Airtable as CRM

I come from a Peoplesoft/Oracle database background (*real* databases) and am using AT to help me manage a membership of a makerspace. I found it to be quite useful for small databases like you're thinking about. My application is very form intensive (I use fillout.com) and use it to send emails, notifications and interface with my g-suite and paypal. The one suggesiton I would make is to step up from the free so you can get the ability to write scripts. If you don't know javascript, don't worry. Get a ChatGPT account and it will write the program for you if you can explain in words what you want. It's quite amazing.  I believe AT would support your CRM without hesitation.

Jeff

Similar to @JeffJohnVol‘s answer above:

I came from the FileMaker world as a longtime FileMaker developer.

FileMaker is one of the most powerful low-code database apps on the market. It is way more powerful and way more feature-rich than Airtable, yet it still requires add-ons to do integrations and other functions that it doesn’t natively support.

As a database product, Airtable isn’t designed for anything in particular, but it can be customized to do the majority of things that people want it to do.

Airtable already includes some limited integrations with some of the most popular apps, but as you have discovered, Make’s advanced integrations is the top tool that people use to help them integrate Airtable with other apps in a more advanced way.

The 3rd-party ecosystem for Airtable is very robust and exciting, too. For example, Fillout is 100% free, yet it offers hundreds (possibly thousands) of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer.

So Airtable is more of a blank canvas that you can customize to your needs. Unlike FileMaker’s advanced toolset, Airtable only starts you off with a handful of basic tools, but their API along with the 3rd-party market makes it a viable option for many businesses.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

Hi Jeff and Scott,

Thank you both for your detailed responses and for sharing your experiences! It’s very interesting to hear about your backgrounds with PeopleSoft, Oracle, and FileMaker. I can see how Airtable’s flexibility and third-party ecosystem make it a strong option for many use cases.

That being said, my initial question was more about understanding why Airtable doesn’t include native CRM-like features such as call reminders, SMS, or one-click email automation. I understand that Airtable is designed as a flexible database rather than a full CRM, and that integrations (via Make, APIs, or third-party tools) are the best way to achieve these functions. However, given how much its interface already resembles a CRM, I was wondering if there was a specific reason why these features aren’t included natively.

I’m not a developer, so while I can set up automations with Make, relying on scripting or complex integrations isn’t always ideal for me. I was hoping for a more built-in approach. Do you think Airtable intentionally avoids these features to stay focused on its core database functionality, or do you see a possibility for them to be added in the future?

Thanks again for your insights!

Best,
Jeremy (from France)

I don’t really know why Airtable chooses to build in certain features or not. They don’t give us much insight into their product decisions.

Airtable actually has implemented some of your requests with their extensions, but unfortunately, Airtable seems to have abandoned extensions since they only work at the data layer, not at the interface layer.

You can check out their extensions at this link: https://airtable.com/marketplace

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

Generally, the more features software has, the harder it becomes to maintain.

Because of how general-purpose Airtable is, unless they decide to narrow down their focus on CRMs, I really doubt that they will add features specific to one use case. They cannot appeal to every use-case; what makes them popular is the ability to make custom stuff.

Unless you need very specialized workflows, I personally suggest using a dedicated CRM. Even if you have to connect Airtable for some data access to it, I believe it's usually less of a hassle than building a full-fledged CRM around Airtable.

Best, Milan - Automable.AI Free Airtable consultation

My guess is that they're core functionality is that of a database. The extra features are more application development platform which they have put a bit of work into, but at their core, they're managing data. Sending emails with the automations is incredibly easy inside the platform. You set a trigger, loop through the view you want to send, have an action as a gmail and put in all the particulars you like.  Using non-gmail may be tricker, but that wasn't a concern for me as we're on a google suite platform.  SMS would be interesting, but I dread the thought of turning loose that capability to some that may spam me and others, lol.

Airtable's SMS extension has been very popular with a few of my clients, but since it's only outbound texts, I still needed to create an inbound SMS automation for them with Make.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

As Milan, Scott, and Jeff have brought up, Airtable isn't a CRM, it's a database that can be used as a CRM. What it sounds like your looking for is opinionated software for a specific task (which are valuable, just different). What makes Airtable awesome is you can run a basic CRM, and your accounting, and your project management, and your report tickets, and... all from the same application. You lose some features compared to opinionated software, but you're also not paying for 5 different software services.

