Every price here was fetched from the vendor’s own live pricing page on 6 September 2026. Where a page would not render a number, we say so.
Three things have changed since most comparison articles were written, and one of them is large: Coda no longer exists. It became Superhuman Docs on 8 July 2026. Also, NocoDB is not open source despite being widely described as such, and Airtable stopped charging per seat for AI in mid-2025.
The prices
| Product | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Airtable | $0 | Team $20/user/mo, Business $45/user/mo — both billed annually. Monthly rates did not render |
| Notion | $0 | Plus $10/member/mo, Business $20/member/mo. Page shows one headline plus “save up to 20% with yearly” |
| Coda | — | Discontinued as Coda. See below |
| Baserow | 3,000 rows, 2GB | Premium $10/user/mo yearly ($12 monthly), 50,000 rows; Advanced $18 ($22), 250,000 rows |
| NocoDB | 1,000 records, 1GB, 3 editors | Plus $12/user/mo annual ($15); Business $24 ($30); Scale $45 ($54), 3-seat minimum |
| Grist | 5,000 records/doc | Pro $8/user/mo annual ($10); Business $24 ($30), 5-user minimum |
| SeaTable | 25 users, 10,000 rows | Plus €7/user/mo annual (€9); Enterprise €14 (€18). Note: priced in euros |
| Smartsheet | — | Could not verify any price — see below |
On Smartsheet: we fetched their pricing page three times and got mutually contradictory figures — $129, $249 and $2,419 per member per month, with stray Australian and euro values mixed in. The page is JavaScript-rendered with a currency selector that does not resolve. We are not publishing a Smartsheet price. What is consistent across all fetches is the structure: Pro is capped at 1–10 members, Business requires 3, Enterprise requires 10+, and all plans include unlimited free Contributors.
Coda is now Superhuman Docs
If you were considering Coda, the situation changed. coda.io/pricing now redirects to superhuman.com. On 8 July 2026 Coda became Superhuman Docs at docs.superhuman.com, and coda.io links auto-redirect.
What that means practically, from Superhuman’s own help centre:
- Existing customers keep their current pricing indefinitely. Migration to the Superhuman bundle is optional. Coda Pro maps to Superhuman Pro, Coda Team to Superhuman Business.
- New customers can only get Docs as part of the Superhuman bundle — so you are evaluating a bundled AI email and docs suite, not a standalone product.
- API endpoints continue to work unchanged. But DLP allowlists, embeds and the Slack integration need updating to the new domain.
- We could not verify Superhuman Docs list pricing. Both pricing pages return only metadata, and docs.superhuman.com/pricing is disallowed by robots.txt.
For a new build in 2026, treat Coda as a legacy option. For context, the same company — Superhuman, the renamed Grammarly parent — also acquired the AI spreadsheet startup Rows in February 2026.
The limits that actually bite
This is the section worth reading twice, because these numbers decide when you have to migrate — and migrating is far more expensive than the subscription.
Airtable
| Limit | Free | Team | Business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Records per base | 1,000 | 50,000 | 125,000 |
| Attachment storage per base | 1GB | 20GB | 100GB |
| API calls per workspace per month | 1,000 | 100,000 | Unlimited |
| Automation runs per month | 100 | 25,000 | 100,000 |
| Revision history | 2 weeks | 1 year | 1 year |
| Editor seats | 5 (plus 50 commenters) | Per seat | Per seat |
Two of these deserve emphasis. Records are counted per base, not per table — a base with five tables shares one pool of 125,000. And on the free plan, 1,000 API calls per month is something one badly-written script exhausts in an afternoon.
Other hard numbers: 50 automations per base, 25 actions each. The “Run a script” action is not available on Free, and on Free the “Send email” action can only email base collaborators. The REST API allows 5 requests per second per base and 50 per second across all traffic from a given token, returning a 429 with a 30-second cooldown.
Notion
Does the block limit still exist in 2026? Yes, but narrowly. Notion’s help centre states that block restrictions apply to “workspaces that are on the Free Plan and have more than one workspace owner” — those are capped at 1,000 blocks. A free workspace with a single owner has unlimited blocks. All paid plans are unlimited.
One trap in that: “deleting blocks, or emptying the trash, will not reduce your block count.” The count is cumulative and unrecoverable.
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Maximum rows per database | 250,000 |
| Maximum properties per database | 500 |
| Per-page data cap | 2.5 MB across all properties |
| File upload, Free | 5 MB per file |
| File upload, paid | 50 MB per file (20 MB per PDF) |
| Guests, Free | 10 |
| Version history, Free | 7 days |
| API rate limit | ~3 requests per second per integration |
| API payload cap | 1,000 block elements, 500 KB per request |
| Relations per API request | 100 related pages |
The real ceiling is performance, not the 250,000 cap. Notion’s own optimisation page is unusually candid about it: load time degrades with page count, the number of visible properties, and “complex sorts and filters” on formula or rollup properties — “the more complex they are, the slower your database may be.”
In practice a Notion database is comfortable up to a few thousand items, noticeably sluggish in the 10,000 to 20,000 range once formulas and rollups are involved, and an endurance test at 50,000-plus. We should be clear that no vendor publishes a latency benchmark at any row count, so treat that as informed judgement rather than a measured figure.
The architectural difference, and why it predicts everything
Airtable is a relational database with a spreadsheet interface. Notion is a document store with database views. Almost every behavioural difference below follows from that one sentence.
| Airtable | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Relations | A genuine foreign key. Link a record and the reverse link is maintained automatically | A pointer between pages. A row is a full document, so a relation drags a document behind it |
| Rollups | Aggregate over the linked set, including conditional rollups and multi-hop chains | Aggregation exists but is shallower; each rollup layer costs measurable performance |
| Formulas | Typed, spreadsheet-shaped, with a real scripting escape hatch | Rewritten and arguably more expressive per line, but no in-product scripting. The only exit is the API |
| Integrity | Enforced structurally | A row can be moved, nested elsewhere or converted — the reference survives but the meaning drifts |
| Views | Grid, kanban, calendar, timeline, form, plus Interfaces, a real app-builder layer | Wins decisively on placing a live view inside a document |
| Permissions | Field-level and record-level on Business and above | Cascades down the page tree. No field-level concept — see the row, see every property |
That permissions row is the one that ends arguments. In Notion, if someone can see a record they can see every column on it. For HR, finance, or anything client-facing, that is often disqualifying on its own.
Automations, and the hidden line item
Airtable’s automations are the stronger product by a clear margin. Fifty per base, 25 actions each, and up to 100,000 runs a month on Business. The decisive feature is the “Run a script” action — arbitrary JavaScript with access to the base and to fetch. Combined with webhook triggers, it covers most integration needs without any third-party middleware.
Notion’s automations are button- and trigger-driven and have improved considerably, but there is no in-product scripting action. The ceiling is lower and the escape hatch is external. And that external route has a real constraint: paginating a 50,000-row Notion database over a 3-requests-per-second API limit is an engineering problem, not a footnote.
The practical consequence is a cost nobody puts in the comparison table. Any Notion workflow with branching logic, external API calls or data transformation ends up in Make, Zapier or n8n. Budget for that subscription. Airtable teams frequently avoid middleware entirely until they need to talk to a system Airtable has no connector for.
AI: one of them lets you forecast the bill
Airtable changed its model, and in the customer’s favour. From its own billing documentation: “As of June 24, 2025, customers on Team or Business plans will no longer be charged for AI on a per-seat basis.” AI is now credit-based and included:
| Plan | Credits included |
|---|---|
| Free | 500 per Editor-or-above user |
| Team | 15,000 per billable collaborator |
| Business | 20,000 per paid user |
| Enterprise Scale | 25,000 per paid user |
Notion is a different situation. AI is Business and Enterprise only — Free and Plus get “a limited number of complimentary AI responses” as a trial. Business and Enterprise “include a usage allowance” on “a rolling, six-hour or monthly usage allowance.”
