Airtable

Raised as a usability problem by 28 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 23 threads.

People raised many different problems with Airtable, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 28 complaints

Hard to find planned trips; app freezes phone and needed a restart2026-08-04
Airtable felt confusing and limiting to use, even for experienced spreadsheet users2025-10-01
A single description field and checkbox take up two lines on mobile2024-05-02
Takes too much time and energy to manually add people and company information2023-07-20
Attached invoice files can't be exported or synced, so each must be downloaded manually from every record2023-07-20
Joining data across tables is super slow and pagination is awkward to work with2023-03-28
Became insufferably slow to interact with, making it effectively unusable2022-12-25
Large documents scroll poorly and editing them is laggy2022-12-10
Sort dropdown covers top rows, and its close button removes the sort instead of closing2022-05-08
Copying data out table by table is the only practical export, and the app slows badly past a few thousand rows2021-12-03
Filtering or sorting affects everyone sharing the same view, causing confusion2021-05-15
Airtable struggles to handle more than 50,000 rows2021-03-14
No way to query table structure, so developers must guess it from the first few records2021-03-14
Features are hidden in the current layout, hard to find things2020-12-30
Sharing workflow is obscure compared to mailing a file; large tables become near-unusable2020-10-05
Scrolling through large tables is very laggy and slow2020-06-04
Querying data requires workaround support columns and formulas like Excel2020-05-20
Can't filter or sort entries on mobile; filtering only works on desktop2020-04-05
Hard to log in with Google without granting contact list access2020-02-27
Steep learning curve and UI gets in the way of users2019-07-21
App is very slow to respond when used2019-02-28
Kanban sorts don't re-sort when cards are added, requiring manual resorting each time2018-11-16
Sharing silently bills premium users per invitee with no warning in the UI2018-11-16
UI feels super heavy and not intuitive to the commenter2018-11-15
Didn't gel with the UI; couldn't model complex relationships between tables2018-03-15
Average end users get completely lost when adding one-to-many relationships2015-06-02
Space opens zoom view instead of toggling checkbox; ESC silently saves changes, hard to revert2014-09-26
Unclear whether spreadsheet files can be imported directly, forcing guesswork about the import route2014-09-26