Google Sheets vs. Airtable: Which one should you use for your App's Backend?

Choosing the right backend for your app is a critical decision. For many no-code developers and product managers, the choice often comes down to two giants: Google Sheets and Airtable.

Both platforms offer accessible, spreadsheet-like interfaces, but they serve different purposes. While Airtable is a powerful relational database with a pretty face, Google Sheets remains the undisputed king of flexibility and ubiquity. Let's dive into which one is right for your API needs.

1. Pricing: The Cost of Scale

Pricing is often the deciding factor for startups and high-traffic applications.

Airtable operates on a per-seat pricing model. This is great for small internal teams, but as soon as you scale or need to increase your API limits, costs can skyrocket. Their record limits on lower tiers can also be a bottleneck for data-heavy apps.

Google Sheets (via Sheetful) changes the equation. Google Sheets itself is free for most use cases. By using Sheetful as your API layer, you pay for API usage, not per user seat. This makes it a much more cost-effective solution for customer-facing apps where you might have thousands of users reading data, but only a few admins updating the Sheet.

2. Learning Curve & Flexibility

Airtable forces you to think in terms of "bases" and "records". It's structured and rigid, which is good for data integrity but can be limiting if you just want to "hack" something together quickly.

Google Sheets offers the familiar Excel-like environment that millions already know.

• Complex Formulas: You can use the full power of Google Sheets formulas (`VLOOKUP`, `QUERY`, `ARRAYFORMULA`) to manipulate data before it even hits your API.
• Ubiquity: Everyone knows how to use a spreadsheet. Onboarding a non-technical team member to update content in a Google Sheet takes approximately zero minutes.

3. Performance & API Response

Native Google Sheets API is known for being tricky—it has strict rate limits and can be slow. Airtable's API is better, but still has rate limits that can hinder high-traffic apps (usually 5 requests/second).

Sheetful solves this for Google Sheets. It sits between your app and Google, converting your sheet data into cached, high-performance JSON responses.

This means you get the ease of editing in Google Sheets with the performance of a dedicated production database. For web apps requiring fast load times, this cached layer is a game changer.

The Verdict

Choose Airtable if: You need strict relational data integrity, enjoy their "Views" (Kanban, Calendar), and are building internal tools for a small team.

Choose Google Sheets + Sheetful if: You are building a content-heavy app, need full flexibility with formulas, want to keep costs low at scale, or need a CMS that your non-technical marketing team already knows how to use.