Airtable alternative
The Airtable alternative that keeps your base
Airtable was sold to Bending Spoons in 2026. Bending Spoons' record with Evernote and WeTransfer (steep price rises, deep staff cuts) has a lot of teams asking what happens to their bases and their bill.
You do not have to answer that question in one weekend. Emberblocks connects to your Airtable base as it is today, mirrors it into Postgres, keeps both sides in sync, and gives you the apps and portals Airtable Interfaces was meant to be. When you are ready, the data is already in a database you control.
Builders are always free. Facts about Airtable on this page were last checked on against Airtable's own site. Tell us if something is out of date: hello@emberblocks.com.
What changed at Airtable
Bending Spoons announced the acquisition of Airtable on 4 August 2026 and closed it about a month later. The buyer's playbook at previous acquisitions has been consistent: raise prices sharply, cut the free tier, and reduce headcount. Evernote's Pro plan went from $37 to $250 a year with a 50-note free cap; WeTransfer lost roughly three quarters of its staff within two months. Whether Airtable follows the same path is not known yet.
Airtable's per-seat pricing already made it costly to put a whole team, let alone clients, in front of an Interface. Emberblocks fills that gap whether or not you ever move the data.
Two ways to use Emberblocks with Airtable
Keep the base, add the app
Point Emberblocks at your base. Airtable bases are mirrored into Postgres: the app reads and writes the mirror at database speed, your edits push back to Airtable within seconds, and changes made in Airtable arrive through Airtable's own webhooks. Your team keeps working in Airtable while clients and field staff use the app.
Move to Postgres for good
The mirror is a normal Postgres schema. When you are ready to leave, switch the app's source to the built-in database or your own Postgres and disconnect Airtable. The screens do not change.
Full apps
Interfaces gives you pages over a base. Emberblocks gives you tables, cards, record pages, kanban boards, calendars, maps, timelines, charts, stats, forms, buttons, comments, activity feeds, file viewers, signatures, barcodes and embeds, plus workflows, roles and versioned publishing.
Pricing that fits portals
Airtable charges per seat for anyone who edits. Emberblocks never charges for builders and prices paid plans by app users, so a client portal with fifty logins is a plan, not fifty seats.
Emberblocks vs Airtable at a glance
| Capability | Emberblocks | Airtable |
|---|---|---|
| Built-in database | Yes | Yes |
| Connect your own Postgres | Yes | sync integrations |
| Airtable as a source (two-way) | Yes | is Airtable |
| Google Sheets as a live source | No | sync |
| No code required | Yes | Yes |
| Formula language | Yes | Airtable formulas |
| Field-level permissions | Yes | paid tiers |
| Workflows and automations | Yes | Automations |
| Versioned publishing with rollback | Yes | record revision history |
| Public links without accounts | Yes | shared views and forms |
| Offline edits queued on phones | Yes | No |
| AI drafts the first version | Yes | Cobuilder |
| Builders never pay | Yes | No |
| Paid plans priced by | app users | per seat per month |
| Custom domains | not yet | unverified |
| SSO / SAML | not yet | unverified |
Emberblocks cells reflect what ships today. Airtable cells were checked against Airtable's public pages on the date shown at the top of this page; "unverified" means we could not confirm it and would rather say so than guess.
What you get in Emberblocks
Your data, live
Start on a built-in database, your own Postgres (Supabase, Neon, RDS, anything that speaks Postgres) or an Airtable base. Apps read and write live rows, so there are no exports to keep in sync.
Blocks on a grid
Drag tables, cards, record pages, kanban boards, calendars, maps, timelines, charts, stats, forms, buttons, comments, activity feeds, file viewers, signatures, barcodes and embeds onto a grid and wire them to tables. What you arrange is exactly what your team gets.
Real field types
Fields include text, email, phone, URL, number, boolean, date, date-time, time, duration, select, multi-select, reference, multi-reference, image, file, signature, address and JSON. Barcode scanning and signatures work in the browser without a native app.
Workflows
Workflows run when a row is created, updated or deleted, on a schedule, or from a button; steps update records, send email, call webhooks, branch on conditions and run code.
Roles and permissions
Roles decide which views a user sees and which fields they can read or edit; app users can be loaded from a table in your own data.
Publishing like software
Every publish is a versioned snapshot you can inspect and roll back, with a stable and a latest channel.
Phones and offline
Published apps are responsive, install on a phone's home screen, and queue edits made offline until the connection is back.
AI where it helps
Ember drafts a first version of an app from a plain-language description, and end users can ask questions of the data in plain language when you turn it on.
Where Airtable is still the better pick
- You use Airtable as a spreadsheet-like database with many collaborators editing cells directly. Emberblocks is an app builder; its grid is for viewing and editing records inside an app, not for bulk spreadsheet work.
- Your team depends on Airtable's marketplace of extensions or its sync integrations with Salesforce, Jira and similar tools.
- You need Airtable's revision history on every record. Emberblocks has activity tracking and comments, not per-cell version history.
How to move from Airtable
- 1
Bring the data
Connect the Postgres database the data already lives in, point Emberblocks at the Airtable base, or export a CSV and import it into a built-in table. Column types are detected on import.
- 2
Let Ember draft the app
Describe the tool in a sentence or two. Ember proposes tables, views and workflows; you review the plan before anything is created.
- 3
Rebuild the screens you actually use
Most teams find a third of their old views were never opened. Rebuild the ones that matter as blocks on a grid; the table, kanban, calendar and map blocks cover most of them.
- 4
Set roles, then publish
Decide who sees which views and fields, publish a versioned snapshot and send the link. Roll back in one click if something is off.
Questions
- Does Emberblocks replace Airtable or sit on top of it?
- Either. Connect your base and Emberblocks mirrors it into Postgres with two-way sync, so you can keep editing in Airtable. Or import the data once and use the built-in database. Most teams start with the sync and switch later.
- How fast does the Airtable sync run?
- Edits made in an Emberblocks app push to Airtable within seconds through a transactional outbox. Changes made in Airtable arrive through Airtable's own change webhooks. Airtable's API allows five requests per second per base, which is why the app reads the Postgres mirror rather than Airtable directly.
- What about Airtable Interfaces?
- Interfaces builds pages over a base and charges per seat for editors. Emberblocks builds full apps with roles, workflows and public links, and does not charge for builders. See the migration guide for Airtable Interfaces for a page-by-page mapping.
- How is Emberblocks priced?
- Builders are always free. Paid plans are priced by the number of people who sign in to your published apps: Starter $29, Pro $79 and Business $199 a month billed yearly. Every new workspace starts with a 14-day Pro trial, no card needed, and there is a free plan after that. Full details on the pricing page.
- What does Emberblocks not do yet?
- Custom domains, SSO and an Enterprise plan are not available yet. There is no live Google Sheets connector (import the sheet as CSV instead). Apps run in the browser and install to the home screen; there are no App Store or Play Store builds.
Try it on your own data.
Every workspace starts with a 14-day Pro trial without a card. You can also open a template in the editor first and sign up only when you want to keep it.