One of the great features of Airtable is that it is very easy to share data and schema. This makes collaboration easy. However, sometimes you do not want to share everything.
There are various third party portal methods of controlling access to your data. This post is about Airtable-only techniques:
Here are some of the concepts to keep in mind when providing only limited access to data:
- does the access need to be read-only, or do users need edit access
- do users need to be logged into Airtable, or do uses need anonymous access
- are you trying to protect data (cell values), schema (field types, formulas, etc.), or both
- usually when a user is a collaborator on a base (even read-only) the user can duplicate the base to gain access to all the data and the complete schema.
Shared View Link Access
- read only access to a single view
- can limit ability to easily copy data (depending on plan level)
- does not reveal schema
- allows anonymous access, domain-restricted access, or password access
- workarounds for providing edit access
Shared Base Link Access
- similar to shared view links, but for all table and views in the base
- can also provide read-only access to extensions in dashboards
Interface-Only Access
- provides read-only or edit access
- users must be logged into Airtable
- record data can be filtered to show only user-specific records
- difficult to copy data in bulk
- provides access to only fields displayed in interface
- does not reveal schema
- only available at Pro and higher plans
Collaborator access to a base with a synced table
- provides read-only access to data in the synced table
- hides original formulas of synced fields
- hide other data and schema in the source base
- workarounds for making updates in the source base
- collaborators have full access to the data and schema of the base with the synced table
Base level access without the ability to duplicate a base
If you have an enterprise license, you can prevent collaborators at the editor level and below from duplicating your base. Base collaborators will still have access to all your data, but they will not be able to get your formulas, and exporting data will have to be done table-by-table. They will still be able to infer some schema from simply looking at the data, such as how table are linked, field types, automations, etc. This support article has more details on how the following two restrictions combine with user permissions restrict the ability to duplicate a base.
