Why Small Businesses Are Ditching Airtable for Baserow

Your team is growing. Spreadsheets are everywhere. Someone just overwrote last week's client list, and nobody knows which version is correct anymore. Sound familiar?

This is the exact moment most small businesses discover Airtable. It promises the flexibility of spreadsheets with the power of databases. And it delivers. Until the invoice arrives.

The Airtable Problem Nobody Talks About

Airtable works beautifully for small teams. But here's where it gets uncomfortable: pricing scales per user, per month.

For a 10-person team, you're looking at $2,400 annually just to organize your data. And that's before you hit storage limits or need advanced features.

The real kicker? Your data lives on Airtable's servers. If they change their pricing (again), you're stuck. If they sunset a feature you depend on, tough luck.

Enter Baserow: Same Power, Different Economics

Baserow is an open-source database platform that does everything Airtable does. Visual interface, drag-and-drop fields, linked records, forms, API access. The works.

The difference? You own it.

When you self-host Baserow on a platform like Elestio, your entire team accesses the same instance. There's no per-user fee. Five users or fifty, the cost stays the same.

Real numbers: A Baserow instance on Elestio runs on infrastructure starting at $16/month. That covers unlimited users, your data stays yours, and you get automated backups without lifting a finger.

Compare that to Airtable's per-seat model, and the math becomes obvious pretty quickly.

What Can Baserow Actually Do?

If you've used Airtable, Notion databases, or even Excel with ambition, Baserow will feel familiar. Here's what small businesses typically use it for:

Client Management Build a simple CRM without paying CRM prices. Track contacts, deals, follow-ups, and notes in linked tables. Add a form to your website and watch leads flow directly into your database.

Project Tracking Kanban boards, calendars, timelines. Baserow has multiple views for the same data. Your operations team sees a calendar, your manager sees a Kanban board, everyone stays synced.

Inventory and Orders Link products to suppliers, track stock levels, connect orders to customers. Small e-commerce operations and service businesses use this setup constantly.

Team Directories and Onboarding Employee records, equipment assignments, training checklists. HR tasks that usually live in scattered documents become searchable and organized.

The Migration Question

"But we already have everything in Airtable."

Fair point. The good news: Baserow imports CSV files directly, and most database structures transfer cleanly. Complex automations might need rebuilding, but the core data moves without drama.

For teams just starting out, skipping Airtable entirely saves the migration hassle altogether. Start with Baserow, grow with Baserow.

Self-Hosted Doesn't Mean Complicated

The old assumption about self-hosting was that you needed a server admin on staff. That's not true anymore.

Platforms like Elestio handle the infrastructure side completely. You click deploy, pick your server size, and Baserow is running within minutes. Updates happen automatically. Backups run daily. SSL certificates renew themselves.

You get the benefits of owning your data without babysitting servers.

That's money back in your budget for tools that actually need it.

When Airtable Still Makes Sense

Full transparency: Airtable isn't always the wrong choice.

If you're a solo founder or a team of two, Airtable's free tier works fine. If your company requires specific integrations that only exist for Airtable, switching might create more problems than it solves. And if nobody on your team wants to think about infrastructure at all, even managed infrastructure, staying put is reasonable.

But if you're a growing SMB watching your software costs climb, Baserow deserves a serious look.

Getting Started

Deploying Baserow through Elestio takes about five minutes:

1. Visit elest.io/open-source/baserow
2. Select your cloud provider and region
3. Pick a server size (2 CPU / 4GB RAM handles most small business needs)
4. Click deploy

You'll have admin credentials and a working URL within minutes. From there, creating tables, inviting team members, and building your first database is all visual.

No terminal commands. No configuration files. Just your data, organized the way your business actually works.

Thanks for reading! If spreadsheet chaos is costing your team hours every week, give Baserow a try. You might be surprised how quickly things click into place. See you in the next one!