Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this explanation. Serious question, though - what is the core benefit over using Google Sheets + Apps Script? Is it just a better UI layer and baked-in API access, or is there an underlying structure of some sort that's superior?

View on HN

It's funny how people say things like "just a better UI layer", when to non-techies, the application IS the UI, and the only thing that matters (as long as the performance is acceptable) is features and ease of use.

The difference is that Airtable's core data structure is a relational database whereas Google Sheets' core is a spreadsheet. It's very easy to link to records in other tables in Airtable. Google Sheets does not have the concept of records. You could hack something together, but it just works in Airtable. Airtable shines when you want to have a list X, and then for each item in X, have a list Y. X could be homes, clients, or events, and Y could be rooms, tasks, or guests. In Google Sheets, these types of relationships are awkward to represent.

By playing around with the app, I can totally see that this supersedes Google Sheets and Apps Script by a long way. Yes, the UI layer and the API accesses. In the backend, I feel a lot of interesting things are going around - their relational engine natively supports collaboration, type support, revision history. All your mini blocks can be packaged into one big "base" which forms your workspace.

All of this can be done ... without writing a single line of code, which is impressive!

Composing views and dynamically linking sheets (tables) together through information. Again, it’s a full database with a spreadsheet view / control on top, not a spreadsheet that can act like a database.

More obvious third party integrations, and explained workflows and presets for common tasks non techy people doing business on the web have to deal with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com