An Airtable alternative for teams that want to keep their sheet

Airtable is built as a database with a spreadsheet-like face. To use it you create a base and put your records in it; from then on the base is where your data lives, and everything else — views, forms, automations, interfaces — is built on top of that. That is a sound design for what it is, and it is the opposite of this one.

Gsheet CRM does not have a base. It connects to one Google Sheet in your Drive and reads and writes that file. The board is your status column drawn as stages; a card is a row; dragging it changes the cell. Our servers keep the wiring — which columns mean what, who is on the team, when follow-ups are due — and hold your leads only in a short-lived, encrypted cache that expires within ten minutes. There is no copy of your customer list anywhere but your spreadsheet.

Every consequence on this page follows from that single difference: sharing, backups, formulas, and what happens the day you leave.

• Your sharing, not ours. The file is shared the way any Google Sheet is, from Drive, by you. The app’s permission is drive.file — it can open the one spreadsheet it created or you picked, and nothing else in your Drive.
• Google’s version history. The sheet keeps its own revision history the way every Google Sheet does, and the app additionally writes a Changes tab into the workbook — field, from, to, who, when — so the audit trail sits beside the data it describes rather than in our database.
• Formulas you already know. A computed column in Sheets shows in the app as a field; the app detects formula columns and never writes over them. Sums across a linked tab (payments received, viewings booked) roll up onto the lead’s card without a formula at all.
• Editing anywhere. Paste rows, sort, filter, open it on your phone in the Sheets app. Changes show in the CRM on the next read and pasted rows get their ids filled in.
• Leaving costs nothing. Stop using the app, or revoke its access from your Google account, and the sheet is exactly where it was, working as a normal spreadsheet. With a database product, leaving means exporting your base and rebuilding it somewhere else.

The full feature set — board, follow-ups, reports, roles, linked tables, automations — is described on the CRM for Google Sheets page.

A comparison that only lists one side is not worth reading, so here is the other side, honestly.

• Rich field types. Airtable’s fields are typed at the database level — attachments, linked records with lookups and rollups across many tables, and more. A Google Sheet cell is text or a number with formatting on top. Gsheet CRM adds dropdowns, dates, phones and linked tables, but a spreadsheet is still a spreadsheet.
• Large relational models. Gsheet CRM’s linked tables are deliberately capped at a handful per workspace: one on the entry plan, five on the larger one, with three lookup and three child tables at most. If your model is a dozen related tables with many-to-many links, that is a database job, and Airtable is built for it.
• Building apps on top. Airtable is a platform for interfaces, forms and custom tooling over your data. Gsheet CRM is a CRM: it has a REST API and signed webhooks on the larger plan, but no app builder and no intention of becoming one.
• Very large volumes. The app’s plans cap at tens of thousands of leads per workspace, and the Google Sheets API has its own limits. A team with hundreds of thousands of records belongs in a database.

If most of your needs are on that list, choose Airtable and do not look back. If your pipeline fits in a sheet and the thing you lack is follow-ups, a board and a team that can see the right rows, the sheet is the better home for it.

Reports computed from the sheet on demand — funnel, stuck leads, wins by month, who is handling what — and a Dashboard tab written into the workbook itself as native formulas. Follow-ups grouped by overdue, today and later, with email delivery inside working hours. Roles that give team members their own rows and managers everything, enforced when the sheet is read. On the larger plan, quotes generated from a Google Docs template into your own Drive. And for the dates that matter most — renewals, deliveries, next visits — reminders that run inside the workbook from your own Google account, so they fire with the app closed.