‘Scalability’ is a buzzword you’ll hear every no-code and low-code vendor throw around. Spoiler alert: a lot of it is just marketing fluff, backed by big companies whose logos are stamped onto their website. But the presence of big company logos doesn't tell the whole story.
Airtable, for instance, claims to allow users to ‘Manage and govern apps at scale’, publicizing AWS, Walmart and Blackrock on their homepage, but there’s a huge difference between building a budget tracker for an enterprise company and building out the same enterprise company’s entire operating system.
One is a lightweight app that can probably afford to break; the other is the backbone of an entire business operation that could cost big bucks if it stopped working even briefly. While a tool like Airtable can handle the former, it will typically crumble under the weight of the latter.
The reality is, true scalability is difficult to quantify, and the nature of it depends hugely on the company in question. But, generally, scalability isn’t about who uses the tool; it’s about how well the tool adapts to your needs as you grow, or as your use case does. Can the tool handle increasing complexity without crashing? Can it maintain performance without slowing down? Can it scale and evolve without turning into a budget drain? These are the real tests of scalability, and they’re where many no-code tools start to show their cracks.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what scalability actually means and explore how well Airtable measures up when put to the test. If you want to know more about Airtable, you can read our full in-depth guide.
The four layers of scalability
Building a scalable infrastructure for your business is about making the right decisions now that will support your growth down the line. When you’re assessing a platform for scalability, there are a few factors you need to weigh up, which will determine whether the platform can actually grow with your business or if it’s all going to fall apart as you scale.
First of all, you want to ensure you have a good idea about what kind of app or structure you need to build, according to the role it needs to fulfill for your company. Then you’ll want to consider these four points:
- Database scalability: Can the platform handle more data, users, and requests without falling behind or slowing down? What are the platform’s limits and is your user base or dataset likely to quickly outgrow them?
- Affordability: Does the pricing stay reasonable as you add more users, data, and features, or does it become a financial nightmare? What is the largest user base you’d be likely to have, and could you afford the respective pricing plan?
- Flexibility: How much room does the platform give you to customize and integrate with other tools as your needs evolve?
- Security and compliance: Can the platform keep up with your security and compliance needs?
Knowing the answers to these questions gives you a clearer picture of whether a platform can scale with your business or if it’ll buckle under pressure when your systems get bigger (and potentially messier).
Database scalability
Database scalability is all about how well a system can handle growing amounts of data, users, and requests without performance taking a hit. Typically, a scalable database (like SQL) can handle increased demand without crumbling under pressure.
Airtable does a solid job for smaller teams, but as your business scales, you’ll hit some limits, literally. Airtable’s database structure is not built for handling massive data volumes or complex relationships, especially as your setup becomes more complicated and you start adding automations and computed fields like formulas and rollups.
Airtable’s Enterprise plan maxes out at 500,000 records per Base (application) with the lower-tier plans imposing even stricter limits. While 500,000 records might sound like a lot, it doesn’t last long when you’re working with millions of records or large, complex enterprise-grade datasets. Plus, efficiency issues start to arise even before you hit that limit. At around 100,000 records, you will notice some serious performance drops—slower load times, timeouts, and overall sluggishness.
If you've got moderate data needs and/or a small team—even in an Enterprise setting— Airtable will likely serve you well. But once you’re scaling up with more complex data relationships or high-volume operations, Airtable isn’t the best choice. If you need real-time updates or fast data processing, you’ll want to look into more traditional, robust database systems like SQL.
Affordability
Affordability, when it comes to growing companies, is about how well a platform can accommodate your expanding needs without spiraling out of control cost-wise. Ideally, as your business grows, the platform should offer a pricing structure that’s flexible and manageable at scale. Unfortunately, Airtable’s pricing doesn’t exactly hit that mark.
Airtable is one of the more expensive no-code database tools out there. With recent price spikes, it’s becoming harder for small businesses, startups, and agencies to keep up with the costs. The irony is, these are the very businesses that stand to benefit the most from Airtable's ease of use.
For example, Airtable’s Business plan for just 11 users can cost you nearly $500 a month.
Meanwhile, other platforms like Smart Suite offer similar functionality for $35 per user, totaling just $385 per month for 11 users. Glide, another option for building web apps, offers a plan that includes 100,000 rows and 30 users for half the price of Airtable’s Business plan.
