Airtable alternative

An Airtable alternative for teams billed per editor

Airtable is a real database with a spreadsheet face. That is the strength, and it is why this comparison has limits.

The short answer

Polaris is a free alternative to Airtable for teams using a base as a project tracker rather than as a database. Airtable lists Free with one thousand records per base and up to five editors, Team at twenty dollars per seat per month billed annually, and Business at forty-five, checked 21 August 2026. Polaris has no seat count and adds AI workers who deliver tasks.

Airtable Free: 1,000 records per base
Airtable Team: $20 / seat / month annual
Airtable Business: $45 / seat / month annual
Checked: 21 Aug 2026

Two different Airtable users are reading this

The first built a relational model: linked records across tables, lookups, rollups, an interface for a team that never sees the underlying grid, and syncs pulling data in from elsewhere. That person should stop reading. Polaris has no relational modelling layer and this comparison does not apply to them.

The second uses a base as a project tracker with a status column, an owner column and a date, and is being billed per editor for it. Checked on 21 August 2026, Airtable lists Free with one thousand records per base, up to five editors, one gigabyte of attachments and two weeks of revision history; Team at twenty dollars per seat per month billed annually or twenty-four monthly; Business at forty-five per seat annually; and Enterprise Scale on request. Everyone with edit access is billed. Viewers and form submitters are not.

For that second reader, twenty dollars a seat for a task list with a nice grid view is a defensible thing to reconsider.

Head to head

Airtable prices from airtable.com/pricing plus published 2026 summaries for the free-tier limits, checked 21 August 2026.

Airtable

Polaris

Cost

Free to 1,000 records per base, Team $20/seat/mo, Business $45/seat/mo annually

$0, unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs

Who counts as billable

Every editor on any base

Nobody. There is no seat concept

Data model

Real relational tables with links, lookups, rollups and field types

Tasks in lanes inside workstreams. No user-defined schema

Interfaces

Interface Designer for building views for non-editors

List and board views sharing lanes, plus a pinned Focus lane

Automations

Scripting, triggers and integrations inside the base

AI workers you brief and assign, each with an editable SKILL.md

Docs

Long text fields and attachments

Nested doc tree, block editor, versioning, file review, comments

Chat

Record comments

Team chat in the product, plus a Slack-fed Inbox of task suggestions

Who acts on a row

A person who opens the base

A person, or an AI worker on a cloud machine that returns files as a comment

When you should stay on Airtable

Airtable does something structurally different from everything else in this cluster.

You need linked records and rollups
Modelling inventory against suppliers, campaigns against assets, or clients against deliverables requires relations, and relations are what Airtable is. Polaris has no equivalent and will not gain one by shipping a feature.
Interface Designer is how non-editors use your data
Interfaces let people work with a base without touching the grid, which is often the difference between a system being adopted and being ignored. There is nothing like it in Polaris.
Sync is pulling data in from other systems
Airtable sync keeps a base current from external sources so the base is the shared view of truth. Losing that means rebuilding a data pipeline, not switching a tool.
Scripting and the extension catalogue run your process
Teams with scripts, automations and extensions doing daily work have built software. Treat replacing it as a software project with a real estimate.

The narrow case where switching makes sense

It comes down to one question: is your base a database or a to-do list wearing a grid? If you removed the links, lookups and rollups tomorrow and nothing broke, you are paying database prices for task tracking, and every editor on the team is a line on that invoice.

Polaris covers that second case at zero, adds docs and team chat, and lets you assign the rows nobody has time for to an AI worker instead. What it will never do is hold your relational model, and any page telling you otherwise would be easy to falsify in about four minutes.

Testing it without committing

A one-week check that does not require moving anything.

1
Pick the base that is really a tracker
Choose the one with a status column, an owner and a date, and no links to other tables. That is the candidate. Leave every relational base exactly where it is.
2
Export it and rebuild it as one workstream
Airtable exports each table to CSV. Rows become tasks, the status column becomes lanes, owner and date carry over. Attachments export as links, so download anything that matters.
3
Hire the worker for the rows that never move
Describe the stuck work in chat. The Chief of Staff runs a short interview where every answer is one click, writes a SKILL.md you can edit, and the worker card lands ready for its first task in about a minute.
4
Count the seats you would stop paying for
At twenty dollars per seat per month on Team, five editors moving off one base is twelve hundred dollars a year. Compare that against what the workers actually delivered, which is itemised on their work logs.

Go deeper

Notion vs Airtable

One is a document tool that grew tables. The other is a database that grew documents. It shows.

Replacing Airtable and Slack

A relational base doing three jobs at once, and only one of those jobs should move.

A Notion alternative for teams tired of maintaining the database

Notion is the best place to write the plan. The question is who executes it once the page is written.

Per-seat pricing and usage pricing charge for different things

One model prices access. The other prices output. Almost every argument about software cost is really about which of those you are buying.

Getting a process out of one person's head

The process exists. It is in someone's habits and in six months of Slack threads. A worker interviews and reads until it is on a page.

Hire an AI ops coordinator

It writes down how your company does things, so the answer stops living in whichever colleague happens to be on holiday.

Questions people ask

+Can Polaris do what Airtable does?

No, and this is the clearest limit in the whole alternatives cluster. Airtable is a relational database with linked records, lookups, rollups and interfaces. Polaris has tasks in lanes inside workstreams with no user-defined schema. If your base depends on relations, Polaris is not a replacement for it.

+Who does Airtable actually bill?

Every person with edit access to any base is a billable seat, checked 21 August 2026, at twenty dollars per seat per month on Team billed annually or twenty-four billed monthly, and forty-five on Business. Viewers and form submitters are free. That is why the bill grows faster than the number of people who feel like Airtable users.

+What are the free plan limits?

Airtable's Free plan allows unlimited bases with one thousand records per base, up to five editors, one gigabyte of attachments and two weeks of revision history, checked 21 August 2026. The record ceiling is what forces most upgrades, rather than the seat count.

+How would an AI worker help with data work?

The realistic tasks are research and enrichment rather than schema work: checking a list of companies, drafting the summaries a row needs, or producing a comparison document. The worker runs on a cloud machine with live web search, ticks the acceptance criteria, and posts the result as a comment with files attached.

+Is there really no seat charge in Polaris?

None. The software is free with unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs, and the Chief of Staff is included in every organisation. Revenue comes only from delivered agent work at roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour, estimated by an open formula and logged job by job.