Wrike vs Airtable

With Airtable, you probably know why you picked it. It fit your needs then, or it still does. I’ve seen a lot of posts from the Wrike team lately about the Airtable acquisition, and if you’ve come across them, you’re probably contemplating. Either way, the experience on Airtable is very different from the experience on Wrike.

Airtable isn’t great for operations and day-to-day activities. Using it, you notice it’s almost a premium type of tool, one you don’t come across often. It’s a great alternative to Excel. I don’t always like using Excel, and when I discovered Airtable years ago while working with a business, I was excited because it bridged all the gaps for me. But what you can do on Wrike, you could try to do on Airtable, it just takes a lot more to get there.

I talk a lot about the tools that are good for you, the tools you should pick, and the ones you shouldn’t, depending on what you want to do, the level of customization you need, your industry, and your team size. These are things you have to look at. A large team can still work with Airtable. A large team will definitely fit with Wrike. I’ve worked with Wrike setups of over 200, 300 people, and it fits, because you can have different spaces across regions and still tie everything together into one uniform setup with solid governance, a knowledge base, templates, blueprints. You can build templates in Airtable too, but it gets willy-nilly. There’s too much going on. You end up trying to do so much to achieve so little, chasing the sense that you’re doing something when you shouldn’t even be doing it that way.

Airtable really works well with counting. You have a real estate business and want to track your number of clients, customers, leads. You run a coaching or consulting business and want to manage clients. You want a timesheet. Airtable handles that well because each record is its own independent property, its own little business. Whatever you put into that record overrides the previous. Airtable has version history, but outside of that, it doesn’t do much beyond telling you who made changes.

With Wrike, when I got introduced to it years ago, it wasn’t love at first sight. It won’t be love at first sight for you either. But as you use it, you get exposed to a level of reporting you won’t find in Airtable. One thing I especially love is the workflow reports. I haven’t seen Airtable map anything close to that, and they probably never will. This level of reporting exists because Wrike is specifically built to track work: tasks, how people operate, how they’ve been using the tool. Wrike gets you to that level of visibility.

It’s built around statuses called workflows. Depending on what you need, it gets granular with custom item types, custom fields, workflows, statuses, and automations, all centered around one space. Your team functions as a whole unit, with sub-centers underneath. It’s great for decentralizing power. You keep governance at the top while regions still function independently, and you still get that reporting layer telling you what’s going on, what this person’s capacity is, where they are facing issues, and how frequently they are moving items through the workflow. It’s absolutely wonderful.

Wrike also has database-style options. It’s a strong tool for operations, project management, people management, and resource management. You can set a lot of this up in Airtable too. But here’s the thing: if you’ve been on Airtable a while and you want to push past a certain point, it takes you a while to get there, or you find a workaround. A lot of it becomes the feeling of doing something like I said. You know a thing isn’t quite possible, but you try anyway, and even when it is possible, you’re jumping through a lot of hoops to get one feature that should just come with the tool.

There are things Airtable isn’t built for. You know it, I know it. But we sometimes deceive ourselves into thinking we can force it anyway. There’s a level of customization you won’t get with either tool. Even Wrike has limits. If you move from Airtable to Wrike expecting the same interface, you won’t find it. If you move from Wrike to Airtable expecting blueprints, you can build templates in Airtable, but it depends entirely on how you set it up.

With both tools, you have to sit down and think it through. It helps to have someone break it down for you, because there’s a lot of thinking involved in curating your experience to fit the tool you’re moving to. Nothing about Airtable is bad, nothing about it is good. Same with Wrike. There are just tools you should or shouldn’t use for your business.

You won’t get the level of blueprints or request form customization on Airtable that you get on Wrike. You can get close (Airtable has improved its form layout,  dare I say it’s better than Wrike), but you won’t get there. Every tool is built for a specific purpose. Airtable was built for one thing, Wrike for another, to work with larger teams, which is why you see so many enterprise teams on Wrike. It’s secure. It gives larger teams that sense of security.

I know people running larger teams on Airtable, and I know they’re not able to accommodate everything they need to. So build your list of non-negotiables, the features you cannot do without, and check each tool against that list. Even Wrike’s formulas are basic. You won’t get advanced formulas there the way you would elsewhere.

Wrike might feel confusing if you’re coming straight from Airtable. But if you’re used to tools like ClickUp or Asana, it’ll sit a lot easier on your palate.

Moving from Airtable to Wrike, don’t expect the same flexibility around tables, formulas, and scripting. Wrike has an API, but it’s restrictive. If you want a more free-flowing setup connecting the two, it’s possible, I’ve done it, but it takes a lot of custom work in Zapier or Make, and depending on your team size, that gets expensive very fast.

All of this comes down to team size and budget. Wrike can get expensive for a larger team. Airtable’s pricing is probably a tie at that scale, and honestly, once you’re looking at enterprise teams of 100, 200 people, Airtable might end up more expensive than Wrike.

If you’re a small, humble business like mine, try both. There are things you’ll love about Wrike and things you’ll hate. Same with Airtable. Both have restrictions that will drive you crazy. But I always say: pick your poison.