Stacked against these alternatives, the value-to-cost ratio of Airtable’s pricing starts to look off. While Airtable is great if you’re looking for a user-friendly database with the familiarity of a spreadsheet, solid automation capabilities, and a reliable vendor with years of market presence, justifying its pricing becomes more challenging as your business expands. For the above price, there are plenty of alternatives on the market that might offer better scalability and more flexible pricing for growing businesses.
The bottom line is, Airtable’s pricing structure makes it tough to scale affordably. As your team grows, the costs quickly add up, making it a less viable choice for businesses that need more than a handful of users on a small budget.
Flexibility
Airtable is relatively flexible for a no-code tool, with a solid range of integrations and decent automation features, including the ability to write custom JavaScript logic with its “scripts”. But if you’re used to coding, Airtable can feel limiting because you have to learn its way of doing things rather than being able to freely customize everything programmatically.
Nevertheless, defining flexibility depends on your context too: for instance, if you aren’t a coder, and are looking for a more customizable option than spreadsheets, you’ll probably find Airtable much more flexible for scaling your processes. Airtable is relatively intuitive and well-documented for even non-technical users to build out mid-scale app infrastructures for their business operations.
Airtable also integrates well with third-party apps, APIs, and external tools like Zapier, Make.com, and custom API calls, which is great for scaling workflows across platforms. But, it’s important to stay intentional about integrating multiple platforms - as you stack up automations with different tools, your systems can get messy. Maintenance and debugging can become a hassle, and scaling complex business logic is even harder.
Eventually, if your workflows get more complicated, or if you need more control over your data and processes, Airtable’s no-code approach might limit you. When it comes to features like granular permissions or advanced database operations, again, Airtable might not cut it. Its permission structure is helpful for smaller teams but it’s limited to predefined roles with no option for custom roles (which is still 1,000 times better than what standard spreadsheets offer!). This is sufficiently flexible for most small teams and companies, but, as you scale, especially in enterprise environments, you’ll likely hit a wall.
Airtable’s customization of UI functionality is also pretty basic (perhaps because UI was never Airtable’s primary focus). You can build “front-ends” with Interfaces, which is great for user interaction and creating tailored view-only dashboards and views.
But, when you compare Airtable to tools like Glide or Retool, the design options feel pretty limited. Airtable’s simplicity works well for smaller teams and straightforward workflows, but as you scale up and manage larger datasets or more complex processes, it starts to feel restrictive. If you need more flexibility in your UI or workflow design, you may best to look elsewhere.
Security and compliance
As your business scales, security and compliance become increasingly important—especially if you're handling sensitive or regulated data. Airtable offers some basic security features like two-factor authentication (2FA) and SSL encryption to keep your data safe. Data sent to and from Airtable’s servers is protected with 256-bit SSL/TLS encryption, and, when it’s at rest, it’s encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption.
The good news: for teams on the Enterprise plan, Airtable also supports SAML-based Single Sign-On (SSO) and some extra administration features. They also comply with GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 compliance, which is not necessarily the case for all no-code vendors.
But there’s one key limitation—Airtable doesn’t support self-hosting. So, if your business needs strict control over where and how your data is stored, or if you're in an industry with strict data governance requirements, Airtable will likely fall short. For businesses with high-level security or compliance needs, Airtable’s cloud-only setup can be a dealbreaker.
While Airtable meets many industry standard - more so than many no-code vendors - it likely won’t reach the needs of large Enterprises with higher-level security needs.
So, how scalable is Airtable?
Airtable is a fantastic tool for smaller non-technical teams, startups, and agencies that need a simple, no-code solution for managing moderate data and complexity. It’s easy to use, a big upgrade from spreadsheets, and conducive to getting started quickly. For these small-medium sized teams, Airtable is a relatively scalable solution that can develop alongside their needs—at least up before the point where increasing costs potentially outweigh the benefits.
Indeed, as your business scales and your data becomes more complex, Airtable shows some limitations. As you start working with hundreds of thousands of records or need more complex workflows, things start to break down: performance drops, managing data relationships becomes a mess, and costs can go through the roof. It’s simply not yet built for large-scale operations. If you’re planning to scale to highly complex, data-intensive applications, Airtable will eventually become a bottleneck that holds you back.
So, the next time you see enterprise logos stamped on Airtable’s website, remember it’s important to understand the context of what those enterprises are actually building. Scalability is all about context: where you are now, where you’re going, and how you plan to use the system. Establishing and understanding these parameters will help you make a more objective call concerning whether a platform is truly the right fit for your scaling business, or if it’ll end up holding you back.
