Airtable alternatives after the Bending Spoons takeover: what to move, and when

Airtable still works, its plans and prices are unchanged, and no shutdown has been announced - so the reason to look at airtable alternatives right now is leverage, not panic. Bending Spoons completed its purchase of Airtable in September 2026 and cut much of the pre-acquisition team on October 12. This post covers what that changed, what it did not, and which replacements fit which kind of base.

Three things are true at once as of October 23, 2026: Bending Spoons owns Airtable, most of the people who built the product have left, and your bill has not moved. Which of those matters depends on what your bases actually do.

Prices and limits above are from each vendor's own pricing page, read on October 23, 2026.

Who owns Airtable now, and what actually changed

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based app company, says it completed the acquisition of Airtable on September 4, 2026, buying 100% of Airtable's shares in an all-cash transaction. The same release puts Airtable's reach at more than 500,000 organizations and quotes CEO Luca Ferrari promising heavy investment in product, customer support and go-to-market.

Five weeks later the tone changed. In a post titled Back to bases, published October 12, 2026, Airtable's new product lead Alessandro Savarese wrote that the company is parting ways with a large portion of the pre-acquisition team, who leave by the end of that week with "substantial separation packages", and that experienced Bending Spoons engineers, product managers and designers have joined.

The same post is explicit about customers: plan, price and service offering stay the same, and the customer-facing organization was not affected. It also sets out a roadmap - monthly core releases, an upgraded Omni assistant, Airtable Canvas for building apps, a stronger MCP server, agent permissions and audit logs covering both agents and humans.

So: no shutdown, no migration deadline, no price change announced. If you landed here because you saw "Airtable acquired" and assumed the worst, that is the honest status as of October 23, 2026. What has changed is who holds the institutional knowledge, and we would expect that to show up in support answers and bug fixes long before it shows up in a changelog.

Will Airtable prices go up after the acquisition?

Nobody outside Bending Spoons knows, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The only evidence anyone can check is what the same owner did with a product it already owns.

Evernote, which Bending Spoons acquired in 2023, now gives free accounts 50 notes, one notebook, one synced device, 1GB of storage and 20 tags, according to Evernote's own plan comparison as of October 23, 2026. That is a documented free tier, not a forecast about Airtable, and the two products sit in different markets. In our view it is still the most relevant precedent available, and it is the reason we would not leave an irreplaceable workflow sitting on a free Airtable plan right now.

It also helps to know how little headroom that free plan has. Per Airtable's own plan comparison, the Free plan caps a base at 1,000 records and 1GB of attachments, a workspace at 100 automation runs and 1,000 API calls a month, keeps two weeks of revision history, and allows up to five editor or creator collaborators. Airtable's pricing page lists Team at $20 per seat per month and Business at $45 per seat per month, billed annually. Team raises the ceiling to 50,000 records per base and a year of revision history.

Airtable alternatives, by the job your base actually does

In our view most airtable alternatives are only partial matches, because few other products bundle a relational database, views, forms, automations and an app layer together. Picking well starts with naming which of those five you would actually miss.

Baserow, if you want the closest like-for-like

Baserow is an open-source no-code database you can use hosted or run on your own server, and it is the nearest structural match to Airtable on our shortlist. Its pricing page lists a Free plan with 3,000 rows and 2GB of storage per workspace, Premium at $10 per user per month billed yearly ($12 monthly) with 50,000 rows, and Advanced at $18 per user per month yearly ($22 monthly) with 250,000 rows. Three times Airtable's free row allowance is still thin, but in our view it is enough to test a migration honestly. Baserow is one of 297 tools in Upfynd's automation and no-code category as of October 23, 2026.

Skip it if your team depends on Airtable's interface designer or its marketplace extensions; we found no direct equivalent to it.

NocoDB, if row count matters more than polish

NocoDB's pricing page lists a free cloud plan capped at 1,000 records, Plus at $12 per seat per month billed annually ($15 monthly) with 50,000 records, and Business at $24 annually ($30 monthly) with 300,000 records. The interesting column is self-hosting: the Community edition is listed at $0 with unlimited records, described on that page as "Free, fair-code, run anywhere". Fair-code is not the same as open source, so read the license before you build a company on it.

