Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! Today we’re going to be talking about Airtable vs. ClickUp.
A lot of people have asked me, “Oh, you do ClickUp, so do you also do Airtable setup?” And the answer is no. I have used Airtable and it has a lot of really cool features and yes, it’s very robust. But what I have seen is that most everything that I’ve been able to create in Airtable for my personal needs, I’ve been able to do in ClickUp. So I try not to muddle the waters and have too many things going on within too many different platforms (hello tech stack audit!), but I want to be more objective today in talking about what the differences are, what they share in common, why some people use both, and so on.
There’s been a lot of buzz around Airtable and ClickUp being used together. For example, a lot of people use Airtable for creating a content calendar, even for social media, email marketing, podcast scheduling, podcast pitching, and a lot of that other kind of stuff. Even housing information for your SOPs, referral partners and affiliates, etc. And it’s very true that you can do all of that within Airtable.
Me personally? I’ve seen that even in programs where I get templates for use within Airtable, I personally can just recreate those right within ClickUp and it makes the most sense for me cause I’m already living in ClickUp with everything for my project management tool and it can easily link with my CRM, Dubsado.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again: ClickUp is our one source of truth 💡
It’s the thing that we go to every day and I don’t like to get distracted when I sign on to the big worldwide web by all of these other things. Airtable is really cool, though, because it has a lot of awesome features. So if you need both and want to utilize some of the differences between the two, you connect them.
Basically here are some of the differences:
Click Up was designed to be a project management tool. If you hear me say PM tool, that’s what that means = Project management tool. What this means is you’re managing a project, managing tasks, due dates, team members, all that, all those details right within the project management tool.
Airtable is a database software, so it stores data. Now Airtable (as opposed to something like Google Sheets or Excel), has a lot of automation and a lot of extra goodies that you can do with it. So again, it’s not saying that it is like Excel or like Google Sheets, but it does store information and data in that same way, though it offers a lot of extras as well.
And yes, you can store data in ClickUp. It wasn’t necessarily made to do that, but you can do it. There are a lot of overlapping features of things that you can do within ClickUp, that you can also recreate within Airtable, but to compare them as if they are the same kind of tool is incorrect.
ClickUp is a project management tool, more like Asana, Trello, Monday, Notion.
Whereas Airtable is more like Google Sheets, or an Excel type of platform. It is great for data input, complex formulas, metrics reporting and so on.
Some people think that ClickUp is a glorified to do list, which I highly disagree with. I feel like maybe people who think that way haven’t really seen all the features you could do within ClickUp, but, that’s the thing: it is task management. You are managing to-do’s, just with a whole lot of other features and automation capabilities thrown in there.
Whereas Airtable as a database has a lot of other cool features that you can do, like linking the record. Linking the information from one base to another or building forms. So it has those different views where somebody can submit a form and it adds the information in to create libraries with, and you can add media and other information.
Now, all that to say… ALL of those things that I mentioned about Airtable can happen within ClickUp as well.
We link records by using relationships within ClickUp. ClickUp has form views in every single list that you can use and submit data to actually drop onto the list. And you can change the view if you want to view it like a table, similar to Excel.
We do all of our social media content calendars within ClickUp, and it’s wonderful because we can actually assign due dates and team members to the tasks on the content calendar. A lot of the things that are happening in one can also happen in another.
One thing that I love about ClickUp is obviously the relationships feature. It’s just one of my favorite features and we use it all the time. Since we’ve moved over our content creation for blog posts, newsletters, social media and video shorts into ClickUp, all of those things for our content creation, for our marketing, ClickUp actually has docs that can be used and linked to the task. So you can create a document and then actually link that in a relationship inside of the task.
This way we’re not having to go over to Google Drive or Google Docs and grab that document or to be directed somewhere else with more distracting information. Instead, when we’re right there inside the task, we just drop down to the relationships and click on it and it pops up right within ClickUp and we have everything that we need without leaving the platform.
Having that document relationship feature within ClickUp is a game-changer for me.
Not having to leave the software that I’m already working in saves me time and frustration from getting lost on the world wide web.
Another question that was asked is if you are using both Airtable and ClickUp (again, a lot of people do for various reasons), can they talk to each other, are they integrated?
ClickUp has a lot of views that you can add on. You can see things in a list view, board view, calendar view, table view, form view (which is what we talked about, you can submit information via a form within ClickUp), but they also have an embed view. With the embed view add the embed code from the base you’re wanting to view within ClickUp but it’s going to be read-only. You won’t be able to edit that base from that view.
But you’ll be able to view the information at least. There is kind of a workaround updating that view if you don’t want to leave ClickUp at all. I have actually created a dashboard for this within ClickUp, especially for tracking KPI information until I’m ready to just recreate that information all within ClickUp itself.
What you can do is actually create a ClickUp dashboard that has one side of the form view of whatever Airtable base that you’re trying to use. And then the other side has the updated information so once you submit information into the base and hit enter, let it process and then it updates the view that you’re looking at to see that information base.
If you want to receive loom video tutorials on how to do things like this, you should join our weekly email series that always feature custom vids from me so you can see it first-hand and learn how to do these things within your own ClickUp account.
Exciting news: We’re going to be opening up another four-week workshop for ClickUp!
If you have been trying to decide if the ClickUp set-up VIP day is for you, or if the coaching one-on-one is for you and you just are kind of toggling between the 2 decisions, this workshop is for you. We do start with some of the basics, but we dive all the way into automation and forms. My la-la-la-love language.
Within this workshop, you have 4 different classes with me – LIVE for questions and hands-on learning. It’s in a group setting and we have homework assignments between the actual workshop calls to ensure you’re grasping what’s being taught.
If a four-week workshop is something that would interest you with ClickUp, please message me and we’ll talk about dates.
Some of the other things that we do for ClickUp is four-week one-on-one coaching or simply just one-off consulting call. Maybe this blog prompted some questions about Airtable and figuring out how to embed and create those dashboards within ClickUp? Maybe that’s the thorn in your side, but you’ve got everything else figured out. YES, we can handle that in a one-off consult over a zoom call.
