Struggling to visualize Airtable data? You should try Knack instead.
Ever since we started, Airtable has been a core tool of ours. Because of that fact, you’d think we’d be in love with it!
What we’ve found, is that visualising the data we store in Airtable is really challenging! (Given how many people find their way to our old Airtable data visualisation blog, it seems we’re not the only one’s). We’ve tried hacking Airtable in lots of different ways. Including via Google Sheets to Google Data Studio, but in the end, decided that for certain use cases, we really needed a different tool.
Here’s the thing, visualising data from Airtable isn’t the root cause of our problem. The deeper problem is that Airtable doesn’t provide a “front end” like you’d expect from a database (as of 2022 they are working on that but they’re a long way behind). It’s more akin to being dropped into the middle of a large complicated spreadsheet. Which is fine, if you can handle a large complicated spreadsheet (that has the added benefit of relational data and is less fragile when automating).
However, when you’re dealing with teams of people who aren’t spreadsheet savvy and who only want to see information relevant to them (eg. A graph or a table of data), Airtable creates more problems than it solves.
Enter a different solution: Knack.
(FWIW. We haven’t kicked out Airtable, we still like it in certain situations and will be interested to see how a tool like Softr.io goes. That tool adds the front end element to Airtable that’s currently missing with a nice looking web interface).
Why Knack?
Some of Knack’s core assets:
Forms - forms are built into the app and are two way, this means when a user logs in, they can edit data through forms. Most form experiences on the internet are one way, they can create but they can’t update. ie. You have to ask what the person’s name and email are in the form and get Zapier to **fingers crossed** find them in Airtable, even though you might already have their data in there, if they’ve changed their email address the zap will either halt or create a duplicate.
Relevant information - The front end is a collection of pages. Pages have user roles assigned to them. Users are assigned roles which give them access to only pages that are relevant to them. eg. a page that shows projects you are associated with. This has the bonus of reducing the chances of people breaking things they’re not meant to touch.
Users - You can have as many users on the front end as you want. No worries about your costs going up every time you add someone!
Dashboards - Once all the data is structured right, visualizing data is relatively simple (see below)
Integrated front and back end - One tool, one location. Both the front end pages and the back end objects can all be edited in the same place.
No code automations - When we want to automate something in Airtable, we mainly use Zapier. In Knack, a lot of that automation can be done natively, without any automation tool or code.
Code - But sometimes we do want to do something nifty that just can’t be done straight out of the box. Then Knack allows us to use JS, CSS and the API to go next level. Here’s a project where we integrated Knack with Squarespace
An example of Knack’s front end
Knack certainly isn’t perfect and we’d love to hear in the comments if you’ve tried other cloud based databases? eg. Softr, stacker, bubble.io. There are some situations where Knack doesn’t make sense to use and in those cases we’re still looking for the right tool.
In the meantime, we’re making the most of Knack, we’re hiring value aligned Knack devs as quick as we can find them! Let us know if you know anyone who can help. There’s certainly no shortage of social impact and networked organisations who need to get their online operations in order and who could do with a database ASAP.
To find out more:
If you sign up with this link you’ll get a month free.
Contact us! Get in touch to talk about your data visualisation challenges. We’ve still got a boot in both camps so we won’t tell you to use Knack if we don’t think it fits your situation.