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:
curl -fsSL https://get.appdor.com/appdor-latest.tar.gz | docker load
curl -fsSLO https://get.appdor.com/docker-compose.yml
docker run --rm ghcr.io/nebosa-company/appdor generate-keys > .env
docker compose up -dThat starts a thirty-day Business trial. After it, the install keeps every read and every export but stops taking edits until a licence is in.
That is the self-hosted install. The hosted service at appdor.com runs in AWS us-east-1, in the USA, and there the answer to the sub-processor question is our list, not yours — the difference below only exists if you run it yourself.
For 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 lists at $20 per editor per month, billed annually; Business is $45 (US list prices in US dollars, as published on Airtable's pricing page in July 2026). The jump between them is the interesting number: it is a 125% increase, and the features that force it — SAML, the admin panel, more records per base — are the ones a team needs precisely when it has stopped being a pilot.
Appdor tiers too, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise: SAML and field permissions are Business features here as well, and our own step from Pro to Business is not smaller in proportion. Our prices are in euros, so they are on the pricing page rather than subtracted from a dollar figure in this table. What differs is what the step does not buy:
| Airtable | Appdor | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid tier | $20 per editor / month, billed annually | Pro — see the pricing page (euros) |
| Next tier up | $45 per editor / month, billed annually | Business — see the pricing page (euros) |
| Views behind a plan | Gantt and timeline from the Team plan | all 12, every plan |
| Records per base | capped by plan | capped by plan |
| Read-only viewers | free | free |
| Self-hosting | no self-hosted edition on its pricing page | the same build we host: thirty-day trial, then a licence |
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. Airtable exports a view as 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.
Sources: Airtable's prices, plan features and record limits as published on airtable.com/pricing in July 2026 — US list prices in US dollars, per editor per month, billed annually; the same page listed no self-hosted edition when checked on 4 October 2026. Appdor's prices are in euros, on its own pricing page.