Airtable Flanked by Vertical and Horizontal Tools
Airtable: The $7.7B Roblox of the Enterprise
This weakness makes Airtable easier to flank from both sides, by vertical tools that do one job cleanly, and by horizontal tools that make custom work easier for non builders. In practice, Airtable often starts as a flexible system of record for marketing, ops, or lightweight CRM, but as bases grow, complexity, slow loading, and fragile automations make broad team adoption harder. That opens the door for simpler products with clearer default workflows or more familiar interfaces.
-
Inside companies, Airtable often ends up with a small builder class and a much larger group of people who avoid the base itself. One agency said fewer than 20% of employees used Airtable directly, with most interacting through a custom software layer on top, and cited slow dashboards, reporting limits, and the need for specialist help as the company grew.
-
That creates room for vertical attacks. Teams may start in Airtable for CRM, hiring, content planning, or operations, then move mature workflows to purpose built tools like BambooHR, Salesforce, job board software, or project tools once they need deeper reporting, stronger defaults, or less maintenance. Airtable often stays useful as a prototype layer, but not always as the long term system.
-
It also creates room for horizontal attacks from products with more legible front ends. Notion and Coda package docs and databases in one surface, which makes knowledge sharing and light workflow management easier to roll out broadly, while Airtable itself later introduced Interfaces in 2021 and Portals in 2025 to give teammates and external users simpler ways to work without touching the raw base.
The market is moving toward products that preserve Airtable's flexibility while hiding the raw database from most users. Airtable's later push into Interfaces, Portals, and AI native app building shows the direction clearly. The winner in this category will be the platform that lets one person build, but lets everyone else use the result safely and intuitively.