Airtable vs Google Workspace

Pick Google Workspace if you need the operating foundation a B2B company runs on from day one: professional email on your own domain, shared real-time Docs and Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and Meet for video calls, all under one subscription. At 7 USD/user/mo on Business Starter (annual), it's the cheapest credible per-seat floor for giving an entire team email and collaboration, and Gemini AI is built into the core apps so the assistance follows your daily writing and inbox. This is the boring, essential infrastructure, the default place a lean team writes, meets, and files things. Choose it first; it's the baseline almost everyone needs before any specialist tool.

Pick Airtable if your differentiator is a custom process you need to model precisely, a CRM, a content calendar, an ops tracker, a lightweight internal app, and you've hit the ceiling of what a normal spreadsheet can do. You want linked tables, multiple views of the same records (grid, kanban, calendar, form), automations, and a REST API, all without writing code. The free tier (up to 5 editors, 1,000 records per base) lets you prove the workflow before you pay, and built-in AI can scaffold fields and apps from a prompt. Just go in knowing it's a layer on top of your email and docs, not a replacement for them, and that per-editor pricing climbs as more of the team builds in it.