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Considerations

Subscription Model

Airtable is a closed-source platform operating on a "freemium" model. Most core features are offered in the free plan, though there are restrictions on the number of records per base, editors and commenters per workspace, attachment space, revision history and more. Team, Business, and Enterprise plans all unlock more features, including increased record limits. See plan details from Airtable.

Education, Non-Profit, and Student Plans

Airtable offers 50% off the monthly cost of Team plans for workspaces managed by employees of qualifying educaitonal institutions and non-profits.

Students can receive complementary access to 6–24 months an Airtable Team plan based on their expected graduation date.

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Data Export and Lock-In

By using Airtable – or any paid tool – DH teams may be exposed lock-in. Through its user interface, Airtable only supports downloading table views as CSV files, and there is no way to download an entire base. DH teams with programming knowledge can access Airtable's API and retrieve tables as JSON records, but the relationships between records and tables will have to be redefined. See the Exporting Data section of this guide for more information.

Privacy and Security

Airtable maintains that data is ecrypted at rest on their servers and in transit. Airtable also creates encrypted backups of bases. HIPPA compliant data storage is only available on Enterprise plans.

Two-factor authentication is available for all user accounts, but it can only be required on workspaces with Enterprise plans.

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Spell Check

Airtable does not natively include a spell check tool. When creating humanities data in Airtable, this can cause challenges. If working a web browser, extensions like LanguageTool or Grammarly can provide spell checking features. However, grammar extensions may require sending your data to third parties for processing and storage. If using, consider limiting the websites it can operate on or self-hosting an instance of LanguageTool.

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Field Naming Conventions

Field names are an important part of documenting and structuring your data. Consider creating and following a naming convention. If planning on accessing your bases via the Airtable API, consider using snake_case or camelCase to name your fields.

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Airtable AI

Airtable offers a separate AI subscription plan that can be incorporated into workflows. As of May 2025, Airtable AI is an opt-in service and Airtable data is not used to train large language models.

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This tutorial is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).