Side-by-side comparison · Databases & Backend
Airtable vs Firebase vs PlanetScale
Everything that matters when choosing between them, in one place: our rating, what each can do, what they cost, and the trade-offs.
Comparing 3 tools, the maximum.
At a glance
Airtable
3.9Pick it if: Small marketing and ops teams who need a shared database and don't have a developer.
Firebase
4.1Pick it if: Teams building mobile or real-time apps, especially if you already live in Google's world.
PlanetScale
3.9Pick it if: Teams running a real product who need their database to stay fast and never go missing.
Overview
| Attribute | Airtable | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| In one line | Spreadsheets that behave like a database, with forms, views and automations built in. | Google's backend for mobile and web apps, with logins, data and hosting in one. | Fast, serious databases for apps that have outgrown the free tiers. |
| Pricing model | Freemium | Freemium | Paid |
| Starting price | $24/seat/mo | Pay as you go | From $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes | No |
| Works with Claude Code | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Rating breakdown
Our scores out of 5. The higher bar in each row is highlighted.
| Attribute | Airtable | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall rating | 3.9 | 4.1Winner | 3.9 |
| Ease of useHow quickly someone non-technical gets value from it. | 4.5 | 3.5 | 3.0 |
| FeaturesHow much it can do, and how well the pieces fit together. | 4.0 | 4.5 | 3.5 |
| Output qualityHow good the results are before you fix them. | 4.0 | 4.0 | 5.0 |
| Value for moneyWhat you get for the price, including the free plan. | 3.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 |
| Speed & reliabilityHow fast it is and how often it falls over. | 4.0 | 4.5 | 5.0 |
Feature comparison
A tick means it does this today. A dash means we haven't checked.
| Attribute | Airtable | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access & platform | |||
| Free plan | Yes | Yes | No |
| Mobile app | Yes | No | No |
| Desktop app | Yes | No | No |
| Browser extension | No | No | No |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Teams & business | |||
| Team workspace | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise plan or SSO | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Connects to other apps | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open source or self-hosted | No | No | No |
| AI abilities | |||
| Works with your files | Yes | Yes | No |
| Understands images | No | Yes | No |
| Makes images | No | Yes | No |
| Makes video | No | No | No |
| Writes code | Yes | Yes | No |
| Runs agents or automations | Yes | Yes | No |
| Learns your brand or style | No | No | No |
| Works in many languages | Yes | – | – |
| Capabilities score | 11/ 17 | 10/ 17 | 4/ 17 |
Pricing
Plans as listed on each vendor's site when we last checked. Confirm before you buy.
| Attribute | Airtable | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans | Free Free One person or a tiny team with a small list. | SparkOur pick Free Early projects and apps with a small audience. | Postgres, single node From $5/mo Staging and small apps that can tolerate a restart. |
TeamOur pick $24/seat/mo, or $20/seat/mo billed yearly Most small teams. | Blaze Pay as you go, no monthly fee Anything that might grow past the free quotas. | Postgres, high availabilityOur pick From $15/mo Production apps with paying users. | |
Business $54/seat/mo, or $45/seat/mo billed yearly Bigger teams syncing data from other systems. | Metal From $50/mo Apps where database speed is the bottleneck. | ||
Enterprise Scale Custom Large organisations with many workspaces. | Vitess (MySQL) From $39/mo MySQL apps that need to shard as they grow. | ||
Enterprise Custom Single-tenant or fully managed setups. | |||
| Which plan to pick | Free is only for testing; you'll hit the 1,000-record cap fast. Team is the plan for nearly everyone, and billing yearly saves about 17 percent. Keep editor seats to the people who actually change data, since viewers and form fillers are free. | Spark is enough until real users arrive. Move to Blaze when you need Cloud Functions or you're close to a quota, and set a budget alert the moment you do. There's no middle tier, so your bill goes straight from nothing to usage based. | Don't start here for a weekend project; Neon or Supabase are free. When a product has paying customers, the $15 high-availability Postgres is the sensible entry point. Only go to Metal once Insights shows the disk is the slow part. |
Key features
| Attribute | Airtable | Firebase | PlanetScale |
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Pros and cons
| Attribute | Airtable | Firebase | PlanetScale |
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Who each one is for
| Attribute | Airtable | Firebase | PlanetScale |
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How we compare
Ratings are our own, from using each tool, across ease of use, features, output quality, value for money, speed & reliability. The "Visit" buttons may use affiliate links, which never affect a score.
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