CheqqThe Cheqq alternative to Airtable
The base is the easy part. Cheqq builds everything after it.
Airtable gives you somewhere to put the records. Cheqq gives you the records, the automations that act on them, the app that sits on top, the documents they produce and an agent that builds all four — from a sentence, not a setup wizard.
A relational database with a spreadsheet's manners. Airtable is genuinely excellent at what it set out to do: structured records that a non-technical team can shape themselves, with views, interfaces and a deep marketplace built up over a decade.
A workspace where the database is one of five surfaces. Your records, the workflows that act on them, apps published to the open web, real .pptx and .xlsx output, and an agent per system — all describing to the same data, so nothing has to be kept in sync.
Why people start looking
Nothing here is a knock on Airtable. These are the points at which one product stops being the right shape for the job, whichever product it is.
The base was never the whole job
The records go in and then you still need the chasing, the weekly report, the form for the rest of the team, the deck for the board. Each of those becomes another tool, another subscription, another export that goes stale.
Filling columns by hand
Someone still opens each row to research the company, judge the sentiment, or work out the category. That is the work, and it is the part a column should be able to do for itself.
Sharing means giving access
Showing a customer their own order, or letting a supplier submit a form, tends to mean a seat, a share link, or an interface behind a login — rather than a page at its own address that only ever reads the three fields you named.
Building it is still configuration
Fields, links, filters, automation triggers, interface layout. It is all learnable, and it is all still you doing it — for every change, forever.
Cheqq vs Airtable
Row by row, in plain terms. Where Airtable is the stronger answer, the row says so.
Collections with around 25 field types, two-way relations, formulas, lookups and rollups, and seven ways to view the same rows.
Bases, fields, links and views — the category's reference implementation, and very well built.
Records sync live, so an edit shows up for everyone with access as it happens, and each row keeps who last changed it and when. Roles per collaborator, plus published apps for people with no account at all.
Real-time collaborative editing with commenting and per-base permissions, refined over many years.
Give a column a job in plain English and it runs on every row — researching the web with citations, scoring, classifying — with the price quoted before it runs and anything you typed by hand never overwritten.
AI fields can generate and summarise per record, working from what is already in the base.
Six trigger types, real branching and loops, sandboxed code, and approval steps that hold for a named person and escalate if nobody answers. Every run keeps its event history and can be resumed rather than restarted.
Built-in automations with triggers, conditions and actions, plus scripting.
Describe a portal, a form or a booking page and it is live at its own address. It can only touch the fields you list, through a filter the server enforces on every request.
Interfaces give collaborators tailored views of a base, designed for people inside your workspace.
Real .pptx decks with native chart objects, .xlsx sheets and .docx reports, themed with your brand and built from the same records — then edited, versioned and shared from the same place.
Not what Airtable sets out to do; you export and build elsewhere.
Gmail, Notion, Linear, Stripe, Atlassian, Airtable, PayPal and Google Workspace — dozens of managed connections, plus any REST API or MCP server you bring, so no tool is out of reach.
Native connectors in automations and sync integrations on premium plans. Beyond that list, you are into the extension marketplace or third-party tools.
You describe the system and it is compiled into tables, workflows and screens you can then read and edit. Changing it is another sentence.
You configure it — a well-designed builder, with AI assistance layered on top.
Based on each product's publicly documented capabilities. Both move fast — if something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
What you would build instead
Not features to evaluate — sentences you could type on your first afternoon, and what comes back.
| Company | Domain | Segment | Headcount | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northwind Trading | northwind.co | Retail | 180 | Series B |
| Cobalt Health | cobalthealth.io | Health | 42 | Seed |
| Ardent Freight | ardentfreight.com | Logistics | 610 | PE-backed |
| Lumen Studio | lumen.studio | Agency | 14 | Bootstrapped |
| Silvergate Labs | silvergate.ai | SaaS | 95 | Series A |
Stop opening every row to look something up.
Describe what the column should contain and it fills every row itself — reading the web where it needs to, attaching its sources, and telling you the cost before it starts. Correct a cell by hand and it stays corrected.
customer_id = session.user_idGive the outside world a door, not a seat.
A customer portal, a supplier form, a public status page — live at its own address in minutes, reading your real records. The permission binding lists the fields it may touch, and the server refuses anything else.
When to stay with Airtable
We would rather you picked the right tool than picked ours. These are the cases where Airtable is the better answer.
- You need the marketplaceIf your setup depends on specific extensions, a sync integration, or an agency that already knows Airtable inside out, that ecosystem is real value and we cannot match it yet.
- The base is genuinely all you needIf the job really is structured records with views and a couple of automations, Airtable does that beautifully and there is no reason to move.
- Your team already knows itFamiliarity across a large team is worth more than most feature differences. Switching costs are real and should be counted.
- Enterprise procurement is settledLong-standing security reviews, admin controls and support agreements take time to rebuild anywhere. If yours are done, that has value.
Moving across, gradually
You do not have to switch in one go — most people run both for a while and let the Airtable side shrink.
Bring one base across
Export a table to CSV and import it, or point Cheqq at the file and describe what the columns mean. Field types, relations and views come out the other side as a collection.
Describe what it should do next
The automations you had, plus the ones you never got round to. Say what should happen and read the steps it compiles before you switch any of them on.
Publish the part people asked for
The form, the portal or the dashboard that was always a workaround in Airtable becomes an app at its own address — with the permission filter written down and enforced.
Switching from Airtable
Can I import my Airtable base?
Yes, via CSV export per table. Cheqq reads the file, infers field types and lets you correct them, and can rebuild relations between tables when you say which columns link. Attachments come across as files.
Does Cheqq have Interfaces?
It has something broader. Rather than a tailored view for collaborators inside your workspace, Cheqq publishes real apps to the open web at their own address — usable by customers and suppliers who have no account, with a server-enforced filter that limits them to the fields you list.
Is this just Airtable with AI bolted on?
No. The AI is how you build, not a feature inside a builder: you describe a system and get its tables, its workflows and its screens together. The day-to-day then runs deterministically, without a model in the loop, which is why it costs almost nothing to keep running.
What about record limits?
Collections are backed by Postgres and sized by plan rather than by a per-base row cap. If you are moving something large, tell us the shape of it and we will be straight with you about whether it fits.
Comparing something else?
vs SmartSuite
vs NocoDB
vs Teable
vs Excel
vs Google SheetsKeep the table. Lose the rest.
Import one base and describe what it should have been doing all along. Free to start, no card.
Start free