We make one of these two products, so read this the way you would read any comparison written by a competitor. What follows is accurate as of July 2026, and the parts where Airtable is the better choice are stated plainly, because you will find out either way and it is cheaper for both of us if you find out now.
What each one actually is
Airtable is a relational database with a friendly face. Its unit is the base, which holds tables, which link to each other. On top of that sit views — grid, Kanban, calendar, gallery — interfaces, forms, and a large automation and integration ecosystem. You build things with it.
Tablitsa is a spreadsheet with a database backbone. Its unit is the sheet: one grid, real column types, rows stored server-side and fetched as you scroll. You import data into it and work with the data. There are no linked records, no Kanban view, no automation builder.
That is the whole comparison, really. Everything below is detail on that difference.
Pricing: per editor vs flat
This is where most decisions are actually made.
Airtable charges per collaborator with edit rights. Team is $20 per collaborator per month billed annually ($24 monthly); Business is $45 ($54 monthly). The free plan allows 1,000 records per base and up to 5 editors.
Tablitsa charges per account: €29/month Pro, €99/month Team, with a free tier and a 14-day trial on both paid plans. Collaborators are included — 3 on Pro, 10 on Team — rather than billed per head.
Work it through for five editors. Airtable Team is $100/month and climbs every time you add someone. Tablitsa Pro is €29/month for three, or €99/month for ten. The crossover is early, and it is decisive for a growing team, because per-seat pricing quietly taxes you for the colleague who opens the tool once a fortnight.
The honest counterpoint: if you are one person, Airtable’s free plan gives you 1,000 records and five editors, and Tablitsa’s free plan gives you 1,000 rows and no collaborators at all. Solo and small, Airtable Free is the better deal.
Limits: records per base vs rows per sheet
These numbers are not directly comparable, and comparing them carelessly is the most common mistake in this decision.
Airtable caps records per base, cumulative across all tables in that base: 1,000 on Free, 50,000 on Team, 125,000 on Business. One 50,000-row table and two 25,000-row tables both sit exactly at the Team ceiling.
Tablitsa caps rows per sheet: 1,000 on Free, 100,000 on Pro, 1,000,000 on Team. It also caps sheets per workspace (1 on Free, 10 on Pro, unlimited on Team) and upload size (5 MB, 50 MB, 500 MB).
So a single 300,000-row export does not fit in Airtable Business at all, and fits in Tablitsa Team. But twelve tables of 40,000 rows each is a normal Airtable Business base, and in Tablitsa would be twelve sheets. Count your data the way each tool counts it before you conclude anything.
Data model: linked records
Airtable’s linked-record field is its best idea. An order points at a customer; the customer shows their orders; rollups and lookups compute across the link. It is a relational database that a non-engineer can hold in their head.
Tablitsa has nothing equivalent. Sheets are independent. If your data is genuinely relational, this is the end of the comparison and Airtable wins it. Do not let anything below change your mind on that.
The question worth asking is whether your data is relational or merely large. A great many Airtable bases are one big table that someone normalised out of habit. If yours is a flat table of records — transactions, contacts, inventory, survey responses — you are paying for a relational engine you are not using.
Getting data in
Both import CSV and XLSX. The difference is what happens next.
Airtable imports into a table where you then set field types, which is a manual pass over every column. Tablitsa infers a type for each column as it imports — number, date, boolean, email, URL — so a numeric column arrives numeric and sorts correctly. If it guesses wrong, or you want a second opinion, Detect Types on the AI toolbar re-examines the columns and shows you its proposals to accept or override.
From there the AI toolbar has the rest of the cleanup: data-quality analysis, duplicate merging with confidence scores, and generated validation rules. Import is when messy data is cheapest to fix, and the order those steps go in matters more than people expect.
Detect Types is on every plan. Data quality, data merge, and validation rules are Pro and Team.
Asking questions of the data
In Airtable, a question becomes a view: filter, group, and a rollup field, and if the question is unusual, a formula field or an extension.
In Tablitsa you type the question. Ask Data takes plain English — total revenue by country last quarter, rows missing an email — and answers it against the sheet, showing you the SQL it used. It is on every plan, with daily and monthly limits that rise with the tier — Free includes 3 questions a day.
If you ask the same five questions every week, Airtable’s saved views are better: set them up once and they are there. If your questions are one-offs that change every time, building a view for each is friction, and typing the question is not.
Views, automations, ecosystem
Airtable wins all three, comprehensively. Kanban, calendar, gallery, Gantt; a real automation builder; interfaces and forms; a marketplace; and a decade of tutorials, consultants, and Zapier recipes. Tablitsa has a grid, a REST API, API keys, and webhooks on the Team plan.
If you intend to build an application — a content calendar with approval steps, a CRM with automated follow-ups — Airtable is the correct tool and this is not a close call.
So which should you choose?
Choose Airtable if your data is relational, you need more than a grid view, you are building workflows and automations on top of it, or you are a solo user who fits inside the free plan.
Choose Tablitsa if your data arrives as spreadsheets and stays tabular, your sheets are large — a few hundred thousand rows is unremarkable — you want a flat bill that does not grow with headcount, and the thing you do most is ask questions of a big table rather than build an app on top of it.
A useful gut check: if you have ever described your Airtable base to someone as “really just a big spreadsheet”, you are paying for a relational database and a per-seat licence to store a spreadsheet.
Export a table as CSV and import it. The Free plan takes 1,000 rows without a card, and Pro and Team have a 14-day trial. Half an hour will tell you more than the rest of this page.