Airtable vs. Fibery in how features and functionality are framed and communicated

This recent Airtable announcement page was quite interesting to me:

From a quick review of the page, about 75% of these features are actually already present in Fibery in some form:

  • Two-way sync :joy: (this is almost a non-feature in that in Fibery it has always been the case, right?)
  • Data map (sorta, combination of the database map and whiteboard)
  • Permissions (more or less)
  • Apps (Fibery Templates, no?)
  • “Verified data”? Not sure how exactly this will work.

The biggest missing piece currently is “Interface Designer”. The coming Blocks migration appears to be fairly similar to most of what Interface Designer can do, though Airtable’s version may be a bit more slick and design-oriented.

But the main thing I wanted to point out here is how Airtable is communicating these things. One of the best examples, I think, is how they’re framing “two-way sync” as some great feature, rather than just a fundamental, baseline capability (“table stakes”). They are framing it in the language of the problem the customer can solve with it (Fibery does this already too, to be fair). The “apps” terminology is potentially interesting too.

I’m not saying they’re doing all of this right or that their approach is necessarily better. But I do think they’re doing a good job of communicating simple, often basic features in ways that make them sound more valuable, impressive, etc. If you view something as just a basic part of how a thing should work (i.e. “two-way sync”), you’re probably a lot less likely to call it out as a feature in marketing. So maybe there are things Fibery does that aren’t being trumpeted as unique, powerful, important, etc., when they could be seen that way if communicated in a particular way. Just a thought.

I also think there are a few genuine advantages, good ideas (e.g. Views insights), etc. to be gleaned from this Airtable page for possible future Fibery improvements. One thing I want to point out is the concept of “interfaces to an app”:

With our new navigation bar , it’s a cinch to navigate between all the interfaces of an app. Simply click on the different interfaces shown on the top bar to switch your view—all without leaving the current screen.

This is a good way of describing how Allow multiple Views to be accessed via tabs or dropdowns from a single sidebar item can be framed, or considered conceptually. Not just as a simple convenience, but as a conceptual grouping of parts of work, work process, etc. One could even imagine a workflow in tabs.

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I started with Airtable back in late 2020 but got the feeling that development appeared to have stalled and the lack of critical features like comprehensive permissions controls and two-way sync between bases led me to look for something else which ended up being Fibery.

Not sure what happened but mid-2021 Airtable started cranking out incredible feature releases. Most of which Fibery already had in one way or another. But yes the way they sold every months feature release made it seem like it was a game changer. I’m kind of surprised that Fibery doesn’t package their feature releases into emails - maybe they do and I’m unsubscribed?

That being said, Airtable’s Interface Designer is the one thing that’s giving me major FOMO
I would even be made content just by getting something like Coda’s “Customize view” (see below)

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I second all of this! Curious what happened inside Airtable that they started executing better (similar stall then acceleration happened at Notion at some point, I know more about the whys of that though). And also agree that some newsletters or something might be helpful. I get the monthly “Startup Report” emails, so I assume there are no others being sent.

As I mentioned, I also think the Rich Text as Blocks work will probably help with this kind of thing too. Maybe one day we’ll get a “columns block”, too.

I feel the FOMO too, but at the end of the day, as long as Fibery continues being open and honest about their direction, directly communicative with the community, and consistently showing progress, I will follow Fibery into hell and back haha …and I’m saying this as a free user, but I’ll be a paying user (along with all the coworkers and consultants I convince to join with me) once the SOC II certification comes through :relaxed:

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Yeah, we generally do, but not actually sure how you re-subscribe :sweat_smile: