Appdor vs Airtable: the same job, a different bill and a different address
Airtable made this category. If you are reading this you have probably built something real in it, it probably works, and the question is not whether Airtable is good software. It is whether the two things it cannot change about itself matter to you.
Those two things are where your rows live and what the second year costs.
Where the rows live
Airtable is a hosted product. Your data is in their infrastructure, and the answer to "which sub-processors touch our production records" is their list, not yours.
Appdor is a work OS that sits on top of a Postgres database rather than inside a vendor's. The database is the system of record, it is ordinary Postgres, and you can point psql at it. The whole install is:
docker compose upFor a lot of teams that difference is worth nothing, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. It becomes worth something the first time a customer contract names a jurisdiction, an auditor asks for the schema, or somebody wants a read-replica for the warehouse team.
What the second year costs
This is the part that surprises people, because it is not the sticker price.
Airtable's Team plan is $20 per editor per month on annual billing; Business is $45. The jump between them is the interesting number: it is a 125% increase, and the features that force it — field-level permissions, SAML, admin controls, more records per base — are the ones a team needs precisely when it has stopped being a pilot.
| Airtable | Appdor | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid tier | $20 per editor / month | see the pricing page |
| Next tier up | $45 per editor / month | one step, not a cliff |
| Views behind a plan | Gantt and timeline are paid tiers | all 12, every plan |
| Charts behind a plan | extensions vary by tier | all 25, every plan |
| Records per base | capped, and the cap is a tier feature | your Postgres |
| Read-only viewers | free | free |
| Self-hosting | not offered | the same build you would pay us to host |
The row that matters most is the one about views. Appdor ships 12 view types, 48 page elements, 25 chart types and 24 dashboard widgets, and none of them is a plan tier. The plan decides seats, support and who runs the servers. It does not decide which of the product you are allowed to use.
What Airtable does that we do not
A comparison post that finds nothing good to say about the other product is an advertisement, so:
- The ecosystem. Airtable's marketplace, its extension gallery and the sheer number of people who already know it are real advantages, and a smaller product does not have them.
- Interface Designer is mature and has had years of polish.
- Sync from other bases is a first-class feature there.
If those are load-bearing for you, that is a reasonable reason to stay.
The migration, honestly
Your rows will move. Every tool in this category exports CSV and the rows come out fine.
What does not come out is the logic — the formula columns are the part that stalls migrations, because an export gives you the last computed value and loses the expression that produced it. Appdor reads 7 competitor formula dialects, Airtable's among them, and recompiles the expression rather than freezing its output. That is covered properly in its own post.
It is not a promise that every expression survives. A function with no counterpart is reported rather than guessed at, and that list of refusals is your real migration backlog.