Airtable

You need to route human review tasks to team members, track approval status across workflows, and maintain an audit trail of who approved what and when.

You're building an agent that needs to store task state, fetch pending approvals, and update records when decisions are made—but you want to avoid managing a separate database.

Performance degradation above 100K records

While Airtable advertises 500K records per base on Enterprise, real-world performance degrades noticeably closer to 100K. Grid views slow, filtering becomes sluggish, and complex rollups/lookups lag. For high-volume approval workflows (e.g., thousands of daily tasks), you'll hit this ceiling quickly.

AI credit costs are unpredictable

Airtable's AI features (automations, field inference, etc.) consume credits on a per-use basis, not per-seat. If your agent or automations trigger AI operations frequently, monthly costs can spike unexpectedly. Monitor credit usage closely and set alerts.

Airtable is faster to prototype; Zapier + DB is more flexible at scale.