure or some third party like Zapier / Integromat), you can trigger automations in other Saas applications (such as sending an email via Sendgrid, or adding data to Salesforce) or you can send the data to a data warehouse (S3, Snowflake, etc)

Here is a full post on Medium with how to get Airtable webhooks working - Airtable Now Supports Webhooks!

If you have any questions, fire away!

openside · ‎Jun 21, 2019

I think thats a bit disingenuous to claim that. Airtable does not support webhooks. You’ve created a workaround to the lack of webhooks, which is cool. But Airtable does not support webhooks (of course, I wish they did!) I don’t think you should be making that claim.

just my 2c.

Tod_Sacerdoti · ‎Jun 21, 2019

Thanks for your comment. Here are my thoughts:

A. The power of this workaround is that you can receive a webhook with all the data that an Airtable webhook would provide.

B. I think the clarification is quite clear – “Based on the transitive property (A=B and B=C, then A=C), Airtable supports Slack Notifications, and Slack supports webhooks, so Airtable supports webhooks! You just have to know how to set it up correctly.”

Given how many Airtable solutions you have built and how active you are in the community, it would be great if you could try out the solution and give specific feedback on how we can improve it.

Our goal is to get as close as possible to Airtable fully supporting webhooks for all customers, for free.

David_Torbett · ‎Jun 24, 2019

Does this somehow allow you to capture the deletion of a record in airtable?
TIA.

Tod_Sacerdoti · ‎Jun 25, 2019

Based on our testing it appears that Airtable does not inform Slack when records were deleted. So, this remains a limitation it appears.

David_Torbett · ‎Jun 25, 2019

thanks for confirming. It’s one of a few “limitations” that stops us underpinning more solutions using Airtable.
thanks

SEO_SIXT · ‎Jan 15, 2020

This is a neat workaround, but very limited.

Airtable groups together a bunch of record updates: only the first one works
Sometimes Airtable just decides to skip some record updates (you get notified of it)

Jason · ‎Jan 22, 2020

Thanks for sharing more about your workaround @Tod_Sacerdoti!

For anyone reading, I want to point out that this is a third-party solution not created by Airtable. To prevent confusion, I’m going to close this topic from further replies.