Thank you for your responses.

I noted Fillout, according to JeffJohnVo and ScottWorld, even though I initially thought it was only for creating forms. I will look into it further.

According to ScottWorld, there used to be Airtable extensions (which have apparently been removed, but I will check) that allowed sending SMS (not calls, I believe) and emails. There are still some available for emails, but they are intended for email campaigns. I don’t know if they are practical for sending one-off emails, but I imagine it is possible:

https://www.airtable.com/templates/email-marketing/exp4hFElG3FR5ACn1

https://www.airtable.com/templates/marketing-campaign-tracking/expNoL0sYUbOogSCm?igaag=174689262696&igaat=&igacm=22184696575&igacr=731130828124&igakw=marketing%20campaign%20tools&igamt=p&igant=g&utm_source=google&utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_extra5=kwd-325147565953&utm_extra2=22184696575&utm_extra10=174689262696&creative=731130828124&utm_extra8=c&cx=&utm_campaign=demand_nb_templates_all_us_en&utm_content=text&utm_term=marketing%20campaign%20tools&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAn9a9BhBtEiwAbKg6fifgyT1oFv7CHyTUG9pxHEay7M-6Ws3RK-fXUIAhhTZ5EX2APgTDZhoCIKEQAvD_BwE

I also note, based on Milan - Automatisable’s comments, that it is not so simple—without altering the software and its original purpose—to integrate, natively or via extensions, buttons/clicks into Airtable that would allow contacting a database contact in one click, like in a CRM (on a case-by-case basis, or even for campaigns, but the latter interests me less).

Of course, as we’ve seen, I can create bridges—and I will—between Airtable and a CRM like HubSpot (which allows calls, SMS, and emails), or by separating tasks, though less practical, by creating bridges between:

• Airtable / Make / Twilio or MessageBird: call and SMS reminders.
• Airtable / Make / Gmail / ChatGPT: automated email generation and sending (with manual validation) and email archiving.
• Airtable / Make / MailChimp or Klaviyo

In short, I had already noticed that Airtable was perfect for several of my needs (as DisraeliGears01 also pointed out), since it allows me to create a database to gather all my leads, prospects, and client data—such as name, first name, emails, phone numbers, interactions, and documents (photos, PDFs, invoices, etc.)—while also being useful for accounting and logistics. This makes it an essential tool, a kind of Swiss army knife for all these database-related needs (contacts, accounting, logistics, etc.).

The only issue—the one thing it lacks (for contact database purposes only)—is the ability to make calls, send SMS, and emails directly from Airtable, either natively or via an extension, without requiring integrations with external software like those mentioned above. It seems like a small step to make this possible, but apparently, from what I understand, it is not so simple for developers to implement without changing the nature of the software.

Thus, my logic is that if Airtable already excels at gathering various databases in the best way possible (contacts, accounting, logistics, etc.), then adding call, SMS, and email functionalities would be a small step toward making it a CRM. This would be much simpler than setting up integrations with different tools for each task or integrating Airtable with a CRM (which handles all three: calls, SMS, and emails), which would result in duplicated data (with the same data in Airtable and CRM although I can limit CRM to the minimum data since everything is already in Airtable) and additional software costs. For financial and practical reasons, I prefer to avoid integrations and automation via Make when possible, and if Airtable could support calls, SMS, and emails (either one-off or in campaigns), it would be far more convenient.

In short, I see that I can almost do everything I need with this software (contacts, accounting, logistics databases, etc.), but I am frustrated by the financial cost and complexity of integrations required simply because Airtable does not natively support calls, SMS, or emails with a one-click option.

That being said, I will still check out the link sent by ScottWorld (I should have started with that...) https://airtable.com/marketplace, as there may still be extensions available for phone calls, SMS, and emails. Otherwise, I will have no choice but to integrate Airtable with a CRM (inevitably, since CRMs handle calls, SMS, and emails). However, I don’t like the idea of data duplication, so I will see how I can work around that. Alternatively, although I would have preferred to avoid integrations, I could integrate Airtable with different specialized tools for each specific task (calls and SMS or emails).

Best regards.