We are an active Airtable and Stacker user, and have reached a block with the delay in Airtable to Stacker sync. Thus, our reason to explore Glidetables as an alternative to Airtable, and then use Glide App and Pages for the interface. Some questions:
Is GT really an alterantive to AT? We use AT automations quite a bit to send our email notifications and other functions, and do not prefer to use another 3rd party toodl like Zapier or Make for this.
In Stacker, we are able to have Roles and them can set read/edite/create persmission for each field/column to each Role. Does Glide provide such granular control?
We use our apps mainly as internal company tools for business processes, so view filters and details permissions are very much needed.
Glide Tables are just another data source to hold data. They hold data, just like Airtable does. I wouldn’t consider it a direct replacement though, as airtable has a lot of their own features.
I’m not familiar with Stacker, but based on the way you explain it, I would say that Glide Apps/Pages are very similar. Yes, you can set granular control like you want.
In terms of hosting data in tables, I would say Glide Tables and Airtable are very similar.
In terms of the ability to perform automation on the data, without a third party like Zapier or Make, I would say Airtable is more advanced than Glide Tables. The actions available in Glide are more limited and can only be trigger by a user, time-based actions are not possible.
To think of it, I wonder if a strong automation part, like Glide Actions or Glide Automations, might be the missing pillar.
I don’t know how others see it, but I think most simple nocode products sit on a three-legged stool: front-end for display, backend for data/tables, automations/actions so the app performs operations.
Glide is strong with its front-end (builder) and backend (tables), but still relies heavily on third-party tools for automation. My feeling is the 1 billion developers don’t want to and cannot use third-party automation tools.
@nathanaelb I’m fully with you with the 3 pillars. AT has the backend and autoamtion ahead of others and we would like to use it as our base.
The sync delay really does create an issue as we have lots of apps which are linked. Some have records entered to be used right away in another app, as inter-company apps like Sales, Marketing, HR, Masters are interlinked.
Wow I’ve been thinking about this all week also. I shudder every time I think about how to use Google sheets to automate stuff And other tools charge their own fees on top of what glide charges which just increases costs.
Hi @David_Gabler, as you’re an Ambassador : ) any comments or suggestion on my mention of:
The sync delay really does create an issue as we have lots of apps which are linked. Some have records entered to be used right away in another app, as inter-company apps like Sales, Marketing, HR, Masters are interlinked.
Kind of stuck at the moment…
Any suggestion would help lots in assisting our decision if Glide might be the way to go for us. Thanks.
Hi @Khuned_Sachdev, I am not sure what I can add that would not be better explained by or looked into by either a Glide Certified Expert (of which I am not) or Glide Support.
My thoughts would only be based on my general knowledge of programming principles. For example, I’ve never seen an application, whether linked or not, that had dependencies on new records. They’d not even know of their existence.
The only place I can see an update delay being an issue is on a step in the process flow (for example, an API that needs the RowID and cannot get it until the update is complete), but those sorts of situations are typically handled best in the forum by posting specific examples of where it is causing an issue, rather than speculation based off a generalized description of your system.
Here’s something from weeks ago where we talked about the technical limitation of the Airtable API and where we seem to be at now with Airtable syncing.