Airtable alternatives

Why look beyond Airtable at all?

Airtable has clear strengths — anyone switching should know what they are giving up:

• Relational structure suits shot and gear lists well
• Views let each department see only what it needs
• Automations cover simple recurring steps

Where teams hit limits

The search for an alternative almost always starts at one of these points:

• Someone has to design and own the base
• Per-seat cost climbs with crew size

1. TillyGen — brief to shoot-ready plan

TillyGen ships the production logic; with a generic database you build and maintain it yourself, forever.

A fit for commercials, brand films, corporate and social work — anywhere a brief lands and has to become a plan a crew can actually shoot from, quickly.

Strong until the maintenance falls to whoever has least time.

Other alternatives

General-purpose tools are unbeatably flexible and expensive for exactly that reason: every piece of production logic a specialist tool ships with has to be built here by hand — and maintained afterwards, including after that person leaves.

Depending on your bottleneck, these are worth a look — each with a different centre of gravity:

• Notion: Small teams that want to shape their own system.
• Monday.com: Cross-departmental coordination beyond the shoot itself.
• Asana: Task tracking around a production, rather than the production plan itself.
• Trello: Very small teams with simple, linear jobs.
• Google Sheets: Getting started immediately at zero cost.
• Final Draft: Writing the screenplay itself.

What the choice actually turns on

The useful question is not which tool has more features but where your process stalls today: writing the plan, distributing the paperwork, or getting sign-off. A tool that solves the wrong problem well stops being opened after three weeks.

Just as important is who is meant to work in it. A tool only the production office uses, while the director and DoP stay in spreadsheets, moves the problem rather than solving it — the paperwork then drifts between tool and spreadsheet instead of between two spreadsheets.

Before you migrate

Three things you can settle in half an hour beforehand, and that cost weeks if skipped:

• Export formats: does what comes out match what post, accounting and the client expect — PDF for the crew, CSV for downstream systems, API for anything automated?
• Existing data: do live projects have to move with you, or is a clean break between two jobs enough? The clean break is almost always the cheaper answer.
• Access: who on the crew needs read access, who needs write? Per-seat pricing gets expensive fast as the crew grows.