Airtable + Bubble...why?

Need help APIs
1

I’ve heard some successful nocoders say that they use Bubble in conjunction with Airtable. What are some examples of why you would need/want to do that?

Thanks!

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We use Airtable + Bubble for a few reasons, mainly:

  1. Advanced spreadsheet capabilities of Airtable beat anything you can do with Bubble. This is why we often use Airtable to push data to. This makes data analysis super useful. Here is a link with a tutorial on how to do that.
  2. No UI required. Often times a client has to work on the database from an admin point of view. This requires us to build the client an admin panel. Making changes to such admin panels are not crazy hard but nowhere near as easy as with Airtable. An example of this is a custom questionnaire we built for a client. The client can manage all the questionnaires (creating new ones, managing existing, linking to blog posts, results etc) all from Airtable and doesn’t even need access to Bubble. Or a client that uses Airtable as a product library that we then fetch into Bubble.
  3. Fuzzy search. The Airtable API (not the plugin that Bubble provides) has a great search endpoint that you can use for fuzzy search and its pretty performant too.

Are there any downsides? Yes! A couple are: you cannot use related things, the Airtable plugin won’t recognize them. And as your Airtable base becomes more complex and you start creating multiple tables and linking to data from one to another, you always have to use an additional field that outputs a linked field into formula text field as again, Bubble cannot read those linked fields.

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3

@vincent56 is there any noticeable overhead in terms of retrieval time fetching data from airtable vs Bubble’s database?

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4

Isn’t airtables api capped at 5 calls per second?

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Yes its noticeable but it depends on what data you are fetching. If your Bubble data is poorly structured, it can take very long to load data from your DB and the same can be said for Airtable.

You are indeed limited to a rate limit of 5 requests per second, so you need to take that into account for what purpose you’re building.

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It can be really useful for some categories of data as @vincent56 as really nicely outlined.

As an example, we store 10,000+ listings on Bubble’s database (because we need to do Geo search and a number of other things).

But the data relating to the suppliers who have those listings is on Airtable. Easier to Zap on there from Typeform etc and administer.

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7

I also use AirTable a lot. Some set of data are exported, so admins can explore the data easily. The “group by” feature is great, filters are more powerful than Bubble constraints thanks to “any of”.
However the AirTable plugin is a bit painful to use. Each time you initiate your table schema, you must start over and link again again the different tables together.

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8

thanks everyone. this is all extremely helpful.

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9

Hi Vincent,
What you are talking about is very interesting, could you detail this solution?

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10

which solution exactly ?:slight_smile:

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@vincent56 about your post when you say “use extra field that returns linked field in formula text field like again”, how do you do this?

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12

Hi guys ! Interesting conversation, let’s keep this one flowing

13

Hello Vincent

We are planning to use airtable for data analytics. Is there a way through which we can keep bubble and airtable data in sync in real time or through a scheduler.
Do we need to call modify API everytime a data is modified in Bubble?