Another similar feature request is:
Conditionally-colored cells and manually-colored cells: All spreadsheet apps have always had this functionality, but it’s not available in Airtable. We need the ability to color our cells, both manually and conditionally.
Does everyone love how we have to submit our Airtable feature requests to SmartSuite, because they’re the only ones who are listening to customer feedback? 
After watching the video, my understanding is there is now more access to create relationships than before, except I don’t see the feature yet in my trial instance of SmartSuite.
On the other hand, about the task portrayed in the video, a more disciplined workflow controlled by UI would only let a user start from the Account, including the ability to see and choose the account’s contacts, then create the so-called Opportunity. The process is the same when creating an invoice and so much more.
From the video script…
“Well, why are we making the sales rep do the extra work of finding all those contacts when we know that we really want the contacts who work at Bloom Joy?”
…exactly. I believe the process was faulty from the start.
Correction: In fact, I do have the feature but was working a bit faster than system response at the time.
Thank you all for all this valuable information. 1000s of hours invested in Airtable yet I am truly open to moving away. My trust in the company has been shattered over the last few months.
I started a free account to take a look around. What I am missing the most, and this is a real must have for us, is a true, built in front end interface. This was the main attraction for Airtable and why we went there from Salesforce. We need our users not to come in contact with tables (the backend). And yes, I know there are other 3rd party solutions but I am looking for a native solution. Dashboards seem like a good way to create a single interface but there is no way to organise them as a solitary front end experience.
I feel the same way that I am truly open to moving away from Airtable.
My loyalty is based on: (a) the best products + (b) the products that treat me & my clients the best.
I think that Airtable is doing a fantastic job at ruining people’s trust in it. I also think that SmartSuite still has further to go to catch up to Airtable’s core features. When it does, it could be a tipping point for many people.
Anyone know what the database engines that Airtable and / or SmartSuite use?
That would be a native front end for us. Within minutes I have already discovered many things I really like and miss at Airtable (or at least now I do).
We also would need integrators like Whalesync and Wized to adapt SmartSuite as they bind us to Airtable for the moment.
I’m a huge fan of SmartSuite, nearly entirely won over and have generally switched my thinking for client projects now from airtable first to smartsuite first.
But. The one thing that is holding me back with SS is concerns about performance and reliability - as some have mentioned above. Say what you like about Airtable but it is solid, robust, battle-tested and reliable. I don’t have any fears building in AT, its more whether the features support what you need
With SS I have this niggling concern that something might go wrong with the performance or reliability. If I’m recommending to a client they shift their entire company operations over to a new platform - their new “Work OS”, to use smartsuite’s phrase - it has to be absolutely bullet proof. I’ve found bits of weirdness playing around with it occasionally like
I really hope SS are investing seriously in performance, reliability and testing (as someone said above - instead of just building more features) so that these concerns can fade away, the platform has so much potential!
Tom, thank you for the kind words about the platform. We have invested thousands of hours of time into bringing innovative and effective features to support the workflows you are building out for your clients.
That being said, my primary focus as CTO has been - and remains - ensuring the scalability and reliability of those workflows into the future. We have recently made significant investments in our AWS infrastructure, have engaged with an AWS Premier tier DevOps partner to further extend our monitoring and optimization capabilities, and have tooled the platform so that every aspect of its operation is monitored, alerted on and able to provide us with real-time visibility into all of its workloads.
The next stage in this development is preparing our infrastructure for geographically-dispersed deployments to best accommodate our customers’ needs for global responsiveness and privacy compliance. AWS themselves have contributed funds for this effort as we continue to build out our global infrastructure and proceed with our expansion plans.
It is my commitment to the SmartSuite community to regularly update on our efforts and transparently describe our plans to become even more robust in our offerings and commitment to operational stability, reliability and resilience. SmartSuite as an organization is committed to the goal of delivering the “bullet proof” platform you describe.
Hi Peter, and welcome to Table Forums!
I’m trying to recall a single case where Howie Liu posted on the Airtable Community since 2018, when I joined and began using Airtable. Not only is your comment timely, but it is also a good read and demonstrates a degree of transparency and vision that got you guys started on this path.
I haven’t done much with SmartSuite, primarily because of timing and long-running projects that cannot turn on a dime. However, I’ve already found some very powerful aspects of your platform that I intend to leverage for my own companies and clients.
Thanks for weighing in!
Hey @tobias we are exploring the idea of interfaces but for now we are taking the approach of dashboards internally and product like EasyPortal, WeWeb, Noloco, etc. for external use.
Would you mind sharing your use case for interfaces?
Interesting! We currently have the ability to color based on conditions but the manual option is def a nice twist.
Thanks for this info, @Avi! You have the ability to color individual cells based on conditions, not just the entire row which is what Airtable restricts us to?
Yah, one of the machines I use to create shipping labels on Airtable is 2008 machine with barely any memory and intel Celeron and Airtable is pretty snappy on that too. So that would be my benchmark what would I expect from a spreadsheet application, if not the same what running Excel would offer. That’s also what makes Airtable so sticky with customers.
And yet another question for you, @Avi! 
Does SmartSuite offer automatic backlinks to linked records within the same table?
Airtable automatically creates backlinks to records that are linked across multiple tables, but it doesn’t create backlinks of records that are linked within the same table.
I find it incredibly reassuring and confidence building that you are personally posting here to this community. Granted, it isn’t your community (yet) which makes it even more fun, right? That’s one of the main things I am missing at AT. Any signal from the core management to the community that they are listening, that they care, I guess that they even still work at the company.
Well, I am the only one in the company working directly in the bases, with the (raw) data, setting up automations, etc. All the progamming and administrative work is done by myself. We have found that working in tables takes an extra degree of care, as data is otherwise altered quickly and sometimes without noticing.
All our users only work with (select) data in interfaces that we have tailored to be as clear and functional as possible. We have about 20 interfaces with about 10-20 pages per interface.
What we are trying to achieve for our users is a ONE APP experience for the company. Ideally the user would log in, go to a landing page with a personalized dhashboard, options for departments, apps, etc. and work from there. Obviously this isn’t possible with AT yet either. But once you access the interfaces of one base you have that sort of experience. Based on your permissions, you can jump around between the different pages that have been created for that base.
All of this is possible with FileMaker, which is one of the world’s most advanced database systems, although they have been on a downward trajectory for years as people have shifted away from high-end databases to low-end databases.
I used to be a FileMaker developer for 30 years, and I still have connections in that world if anybody needs a referral to a certified FileMaker developer.
I have used Filemaker numerous times over that past 25 years. But never for long. It somehow never stuck. There was ultimately always another tool to achieve the same more easily and also more cost effective. I have looked at their offers here and now but things like:
2 GB of FileMaker Data Storage per user/year. No upgrades available.
I just don’t understand. 2GB is used in a a heartbeat, depending on your business.
The speed at which I am able to build and scale in Airtable is simply breathtaking.
It’s actually more nuanced than that:
Scaling is not something that is a strength of Airtable, and its limits are way more draconian than FileMaker’s limits.
I’m not saying that you should switch to FileMaker, I’m just saying that Airtable has significantly worse limits by orders of magnitude. If you host yourself, FileMaker has no limits at all — it is only limited by hard drive space.
Airtable only allows 50,000 records per base on the Pro plan. You could have hundreds of millions of records (or more) in a FileMaker database, with no speed degradation either, so FileMaker was actually designed for enterprise businesses.
It is at the scale we are at 