Notion does not publish what that allowance is. We looked; the AI FAQ explicitly declines to give numbers. Beyond it you buy Notion Credits, and Notion states it “charges tokens at each provider’s published rates, with no markup.” The only hard published figure is on the pricing page: Custom Agents are free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly credits.
That asymmetry is the story. On Airtable you can forecast the AI bill from a published table. On Notion Business you cannot, and the overage is consumption-priced.
The open-source options, and one that is not
We checked the licence text in each repository rather than the marketing page, because this is exactly where people get caught.
- Baserow — MIT core, verified. The repository states “This project is licensed under the MIT License.” The premium plugin operates under a separate proprietary licence, and Premium, Advanced and Enterprise are per-seat paid licences you activate on your own instance. No 2026 licence change found. Be precise if you cite this: the core is MIT; row-level comments, advanced permissions, SSO and audit logging are not.
- NocoDB — NOT open source. The repository states: “This project is licensed under Sustainable Use License.” NocoDB’s own pricing page describes the self-hosted Community tier as “fair-code” — the same term n8n uses. The licence permits internal business use and modification but prohibits offering the software as a commercial service to third parties. If an article calls NocoDB open source, it is wrong.
- Grist — Apache 2.0, the cleanest of the three. The repository confirms grist-core, grist-desktop and grist-static are all Apache 2.0. One nuance worth knowing: the default Docker image bundles source-available proprietary Enterprise code that is “completely inert and inactive” until enabled. For a strictly free-software deployment, use the
grist-ossimage.
What self-hosting actually costs
All three run comfortably on a single small VPS for a team under about twenty people: a 4GB, 2-vCPU instance at roughly $20 to $25 a month, plus object storage for attachments and a managed Postgres if you would rather not run your own, at $15 to $50. Call it $40 to $80 a month all in, before your own time.
Against Airtable Business at $45 per user per month, a ten-person team breaks even against self-hosting almost immediately on paper. What the paper ignores: backups you actually test, upgrades, TLS, SSO (a paid tier in all three), uptime while you are on holiday, and the absence of anyone to call. Budget two to four hours a month of competent operations time, and be honest that this is the real price.
You also give up Airtable Interfaces, which has no true equivalent; the integration ecosystem; mobile polish; and Airtable’s sync-from-external-source connectors. Grist gives you something back that neither commercial option offers: real Python formulas.
Getting your data back out
Airtable gives you CSV per view, and the REST API can extract everything including schema. But CSV gives you values, not structure: linked records export as their primary-field text, so relations become strings you have to re-join. Attachments export as expiring URLs, not files — you must fetch them before they expire. Formulas, rollups, automations, Interfaces, views, permissions and validation rules do not export at all.
Notion exports to Markdown and CSV, HTML, or PDF. Note that bulk export with nested content is effectively a paid feature: “If you’re on a Business Plan or Enterprise Plan, you can switch on the Include subpages option.” Known breakage: form-view databases cannot be exported at all, and callout blocks convert to raw HTML because there is no Markdown equivalent. Workspace exports “can take up to 30 hours to process.”
The honest verdict: neither product lets you export a working system. Both let you export the contents of one. Notion’s prose comes out fine as Markdown; its structure does not. Airtable’s data comes out adequately via the API; its application layer is the real switching cost.
Grist is the standout here — its native format is a SQLite file you can download and open, which is as close to zero lock-in as this category gets.
Which one, for what
| Use case | Answer | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Personal knowledge base | Notion | Free, unlimited blocks for a solo owner, prose-first. Nobody writes in Airtable |
| Team wiki with light tracking | Notion | Business at $20/member bundles wiki, docs, meeting notes and databases in one bill |
| A real CRM or inventory system | Airtable, with an expiry date | Field- and record-level permissions, conditional rollups, unlimited API calls. But watch the 125,000-record wall |
| A client-facing app | Airtable Interfaces | Notion cannot do this — no field-level permissions means you cannot show a client their row without showing every column |
| Content calendar | Either | If drafts live in the tool, Notion. If it coordinates assets and approvals, Airtable — Notion’s 50 MB file cap kills asset-heavy calendars |
| Genuinely transactional data | Postgres | Over ~100k changing rows, concurrent writes, or anything with money or compliance attached |
| Ad-hoc analysis, one person | Google Sheets | Free, better formulas and pivots, everyone knows it |
One signal worth naming: the moment you find yourself building relations across tabs with VLOOKUP in Sheets, that is when to move to Airtable or Grist. Not before.
