Airtable asks you to think in records, links, and Interfaces. If all you wanted was your Smartsheet grid with twice the headroom, Wisegrid is the shorter trip: the same spreadsheet, the same formulas you already know (about 183 Excel-compatible functions with cross-sheet references), 1,000,000 cells of room, on one flat plan at $19 per editor with every feature included and free view-only collaborators.
Airtable is a relational database and app-builder: bases, linked records, field types, Interfaces, a scripting block. It looks like a grid, but the mental model underneath is records-and-relations, not rows-and-cells. A Smartsheet user who just hit a wall and looked at Airtable found themselves rebuilding how they think about their data.
Wisegrid is a plain spreadsheet grid: rows, columns, and cells, the way you already work. Nothing new to model, nothing to relearn on Monday morning.
In Airtable, formulas are a field type scoped to a single table, and reaching across tables means wiring up linked records with lookups and rollups. That is the database way, and it is a different dialect from the spreadsheet math you built your Smartsheet sheets on.
Wisegrid is a real formula spreadsheet: about 183 Excel-compatible functions, cross-sheet references in Excel-style syntax (=Sheet2!A1), and named ranges (=SUM(MonthlyRevenue)). The formula muscle memory you already have, no new dialect.
The indented parent/child structure Smartsheet users rely on (tasks with sub-tasks, rolled-up totals) is not a native grid concept in Airtable. You express hierarchy through linked records instead, which is one more relation to design and maintain.
Wisegrid keeps it in the grid: native indented row hierarchies (indent/outdent, drag-to-reparent, up to depth 10) with hierarchy functions (CHILDREN, PARENT, ANCESTORS, DESCENDANTS). The structure you already build, computed where you build it.
We will be straight with you, because migration is a trust decision. Airtable is a genuine app-building platform, and its automations, Interfaces, and relational modeling go further than Wisegrid v1 does. If you have built an app on Airtable, Wisegrid is not a drop-in for that. That is the category Airtable was made for.
But a lot of Airtable bases are really just spreadsheets that got talked into becoming databases (trackers, plans, budgets, inventories), where what you actually wanted was a fast grid that calculates. If that is you, Wisegrid is the better fit: real spreadsheet formulas, cross-sheet references, indented row hierarchies, 1,000,000 cells of headroom, and one flat plan at $19 per editor with every feature included and free view-only collaborators. Bring that work here and leave the records-and-relations model behind.
This table is about paradigm, not numbers. We do not publish an Airtable record cap or seat price we have not verified against Airtable’s own pages, so anything unconfirmed on their side stays marked, not guessed.
1 Airtable’s paid plans are priced per seat (Airtable pricing). Wisegrid is one flat plan at $19 per editor with every feature included, and view-only collaborators are always free and are never auto-converted into a paid seat.
A single Wisegrid sheet holds up to 1,000,000 cells, 40,000 rows, and 600 columns, with in-product capacity meters that warn you at 80 percent so you see the wall coming. A big dataset stays one sheet, computed with real cross-sheet formulas, instead of being broken into linked bases you then have to stitch back together.
Export each Airtable table to CSV, then import it into Wisegrid: your columns and data come across, and you map them to Wisegrid column types as you go. Then build the spreadsheet formulas you actually wanted. (Coming from Smartsheet too? The native one-token Smartsheet importer has you covered there.)
Move the spreadsheet-shaped work out of Airtable bases and into a grid that calculates: real Excel-compatible formulas, cross-sheet references, indented row hierarchies, a million cells of room, and a bill that matches the team you actually have.