Data Stores vs Air Tables

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I’m considering whether to use Data Stores or Air Tables (AirTables?) for storing my data between scenarios. Wondering about flexibility, cost, permanence, ease, scalability, import/export, and performance. Can someone share either URLs to comparisons you made/found like this and/or share your ideas, opinions, or experience?

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Perplexity (using Claude 3.5 Sonnet) gave me this:

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Looks like they are neck-and-neck with Airtable being a bit more “Enterprise-ready” and not limited to Make.com use.

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I am going to make your decision even harder, @Scott_Swain! I am using Xano for middle to high duty cases.

From my view:

  • Make Data Stores
    If you want to use the lowest amount of operations and the fastest solution. The creation of Data structures is not that intuitive and only offers basis functionalities, but I feel like having the scenario execution and the Data Store within the same environment takes away connection or authentication issues.

  • Airtable:
    If you want to analyse your data and use it elsewhere. For example, in dashboards or other Airtable apps. Very scalable and user-friendly. More possibilities for the types of data that you want to store.

  • Xano
    For the bigger customers and larger amounts of data. A paid plan is definitely worth it, you can create many databases that you can use with different customers. Also, the function stacks and webhooks are very useful. I use it to create a production DB and replica DB, where the replica is used for any number of data-related analysis such as PowerBI connections, AI-analysis, etc…

Cheers,
Henk

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Thank you, Henk!
Regarding “lowest number of operations,” can you please expand on that? What part about Data Stores do you see reading/writing from/to them require less operations than Air Table?

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With data stores, I often use an ID from an external service as key. That makes retrieving and updating records in a Data Store a little faster. I find that with Airtable I must do a lookup first before I am sure I have the right record.

I know the ID can be set in Airtable, too, but the Airtable customers I work with often have access to the table and make manual changes, thus increasing the change of incorrect records.

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