Questions people ask
Is Notion’s block limit going to bite me?
Only if you are on the Free plan with more than one workspace owner — that workspace is capped at 1,000 blocks permanently, and deleting content does not reclaim the count. A solo-owner free workspace has unlimited blocks, and all paid plans are unlimited.
What actually stops me scaling on Airtable?
Records per base: 1,000, 50,000 and 125,000 on Free, Team and Business. It is per base, not per table. On Free the second wall is 1,000 API calls and 100 automation runs a month, both trivially exhausted.
Is Notion cheaper than Airtable?
At list, yes and substantially — $20 per member against $45 per user for Business, both annual. But compare like for like: Airtable Business includes unlimited API calls, 100,000 automation runs, field- and record-level permissions and two-way sync. Matching that on Notion usually means adding a Make or n8n subscription and living with a 3-request-per-second API. The gap narrows more than the headline suggests.
Do I have to pay extra for AI?
Airtable: no. Since 24 June 2025 AI is credit-based and included on every plan, with published top-ups from $20 per 10,000 credits. Notion: effectively yes — AI is Business and above only, Free and Plus get a trial, and beyond the unpublished included allowance you buy credits at $10 per 1,000 monthly credits for Custom Agents, with premium models billed at provider token rates.
Is Coda still an option?
Not as Coda. It became Superhuman Docs on 8 July 2026. Existing customers keep their pricing and their documents, formulas and automations work unchanged, and the API is unaffected. New customers can only buy it inside the Superhuman bundle. For a new build, treat it as legacy.
Is Baserow or NocoDB safe to build on?
Baserow’s core is MIT, verified in the repository, with premium features under a separate proprietary licence. NocoDB is not open source — it is under the Sustainable Use License, self-described as fair-code. You can self-host and use it internally for free forever; you cannot resell it as a service. If licence purity is the requirement, Grist under Apache 2.0 using the grist-oss image is the cleanest of the three.
What breaks first when I grow?
Notion: performance, well before the 250,000-row cap — rollup- and formula-heavy databases degrade noticeably in the tens of thousands. Airtable: the 125,000-record wall on Business, which is a hard stop rather than a slowdown.
What we could not verify
- Any Smartsheet price. Three fetches, three contradictory answers. Only the seat structure is verified.
- Superhuman Docs list pricing. Both pages render only metadata; the docs subdomain is robots-disallowed.
- Airtable’s monthly-billed rates. Only annual figures rendered.
- The exact Notion annual-versus-monthly split. One headline plus a “save up to 20%” badge.
- Notion’s per-plan AI credit allowances. The FAQ explicitly declines to state them.
- Notion guest limits on Plus and Enterprise — the relevant help pages return 404.
- Airtable Enterprise Scale limits — the plans page says to contact sales.
- Airtable’s export limits documentation — that page returned 404.
- Baserow self-hosted per-seat pricing and SeaTable self-hosted above three users — both contact-sales.
- Any vendor latency benchmark at 10k, 50k or 100k rows. Our performance discussion is informed judgement grounded in Notion’s own qualitative guidance.
- Notion’s per-workspace API rate numbers — documented only as “scaled to the plan.”
The short version
- Airtable is a database; Notion is a document store. Everything else follows from that.
- Notion has no field-level permissions. See the row, see every column. Often disqualifying on its own.
- Airtable Business tops out at 125,000 records per base, shared across every table.
- Notion’s free block limit only applies with more than one workspace owner, and deleting never reclaims the count.
- Airtable publishes its AI credit allowances; Notion does not.
- Coda is now Superhuman Docs. New customers can only buy it bundled.
- NocoDB is fair-code, not open source. Grist under Apache 2.0 is the clean choice.
- Neither lets you export a working system — only its contents.
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