Best European Alternatives to Airtable

Why people leave Airtable

Airtable is the tool that convinced non-technical teams they could build a database, and it deserves the credit. The grid looks like a spreadsheet, the linked records behave like foreign keys, and nobody had to explain either.

People leave when they hit the meter. A base on the free plan stops at 1,000 records. Team stops at 50,000 and costs $20 per seat per month billed annually. Business stops at 125,000 and costs $45. Those ceilings arrive at the worst possible moment, which is after the base has become the thing three departments rely on and the person who built it has moved on.

The second reason is drift. Airtable no longer describes itself as a spreadsheet-database on its own homepage; it sells an AI app platform, with Omni and agents at the front. That is a legitimate direction for a company to take, and it is not the product a lot of people bought.

• You are renting rows, not buying software The record ceiling is per base, and it is the number that decides everything else: 1,000 free, 50,000 on Team, 125,000 on Business. There is no way to buy rows without buying seats, so a base that outgrows Team drags every collaborator from $20 to $45 a month whether or not they need anything on the higher plan. Teams end up splitting one dataset across several bases to stay under the line, which is the moment the tool starts making the data worse.
• The free plan is a demo, not a tier 1,000 records per base, 1GB of attachments, two weeks of revision history and at most five people with editing rights. That is enough to prove the idea and not enough to run anything, and the two-week history in particular means a mistake found on a Monday three weeks later is unrecoverable. Several tools here give a free workspace that a real team can sit on for a year.
• The product you bought is being rebuilt around AI Airtable's own site now leads with AI-powered app building, agents and Omni rather than with the grid. If that is what you want, staying is the rational move, because Airtable is further down that road than anything on this page. If you wanted a shared database with views over it, you are now a legacy use inside a product with a different centre of gravity.
• The company is in San Francisco, whatever the storage says This is the one place where the usual argument needs qualifying rather than repeating. Airtable's security page says customers have the option to store data in the European Union, and it does not say on which plan or at what price. So the storage question may well be answerable. The jurisdiction question is not: Formagrid, Inc. operates from San Francisco, and a US disclosure order reaches the company holding the base regardless of which region it sits in.

What you have to replace, not just match

Airtable is doing at least three jobs in most organisations, and only one of them is hard to move.

The first is the shared grid: linked tables, field types, views, filters and a form that feeds it. Every tool on this page does that, and does it well enough that the switch is a weekend.

The second is automation — the scripts, the webhooks and the integrations that quietly run your process. Those do not port, and they are usually undocumented. The third is the interface layer, the read-only app you built for people who should never see the raw table.

Work out which of the three is load-bearing before comparing prices. If it is the grid, this page is easy. If it is twenty automations nobody wrote down, budget the rebuild honestly, because that is where these migrations actually go wrong.

How each alternative compares to Airtable

What actually breaks when you switch

Attachments are the trap. Airtable stores files behind signed URLs and an export hands you links rather than the files themselves, so a migration that looks complete leaves every image and PDF pointing at an address that stops working. Download them deliberately, in bulk, while the account is still open.

Automations are the cost. Nothing here imports an Airtable automation or a scripting block, and in most organisations nobody has written down what they do. Inventory them first, decide which ones were ever worth having, and treat the rebuild as the project rather than as the tidying up afterwards.

And expect an argument about who owns the result. Airtable spread because individual teams adopted it without asking anyone, which means the migration is also the moment IT discovers seven bases it has never seen. That conversation is usually more time-consuming than the export, and it is better to have it before the renewal date than during it.

Is my Airtable data actually stuck in the United States?

No, and this is worth getting right because most comparison pages say otherwise. Airtable's security page states that customers have the option to have their data stored in the European Union. What it does not publish is which plan carries that option or what it costs, and the supporting documentation is not public, so the honest answer is that it exists and you will have to ask sales what it takes.

What the option cannot change is who can be compelled. Formagrid, Inc. runs Airtable from San Francisco, so a US order reaches the company that holds the keys to the base irrespective of the region the bytes are parked in.

If your requirement is a line in a procurement form about storage location, ask Airtable before you migrate anything. If it is an assessment of foreign disclosure risk, region selection does not touch it and a different supplier is the only lever you have.

Which of these removes the record limit?

Self-hosting does, on three of the four. Baserow states that the self-hosted version will never place limits on rows, records, webhooks or API requests, and unlike its cloud it has no rate limit either. NocoDB's Community edition is free forever with unlimited records, storage and seats. Grist's Community Edition is yours to run without the per-document ceilings that apply to Grist's own hosting.

On hosted plans the ceilings come back, and they are not always higher than Airtable's. SeaTable is the exception worth naming: its Enterprise plan at €14 per user per month lists rows as unlimited, against 125,000 per base on Airtable Business at $45.

The trade is the usual one. A server that nobody patches is a worse outcome than a metered SaaS account, so count an administrator in the price before deciding that unlimited is free.

Are all four of these European?

Two are. Baserow B.V. is registered in Amsterdam under Dutch law with disputes heard in Amsterdam, and SeaTable GmbH is in Mainz, registered at the district court there, with the cloud on German data centres.

The other two are American companies with European-friendly licensing. NocoDB Inc. is deemed domiciled in California by its own terms, with San Francisco courts named. Grist Labs Inc. gives a New York address and elects New York law, and its privacy policy says information may be stored and processed in the United States.

That is not a reason to strike them off. It is a reason to be clear about what you are buying: with NocoDB and Grist the European part is the deployment you control, not the vendor you are trusting. If you use their hosted service, you are trusting an American company.

What breaks when I move a base?

The grid survives. Tables, field types, links between records, views and filters all have equivalents, and every tool here imports CSV or connects directly, so getting the data across is a day at most.

Automations do not survive. Airtable's scripting block, its automation triggers and the integrations wired through them have no import path anywhere, and they are typically the least documented part of the system. The same goes for interfaces: the read-only app you built for the rest of the company is a rebuild, not a migration.

Attachments are the quiet one. They live on Airtable's storage behind signed URLs, and a CSV export gives you links that expire rather than files. Pull the attachments deliberately before the account closes, or you will move a table full of dead references.

Which one to pick

If you want the same product from a European company, Baserow is the answer and self-hosting it is the version where the record ceiling stops existing. Check how its per-workspace row counting maps onto your bases first, because the headline numbers are not comparing the same thing.

If the requirement is a German supplier with a contract and an address, SeaTable does that and its Enterprise plan removes the row limit for a third of what Airtable Business costs per seat.

If the data really belongs in a database your engineers already run, NocoDB is the honest recommendation — as software you deploy in Europe, not as a hosted service from a company domiciled in California.

And if what you actually miss is a spreadsheet that can calculate and keep secrets, Grist is the most interesting tool on this page and the one whose company is least European. Run it yourself, or use a European instance, and the distinction stops mattering.