Skip it if nobody on your team wants to own a server, because the cheap tier is the one you host.

Grist, if your base is really a spreadsheet

Grist is where we would look when what you built in Airtable is a calculation, not an app. Its pricing page lists a free cloud plan with up to 5,000 records per document and 1GB of attachments per document, Pro at $8 per user per month billed annually ($10 monthly) with up to 100,000 records, and Business at $24 annually ($30 monthly) with a five-user minimum. The detail worth knowing: the Grist Community edition is free and open source on your own server, and that page says individuals and organizations with less than $1 million in total annual income can request a free activation key for self-hosted Grist.

Skip it if you need many non-technical collaborators in shared views; Grist's document model rewards people who like formulas.

A project tool, if your base is really a project tracker

Plenty of Airtable bases are a task list with a status field. If that describes yours, we would not replace it with another database - Plane and Zoho Projects are built for issues, sprints and timelines, and you can see the field in Upfynd's task and project management category, which lists 589 tools as of October 23, 2026. Verify current pricing on each vendor's site before you commit; we did not re-check their plans for this post.

A docs tool, if your base is really a wiki with a table in it

When the table exists to support the writing around it, a workspace tool fits better than a database. Notion is the obvious candidate, with the caveat that its own pricing moved this year - we covered who loses a discount at renewal in our note on the Notion price increase. Upfynd's spreadsheets and documents category lists 135 tools as of October 23, 2026 if you want to browse the field yourself.

An automation platform, if the automations are the point

If the valuable part of your Airtable setup is the automations firing off record changes, the database is the easy half to replace. Activepieces is an open-source automation tool for exactly that layer, and most database alternatives above expect an external automation platform anyway.

What a cheaper alternative to the Airtable Team plan is worth

Run the arithmetic before the feature comparison, because seat count decides most of these migrations. Ten seats on Airtable's Team plan at $20 per seat per month is $2,400 a year, and that buys 50,000 records per base. Ten seats on Baserow's Premium plan at $10 per user per month billed yearly is $1,200 a year for 50,000 rows per workspace - the same headline ceiling, measured differently, at half the price. Ten seats of Grist Pro at $8 per user per month annually is $960 a year.

A saving of $1,200 to $1,400 a year reads as real money for a five-person company and as a rounding error for a fifty-person one. That asymmetry is why we think small teams should price a move now and larger teams should wait for an actual change of terms: at thirty seats the migration labour and the retraining usually cost more than the difference, and we found no like-for-like replacement for Airtable's interface and extension layer to migrate into.

One more line item people forget: self-hosting is not free, it is a different bill. NocoDB's Community edition and the Grist Community edition cost nothing to license, but someone has to run, back up and patch them. If that person is you at the weekend, count it.

Do this today, whether or not you move

The cheapest insurance, in our view, is an export you have actually opened - and attachments are the part that catches people out. Airtable's own documentation on changes to Airtable attachments says download URLs on its airtableusercontent.com domain expire after a few hours and will stay active for at least two hours after you receive them, that it discourages using those links as a CDN, that third-party tools relying on them may break, and that you should store a separate copy of the file outside Airtable. A CSV full of expired links is not a backup.

1. Export each table you care about and open the file. Check that formulas, linked records and single-selects came out in a shape you could import somewhere else.
2. Download the attachments themselves, not the links, and keep them in your own storage.
3. Write down which automations, forms and interfaces are live. That inventory, not the data, is what makes a migration expensive.
4. Note your renewal date and your seat count, so a price change arrives as a decision rather than an invoice.
5. Rebuild one real base in a shortlisted tool before you promise anyone a migration.

Our view: stay, but stop being stuck

We would not migrate off Airtable this month on the strength of a layoff announcement. The product is unchanged, the roadmap is public, and a rushed migration costs more than a year of seats. What we would do is make leaving cheap: a tested export, attachments in your own storage, a documented inventory, and one alternative you have genuinely used. Then a price rise is a choice.

If you want to compare the field rather than take a shortlist on trust, start with the spreadsheets and documents and automation and no-code categories, and check every plan limit on the vendor's own pricing page - ours were accurate on October 23, 2026 and these pages change without notice.