Can somebody explain like I am a five years old. Spent time reading different articles give different recommendations. Integromat/Make offers both.
Personally, I don’t know the difference from a technical standpoint — but they both act essentially the same.
Since Make supports both oAuth and Personal Access Tokens, I would recommend using Personal Access Tokens, since it’s significantly easier to setup in Airtable.
My understanding is that Airtable recommends using OAuth for third party integrations.
Personal Access Tokens (PATs) are easier to use, and Airtable cannot stop you from using them, but Airtable would prefer you to use OAuth when it is available.
Do you know why Airtable prefers you to use OAuth?
I tried to use it when I got the message, “Do not use this for third-party authorizations” upon a Personal Access Key. But I’m not a developer and I didn’t find the documentation on OAuth clear enough for me. (I got stuck on the request to enter a url link and couldn’t find more information.)
One question I have:
I’m doing a lot of Airtable development for my organization. I am trying to have as little tied to my individual account as possible so that if I leave, they don’t have to change everything or keep my account open (and paid for). Is this possible with 3rd-party integrations or is everything tied to a key tied to an individual account? (I thought OAuth solved this but reading another thread on OAuth, it appears it doesn’t?)
[We recently upgraded to Enterprise, if that makes a difference, which I had assumed it would, but I can’t figure that out either.]
Unfortunately, everything is always tied to an individual account.
However, since you are on the Enterprise plan, you can create free service accounts which:
(a) are only used for API access,
(b) won’t cost you any additional money, and
(c) won’t get affected when people leave the organization.
I talk more about these free service accounts in this thread:
The app that you are connecting to would need to provide you with this URL.
For example, for Make.com, the URL is https://www.integromat.com/oauth/cb/airtable3
From what I understand, I believe this means that each oAuth integration can only be used with one external app, whereas a Personal Access Token can be used across multiple apps.
p.s. If you didn’t have an Enterprise account, the best solution for this would probably be to create an additional “Admin” account that doesn’t belong to anybody specific. But yes, there would be an additional fee for this account.
Another solution would be to repurpose your account to the new employee who replaces you, but then that employee would be linked to all of your activity history.
But since you do have an Enterprise account, you have the best option available to you — the free service accounts.
Since you have an enterprise account, I agree that using a free service account is the way to go.
If you didn’t have enterprise, you could use an email alias to create a new account, and when you leave, change the email of the Airtable account to someone else’s alias.
You can use OAuth with multiple services—you just have to authorize each service individually.
Yes, this is what I had done (somewhat late in the process so I was still working on transitioning everything).
I didn’t realize there was a free service account. Or, at least, I think I had seen something referenced but didn’t quite understand it. Thanks so much for this!
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