Ha, perfect! Yeah, I was just comparing the 2 products. 90% of my clients are totally fine with Airtable’s limits, because they don’t need to exceed them.
That is correct! When spotlighting based on a condition in SmartSuite you get to choose if you want to put color on the record or on the field! See the image below.
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- When manually linking a record you can search by any key word that’s selected in the fields to display. Automatic linking still requires using the key field. (See image 1 for example)
- Yes, our advanced field settings let you choose what fields display and their order. This is unique to just that Linked Record field, and can be customized on the mirrored side as well. (Image 2)
- There’s currently no filter/sort that can be applied after linking. They are sorted showing the oldest at the top and newest at the bottom.
- Yes, when pressing the back arrow or cancel button you’ll be prompted on if you’d like to save or discard any of the changes made.
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Currently we do but we are looking into modifications in this area. Can you share a bit more about your use case and why it’s important to you?
Thank you for this detailed reply Peter, and for engaging on this forum - I’ve always found the SS team very keen to engage which is another universe compared to Airtable!
It’s great to hear that lots is happening on the reliability and performance front. I should say that the three issues of weirdness I had were all in the same session so perhaps just SS having a bad day (or couple of hours). And the bug re. copy+pasting linked fields seems to have been fixed now
I look forward to forgetting all about these niggly concerns as hopefully having just been teething problems and getting on and using the platform
It would be good to hear from other people here if any others have found any performance problems or conversely whether they’ve used the platform in anger and had no issues at all (which they’re probably less likely to report)
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Performance is my biggest issue, I am waiting for detailed response about performance
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Hi @Avi,
The most common use case that I see for this is a single table that lists all the employees in a specific company.
Each employee reports to a specific manager, so each employee would be linked to a specific manager.
But in Airtable, it doesn’t do the reverse linking of that. So each manager is not linked to all of the employees that report to them.
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Got it! Well maybe you should give it a try in SmartSuite and let me know how you find it (;
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I love analytics. Here’s one -
Just 14 employees are responsible for SmartSuite’s success. In contrast, Airtable is more than 70 times larger after its recent layoffs.
Small. Nimble. Debt-free. Customer-focused. Insulated from external influences. Zero layers of management between you and the product architects and engineers. Will they sustain this dynamic?
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You are comparing watermelon with an apple, when you look on a platform the first thing to watch is performance
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You can’t gauge performance without a lot of predicates.
Both platforms are tangelos until you set a context.
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Watermelon is an apt image for Airtable
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The first thing I try to watch for from now on is people. Performance won’t fool me again like it did with airtable. What good are tech specs if the human performance is complete chaos.
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And even if you were skeptical of the specs and the team, Airtable has not been a bright shiny example of performance or scale. I think 25% of @ScottWorld 's massive list of functional shortfalls is related to performance or scale. The scale of these tools comes in two flavors - horizontal adoption in the enterprise (i.e., access control, synching, etc) and data throughput (i.e., max rows, automation runs, script timeouts, etc).
It doesn’t matter if they are perceived as watermelons or apples - both products have shortfalls given specific contexts (e.g., you must use predicates for any declaration of success). Sometimes the shortfall is the implementer who knew (or should have known) the technology was ill-prepared to perform. These are constraints, not necessarily failures.
So many rescue cases I’ve worked on got to crisis levels because the implementers - both internal builders and external consultants - failed to consider the question of fitness of purpose. Who should be blamed for this? The platform? Or the implementers?
The implementers sleep well at night by pointing to the specifications to unfairly place blame on the platform. This doesn’t carry any weight with me. Fixed automations is a ceiling you need to factor over time, not just day one. Blaming failure on platform specs doesn’t put finer points on the nature of performance, which is predicated on many things including, but not limited to:
- The client-side memory and compute stack.
- The performance impact of API calls used for polling.
- The lack of investment in event-based architectures.
- The flagrant use of fields as intermediate value-holders and computations.
- The lack of script profiling and optimized use of the SDKs.
- The data model itself.
- The big one - a failure to craft the solution with a deep appreciation for operational vs. strategic data management.
We’re WAY off-topic in this thread now, and I wish it were as simple as establishing these products as two types of fruits. Our comparisons of these platforms are often as poorly crafted as our pre-assessment of performance or inability to gauge fitness for specific solutions. 
My recent observation is about the nature of the two companies - one with vast resources ($1.2b and 1,000+ people) vs. one with minimal resources and a development team you can count using fingers on one hand.
SmartSuite is certainly not solving “all” of the pain points that Airtable has failed to solve. However, it’s my experience that the smaller, tighter team is more likely to do so.
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And now integrated AI - smart progress in SmartDoc. What’s not to love about this?
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SmartSuite being a relatively small company, means higher risk for your solution deployed on their platform if you spent 1000’s of hours to develop it. While the lean character has advantages for now, when customer base grows, so do the over-head costs. In software business there are 2 possible outcomes: a) you either grow or b) you decline. There is no 3rd way because stagnation is a decline. Competition is ripe with a low barrier of entry, you don’t need to look far for examples like Stackby eager to copy Airtable without shame. Airtable also used to be a small a nimble company. If you haven’t been around that long you may not know but it grew its headcount 8x from the end of 2019 to 2022, and was able to quickly grow from $10 million to $100 million ARR. I would give Airtable 12 months to sort out the chaos before looking seriously elsewhere. Before looking at something else, I would ask also what other innovations the other solution brings. SmartSuite is good at resolving the issues Airtable has/had, but what further innovations is SmartSuite brining other than just creating a better version of Airtable.
That’s true. There are risks with every path. Use caution. Invest with eyes wide open. Use lots of predicates when crafting requirements. Above all, communicate the risks to your clients.
I’m bringing this question around again, mainly because I’m wondering if the root database engines are playing so much a part of the reason that Airtable and others such as Monday take so long as they do to bring features and fixes to market.
I know next to nothing about such engines other than there is basically SQL and NoSQL, generally. I know FileMaker, while still using its legacy engine called DRACO, has been working on what they call “new stuff” using MongoDB. Their development seems to be going rather slow, IMO, but I could be very wrong.
In the meantime I’ve enjoyed SmartSuite the last two weeks but certain things throw me a little; sub-items and multiple items or records in what appears to be a single field. Curiously, SmartSuite HQ is within a short walk from me and also very near the previous HQs of some legacy software companies that invented and worked with DB technology decades ago which used “multi-value,” a type of NoSQL nowadays.
I’m wondering, is it currently a case of; “What was old is now new again?”
Good morning @Avi
I’ve finally decided to invest time in reviewing SmartSuite’s features - and my initial experience has been very positive!
May I ask, regarding item 5;
Dynamic choices in linked record fields is live in SmartSuite!
Will the filtering be expanded with Single and Multi-select fields? Reason I ask, is that there are many cases where this dynamic filtering is required, but the use of a Single / Multi-Select field is preferred over a Linked App - usually due to scoping. Experimenting with Dynamic choices this morning, they worked exactly how I’d hoped within a Linked Field context, but then it dawned on me how they’re also needing that same ability but with Single / Multi Select fields - and importantly, the ability to use Linked/Select fields interchangeably within that advanced filter, in that, I may need to check a Single Select field against a Multiselect field (or a Linked Record field).
On the upside - the workaround is to convert all Single / Multi Select fields into their own App tables - but by doing this, I think you start to see how by being able to dynamically reference Single / Multi Select fields directly would be an advantage.
As a side note, I love the feature request board!!! I’ve posted my suggestion here, as I searched but couldn’t find this feature already requested.
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I like to check if the solution has bit more weight before I put the eggs in it. For example I am looking for tell-tell signs of how broad is the solution accepted on 3rd party platforms and in 3rd party support forums for example here… https://hightouch.com/
There is no mention of SmartSuite there yet.