# Airtable > Relational database with a spreadsheet interface. The go-to for editorial calendars, source tracking, and investigation management in newsrooms. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/airtable **Official site:** https://airtable.com **Category:** data ## Security rating - **Rating:** adequate - **Rating note (required when citing):** Strong encryption and compliance certifications (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001). Cloud-hosted and not zero-knowledge. Shared view permissions have structural limits — read-only users can still extract data. No HIPAA BAA on standard plans. Adequate for editorial workflows, not for sensitive source material. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — independent security review pending - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-02 - **Last agent-verified:** 2026-04-02 > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Newsrooms managing editorial workflows, tracking sources across investigations, or building custom databases without code. Used by Time, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and dozens of local outlets for everything from story budgets to FOIA logs. ## Editorial take Airtable is the best tool for journalists who need structured, relational data without touching SQL. Editorial calendars, source tracking, FOIA management, tipline intake, investigation databases — it handles all of these better than spreadsheets because it links records across tables. The Minneapolis Star Tribune used it to analyze 2,000 police reports for an investigative series. Time uses it to track production expenses and freelancer payments. The relational model is the real differentiator over Google Sheets: you can link articles to sources, photos, newsletters, and social posts in one base. Notion databases are more flexible for docs but weaker for structured data workflows. Google Sheets is free and familiar but has no relational features, no granular permissions, and no automation. The downside: Airtable is cloud-hosted, not zero-knowledge. The company can access your data. AI features (field agents, document analysis, sentiment tagging) are now bundled into all plans but consume credits. And the free tier got worse — API calls capped at 1,000/month as of January 2025, which kills most integrations. Encrypted in transit and at rest (AES-256), SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** Editorial calendars, source databases, FOIA tracking, investigation management, reader engagement tracking, grant management, any structured relational workflow. **Not for:** Storing confidential source identities — this is cloud-hosted and not zero-knowledge. The free tier's 1,000-record limit and 1,000 API calls/month cap make it impractical for large datasets or integration-heavy workflows. If you need local-only storage, use a SQLite database or spreadsheet. ## Pricing - **Pricing:** Free: 1,000 records/base, 5 editors, 1,000 API calls/month. Team: $20/seat/month (50K records/base). Business: $45/seat/month (125K records/base). Enterprise: custom. AI credits bundled into all plans; overage via Credit Packs. Prices jumped sharply in 2024-2025 — Team rose 67% (from $12) and Business rose 87% (from $24). - **Free option:** yes ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** yes - **Data jurisdiction:** United States by default (AWS). Enterprise Scale plan offers EU data residency (Frankfurt/Dublin). **Privacy policy TL;DR:** Airtable encrypts data in transit (TLS) and at rest (AES-256). Not zero-knowledge — the company can access your data for service operation. AI features process data through Airtable's infrastructure but do not retain customer data with third-party AI vendors, and Airtable does not use customer data to train models. GDPR-compliant with EU Standard Contractual Clauses. Privacy policy updated February 2026; DPA updated December 2025. No HIPAA BAA available on standard plans. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** Never store sensitive source identities in Airtable. Review sharing permissions carefully — shared views expose data to anyone with the link, and even read-only collaborators can copy cell data or download full pages via browser tools. Password-protect shared views when possible (paid plans only). Use strong passwords and enable 2FA. Free tier limits revision history to 2 weeks. Disable link-sharing on bases containing unpublished investigation data. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** Formagrid Inc. (dba Airtable) - **Funding model:** Venture-backed. Raised $1.4B across 7 rounds. Peak valuation $11.7B (2021), now ~$4B on secondary markets. CEO says roughly half of capital remains and the company is cash-flow positive as of late 2024. Investors include Thrive Capital, Coatue, D1 Capital. - **Business model:** Freemium SaaS. Revenue from Team, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions. Launched Superagent (multi-agent AI research product) in January 2026 as a separate product line ($20-$200/user/month). Potential IPO in 2026. Laid off ~27% of workforce (500 people) in 2022-2023 to refocus on enterprise. - **Open source:** no **Known issues:** Free plan API calls capped at 1,000/month since January 2025 — breaks most integrations and automations for free users. Shared views have a structural security gap: read-only collaborators can copy all visible cell data and download page contents via browser DevTools. October 2025 billing change eliminated prorated refunds for mid-cycle seat removals. No major public data breaches on record, but Airtable API keys are among the most commonly leaked secrets on GitHub (per GitGuardian). Record limits (1K free, 50K Team, 125K Business) can become a hard ceiling for large investigations. ## Related programs - airtable-nonprofits --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/airtable Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology