Airtable vs Monday.com: Database or Work OS? Prices, Limits and Automations Compared
By Mikhail Oskola, Founder & AI Automation Architect · October 20, 2026 · 10 min read
Checked: prices, record and item limits and automation quotas on 19 October 2026, against Airtable's and monday.com's own pricing pages and help centers, in USD.
Pick Airtable if your work is connected data, and monday work management if it is projects and who does what. Airtable is a relational database you build apps on; monday work management is a project board. monday costs less per seat ($9 vs $20, billed annually), but starts at 3 seats and lists no automations on Basic. An Airtable Team base holds 50,000 records, a monday board 10,000 items. Checked 19 Oct 2026.
Airtable vs Monday.com at a glance
Airtable is a relational database that bills only editors, from $20 a seat a month on Team. monday work management is a project board that bills every seat, from $9 a month on Basic, with a 3-seat minimum. Both prices are billed annually and were checked on 19 October 2026.
Every row comes from the vendor's own pricing page or help center, in USD, read on 19 October 2026. On the monday side this is monday work management, the project product. monday CRM is a separate product with its own price list, and it comes up once, further down. Each vendor also publishes a page comparing itself with the other. We don't use those as sources about the rival; what they get wrong is in the last section.
| Airtable | monday work management | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A relational database with an app builder on top. Airtable calls itself "a relational database at its core" | Boards of items for projects and team work. monday sells it as "AI project management software" |
| Free plan | Up to 5 editors, 1,000 records per base, 1 GB of attachments per base, 100 automation runs a month | Up to 2 seats, up to 1,000 items, 3 boards, 500 MB of files. No automations listed |
| Entry price | Team: $20 per seat a month billed annually, $24 billed monthly | Basic: $9 per seat a month billed annually, $12 billed monthly |
| Who you pay for | Editors only. Read-only collaborators, form submissions and share links are free | Every seat, from a 3-seat minimum. Read-only viewers are free from Basic up; 4 guests are billed as 1 seat |
| Data cap | Records per base: 50,000 on Team, 125,000 on Business, 500,000 on Enterprise Scale | Items per board: 10,000 on every plan except Enterprise, which allows 100,000 |
| Automation quota | Runs a month: 25,000 on Team, 100,000 on Business, 500,000 on Enterprise Scale | Actions a month: none listed on Basic, 250 on Standard, 25,000 on Pro, up to 250,000 on Enterprise |
| API calls | 1,000 a month on Free, 100,000 on Team, unlimited on Business and up | 1,000 a day on Standard, 10,000 on Pro, 25,000 on Enterprise |
| Moving data from the other | No monday.com importer. CSV files, up to 100 MB each | No Airtable importer. CSV or Excel files, up to 10 MB each. Can embed a read-only Airtable view on a board |
| Plan with HIPAA | Enterprise Scale only, under Airtable's Health Information Exhibit | Enterprise only, with the HIPAA feature turned on |
Are Airtable and Monday.com the same kind of tool?
No. Airtable is a relational database: tables in a base, records linked across tables, and views, forms and interfaces built on top. monday work management is a board of items for running projects, with columns such as People and Status. They overlap only on simple trackers.
Airtable starts from the data. You keep tables inside a base, records in one table link to records in another, and then you build views, forms and interfaces on top. Airtable's own comparison page calls it "a relational database at its core".
monday work management starts from the work. Each row on a board is an item, with columns such as People and Status, so the board shows who is doing what. monday's work management page sells it as "AI project management software".
Don't decide from the homepages. Both now lead with AI agents: Airtable's headline is "Teams, workflows, and agents. All in one space.", monday's is "People and agents work best in one AI workspace". A quicker test: if your problem is the same customer living in five spreadsheets, that's a database problem. If it's nobody knowing who finishes what by Friday, that's a work-management problem.
How much do Airtable and Monday.com cost?
monday work management costs less per seat at every tier we can pair: Basic $9, Standard $12 and Pro $19 a seat a month billed annually ($12, $14 and $24 billed monthly), against Airtable Team at $20 and Business at $45 ($24 and $54 billed monthly). Prices are from both vendors' pricing pages, read on 19 October 2026.
The tiers don't line up one to one, so the table pairs them by their place in each price list. That pairing is ours, not either vendor's.
Both bill per seat a month, cheaper on a yearly plan. Airtable charges only for people who can edit at least one base. monday's plans "start from 3 users", and above 40 users you can request a quote. A yearly monday plan is paid upfront in one installment, and its prices "do not include tax".
Sources: https://www.airtable.com/pricing and https://monday.com/pricing, both read on 19 October 2026.
| Tier (our pairing) | Airtable, per seat a month (annual / monthly billing) | monday work management, per seat a month (annual / monthly billing) |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free: up to 5 editors | Free: up to 2 seats |
| Entry | Team: $20 / $24 | Basic: $9 / $12 |
| Middle | Business: $45 / $54 | Standard: $12 / $14 |
| Upper | Enterprise Scale: custom pricing | Pro: $19 / $24 |
| Top | No match | Enterprise: custom pricing |
What does a 10-person team pay in a year?
Ten seats for a year cost $1,080 on monday Basic and $2,400 on Airtable Team, billed annually. monday Basic lists no automations, so a team that needs them should compare Airtable Team ($2,400) with monday Standard ($1,440). This is our arithmetic at list price, before tax, add-ons, AI credits and setup work, with prices checked on 19 October 2026.
Standard gives 250 automation actions a month; Team gives 25,000 automation runs.
Count who actually edits. Airtable bills editors only, so if 4 of the 10 just read, Airtable Team drops to 6 × $20 × 12 = $1,440, level with monday Standard. monday also lets read-only viewers in free from Basic up, but its pricing page asks you to pick a team size, so check which size your editors land on.
Neither price list covers setting the tool up. What that work costs is broken down in what an AI automation agency costs.
| 10 seats, 12 months | Airtable | monday work management |
|---|---|---|
| Entry tier, billed annually | Team: $2,400 | Basic: $1,080 |
| Entry tier, billed monthly | Team: $2,880 | Basic: $1,440 |
| Middle tier, billed annually | Business: $5,400 | Standard: $1,440. Pro: $2,280 |
Record and item limits: where each one hits a ceiling
One Airtable base holds 50,000 records on Team, 125,000 on Business and 500,000 on Enterprise Scale. One monday board holds 10,000 items on every plan except Enterprise, which allows 100,000, even though monday's pricing page says "Unlimited items" on paid plans. We checked both on 19 October 2026, on the pricing pages and in monday's help center.
The units differ. Airtable caps records per base, and a base can hold several tables. monday caps items per board, and an account can hold many boards. Both are hard limits on one set of data, so the fair comparison is one base against one board.
"Unlimited items" is the account total. Once a monday board is full, "you will then no longer be able to add additional items until some are removed" (help center, last modified 20 September 2026).
Airtable is gentler at the cap: "you'll still be able to use your bases and we will never remove your data", but you can't add records or attachments until you upgrade.
If an AI answer told you Airtable holds 250,000 records per base, that number comes from Airtable's own comparison page, not its pricing page, which lists 125,000 on Business and 500,000 on Enterprise Scale. The same comparison page says HyperDB, an Enterprise Scale feature, supports "up to 100M records". The pricing page gives no per-base figure for it.
| Plan level | Airtable, per base | monday work management, per board |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 1,000 records, 1 GB of attachments | 1,000 items in the account, 500 MB of files |
| Entry | Team: 50,000 records, 20 GB | Basic: 10,000 items, 5 GB |
| Middle | Business: 125,000 records, 100 GB | Standard: 10,000 items, 20 GB. Pro: 10,000 items, 100 GB |
| Top | Enterprise Scale: 500,000 records, 1,000 GB | Enterprise: 100,000 items, 1,000 GB |
Automations: how many runs you get, and when you need Make or n8n
Airtable's pricing page lists 25,000 automation runs a month on Team and 100,000 on Business. monday's lists 250 automation actions a month on Standard, 25,000 on Pro and none on Basic. A run and an action are different units, and one monday automation can use several actions. Both were checked on 19 October 2026.
Airtable also caps how many automations one base can hold: 75 on Free, 100 on Team, 150 on Business and 200 on Enterprise Scale, with 100 runs a month on Free and 500,000 on Enterprise Scale.
monday counts actions, and it meters automations and integrations separately: 250 automation actions and 250 integration actions a month on Standard, 25,000 of each on Pro, and up to 250,000 automation and integration actions on Enterprise. Free and Basic list none.
A run and an action aren't the same unit, so don't divide one by the other. monday's help center says one automation usually uses one action, then lists the exceptions. Creating an item with Status, Tag, People, Dropdown or Update columns mapped uses an action for each of those columns plus one for the item. Notifying 6 board subscribers uses 6 actions, and condition steps count too.
Running out works differently as well. Airtable stops at the plan's limit. On monday, the first overrun on Standard rolls into the next month as "actions debt". After that, you get a 72-hour grace period at 100% before automations pause. Only Enterprise customers can buy extra actions, so below Enterprise the fix on either tool is a bigger plan.
Or you move the heavy workflow out. When a job needs more runs than the plan gives, or a system neither tool connects to, an external tool like Make, n8n or Zapier takes it over and bills on its own terms. We compare those three in Make vs n8n vs Zapier.
Can Airtable work as a CRM, or do you need monday CRM?
Airtable can hold a CRM, but it doesn't sell one. Its site offers CRM templates and a guide to building your own, which says "Most Airtable CRMs start as a handful of connected tables: companies, contacts, deals, activities." You design the pipeline, the fields and the automations yourself.
monday sells monday CRM as a separate product with its own tiers and prices. Don't price it off the work-management table above. We compared its plans with HubSpot's in monday CRM vs HubSpot, priced.
If your pipeline is a few stages that one team owns, an Airtable base you shape yourself can be enough. If you want sales features that come ready rather than built by you, you're shopping for a CRM, and Airtable isn't one.
Not sure which CRM fits? Take the 6-question CRM picker.
Can you connect Airtable and Monday.com?
Not with a built-in sync: neither vendor documents one with the other. monday can embed a read-only Airtable view on a board or dashboard, which shows the data without copying it. Moving records takes a CSV export, a third-party Marketplace app or an automation tool such as Make, n8n or Zapier. Checked on 19 October 2026.
The embed is monday's Embedded Airtable View widget: you create a shareable grid view link in Airtable and paste its ID into the widget's settings. People see the Airtable grid inside monday, but nothing moves into monday's items.
monday's Marketplace lists an app called Airtable Sync that says it syncs Airtable data to monday.com. We couldn't confirm who builds it, so treat it as a third-party app, not a monday feature. Otherwise, a live link between the two means an automation tool you set up yourself, such as Make, n8n or Zapier.
Moving from Airtable to Monday.com, or back
Neither tool imports directly from the other, so the move runs through CSV files. Into a new monday board, each file can be up to 10 MB and 8,000 rows. Into Airtable, each CSV can be up to 100 MB, and every column arrives as plain text. We checked both vendors' help pages on 19 October 2026.
Airtable to monday: monday's help center lists importers for Excel and CSV, Asana, Basecamp, Jira Server, Google Sheets, Trello and Zendesk, but not Airtable. Each file has to be 10 MB or less. A new board takes up to 8,000 rows, and only the first 50 columns come in. Columns arrive as Number, Status, Email, Date or Text, and dates need ISO format such as 2021-10-23. A table larger than 8,000 rows means several files, and a board still stops at 10,000 items below Enterprise.
monday advertises free migration for Airtable users, but the fine print limits it: "Customers purchasing 50+ seats may receive free migration services".
monday to Airtable: Airtable imports directly from Google Sheets, Excel, Apple Numbers, Microsoft Access, Asana and Trello. monday.com isn't on that list, so boards come over as CSV files of up to 100 MB each. Airtable's import guide says CSV files "reduce all data to a single, simple text field type", so you set every field type again after the import.
Reading those column-type lists, our view is that linked records and attachments won't survive a CSV in either direction, and automations get rebuilt by hand either way. Neither vendor says so in those words. We've written up what breaks in a data migration from our own migration work.
Airtable or Monday.com: which one to choose
Choose Airtable if your data lives in several connected tables, and monday work management if the job is running projects and seeing who does what. Then check the plan you can afford: monday Basic lists no automations, and a monday board below Enterprise stops at 10,000 items.
- Choose Airtable if your data lives in several connected tables and different people need their own views and forms on it. One Team base holds 50,000 records.
- Choose monday work management if the job is running projects and seeing who does what, and 10,000 items on a board is enough.
- Choose monday Basic if price per seat decides it and you don't need automations: $9 per seat a month billed annually, 3 seats minimum.
- Need automations? Compare Airtable Team ($20, 25,000 runs) with monday Standard ($12, 250 actions) or Pro ($19, 25,000 actions), all billed annually.
- Lots of people who only read? Airtable bills editors only; monday gives free viewers from Basic up. Count your editors before you compare prices.
- Need a sales CRM that works out of the box? Look at monday CRM, a separate product. In Airtable, a CRM is a template you build on.
- Patient data? Airtable signs a BAA on Enterprise Scale only, and monday offers HIPAA on Enterprise only.
What the vendors' own comparison pages get wrong
Each vendor's comparison page misstates the other's limits. Airtable's page cites monday's 1,000-item cap, which applies only to monday's Free plan. monday's switching page says Airtable needs paid extensions for Gantt and Timeline views, which Airtable lists on its Team plan. We checked every claim on 19 October 2026 against the other vendor's own pricing and help pages.
Airtable publishes https://www.airtable.com/airtable-vs-monday. monday publishes a switching page at https://monday.com/gp/comp-airtable-migration and a blog comparison at https://monday.com/blog/project-management/monday-vs-airtable/. Here is what they say about each other, next to the other vendor's own pricing and help pages (all read 19 October 2026).
- monday's switching page says "Airtable requires paid extensions for Timeline and Gantt views." Airtable's pricing page lists "Gantt and timeline view" on the Team plan. They need a paid plan, not a separate extension, and monday's own blog comparison puts them on Airtable Team too.
- Airtable's page lists monday's "1,000 items record limit". That is monday's Free plan. Paid plans allow 10,000 items per board, and 100,000 on Enterprise.
- Airtable's page says it handles "500K+ records vs. monday.com's 100K cap". Both are top-tier numbers, Airtable Enterprise Scale against monday Enterprise. Below that, monday stops at 10,000 items per board, and Airtable's Team and Business bases hold 50,000 and 125,000 records.
- Airtable's page promises "Scalability to 250K+ records". Its own pricing page lists 125,000 per base on Business and 500,000 on Enterprise Scale.
- monday's blog says it "provides 24/7 customer support on every paid plan". On monday's pricing page, 24/7 support appears under Enterprise only.
- monday's blog says Airtable users "won't find 24/7 phone and email support or a dedicated customer success manager". Airtable's Enterprise Scale plan lists a dedicated customer success manager.
- AI answers add numbers no vendor prints. When we checked Google's AI Overview for "airtable vs monday automation limits" on 19 October 2026, it said Airtable allows a "Maximum of 50 automations per base". Airtable's pricing page lists 75 to 200, depending on the plan.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airtable or Monday.com cheaper for a 10-person team?+
Monday.com, on list price. Ten seats on monday Basic cost $1,080 a year billed annually, against $2,400 on Airtable Team. Basic lists no automations, though. With automations, monday Standard is $1,440 a year, still below Airtable Team. Airtable bills only editors, so read-only users narrow the gap. Our arithmetic, prices checked 19 October 2026.
Are Airtable and Monday.com the same kind of tool?+
No. Airtable is a relational database: tables in a base, records linked across tables, and apps built on top. Monday.com work management is a board of items for running projects and team work. They overlap on simple trackers. Pick Airtable for connected data and monday for tracking who does what.
Can Airtable be used as a CRM instead of monday CRM?+
Yes, if you build it. Airtable has no CRM product; it offers CRM templates, and its own guide says most Airtable CRMs start as connected tables for companies, contacts, deals and activities. Monday.com sells monday CRM as a separate product with its own price list. Airtable suits a light pipeline you shape yourself.
Can you connect Airtable to Monday.com?+
Not with a built-in sync. Monday.com can embed a read-only Airtable view on a board or dashboard, which shows the data without copying it. Airtable lists no monday connector. To sync records you need a third-party Marketplace app or an automation tool such as Make, n8n or Zapier. Checked 19 October 2026.
How do I move my data from Airtable to Monday.com?+
Export each Airtable table as CSV and import it into Monday.com, because monday's help center lists no Airtable importer. Each file must be 10 MB or less, a new board takes up to 8,000 rows, and columns arrive as Number, Status, Email, Date or Text. Expect to rebuild linked records and automations by hand.
Which gives more automation runs per month, Airtable or Monday.com?+
Airtable lists bigger numbers at every tier we paired, but the units differ. Airtable counts runs: 25,000 a month on Team, 100,000 on Business. Monday.com counts actions: none listed on Basic, 250 on Standard, 25,000 on Pro. One monday automation can use several actions, so its quota goes faster than the number suggests.
When were these Airtable and Monday.com prices checked?+
We checked every Airtable and Monday.com price, limit and automation quota in this article on 19 October 2026, on the vendors' own pricing pages and help centers, in USD. Both vendors change plans and prices, so confirm on airtable.com/pricing and monday.com/pricing before you buy.