Airtable is not a spreadsheet with share links any more. The difference shows up at base number twelve.
Two things this page used to say about Airtable were wrong. It does not hand out access through share links instead of real permissions: there are controls at the workspace, base, interface, table and field level, and Enterprise adds organisation administration and audit logs. And building is no longer manual, because Omni takes natural language and builds or changes tables, views, interfaces, automations and records.
The comparison that survives is about shape. An Airtable base is a boundary, which is useful, and it is why a team can start one on a Tuesday without asking anybody. It gets awkward when the fourth base needs the same customer the first three already have, and somebody starts keeping copies in step. Cordango puts the customer on the platform instead, and lets every capability read the one record.
Feature availability and pricing change. Every row is checked against the vendor's own current documentation, linked at the foot of this page.
Default means it is there without anyone setting it up. Available means the vendor supports it, sometimes only on a particular plan. Build or configure means it is possible and it is your work. Not a focus means the product is aimed somewhere else.
| Cordango | Airtable | |
|---|---|---|
| Building an app by describing it | Defaultthe normal way in, alongside ready-made capabilities | DefaultOmni, and it is available across plan types |
| Starting without asking anyone | Availablea workspace is a company, so somebody sets it up once | Defaultthis is the thing Airtable is best at |
| Shared company records across every app | Defaultorganizations, people and teams are there before the first app | Build or configurebases are boundaries. Sharing across them means syncing or linking, deliberately. |
| Permission controls | Defaultper entity, per field and per command, checked below the application | Availableworkspace, base, interface, table and field controls, richer on paid plans |
| Organisation-level identity | DefaultMicrosoft and Google sign-in on every plan, SAML and SCIM higher up | AvailableSSO and admin controls on Business and Enterprise |
| Audit across everything | Defaultfield-level history produced by the runtime | Availableaudit logs on Enterprise |
| Data architecture | Defaultone company model, one schema per tenant, every capability reads it | Not a focusa base per problem, which is the point of Airtable rather than a flaw in it |
| Flexible ad hoc lists | Build or configurea capability is a modelled thing. A scratch list is not what Cordango is for. | Defaultstart with a table and let it become whatever it becomes |
| Managed hosting | Defaultbackups, updates and patching are ours | Defaultfully hosted |
| German or EU data residency | DefaultGerman data centres on every plan, sub-processors published | Availablea European region on Enterprise Scale. The US is the default, and Airtable documents that some metadata and services stay in the US even then. |
| Personal views without forking the app | Defaultyour own pages over a capability. Layout only, so a shared view grants no extra data. | Availablepersonal views, inside a base |
| Who has to build it | Defaultyou describe it, or you ask us to build it on the same core | Defaultanyone can start, and Omni lowers it further |
| One contract for the whole platform | Defaultapps are not priced separately. The tenth capability does not add a line item. | Defaultone Airtable contract, per seat, published |
An Airtable base is a boundary, and that is a feature. It is why a team can start one without a platform conversation, and it is most of the reason Airtable spread through companies the way it did.
The cost turns up later. Base four needs the customer that bases one, two and three already have, so somebody sets up a sync, or a link, or a Friday export. Airtable has answers for that, and they are all answers in which a copy of the customer exists somewhere and something keeps the copies in step.
Cordango does not have that problem to solve, because the customer is not inside a capability. It is on the platform, and a capability reads it. What Cordango gives up in exchange is the thing Airtable is best at: the scratch list that quietly becomes a system nobody planned.
Airtable is the better choice when flexible collaborative structured work matters more than one company model, and when a team needs to start something on a Tuesday without a platform conversation first.
What we can show you, and what we cannot. Cordango holds no ISO 27001, SOC 2 or C5 certification today, and has not commissioned an external penetration test yet. We would rather you read that here than find it in procurement. Security and permissions at Cordango, and the data processing agreement in full.
Bring the base that four other bases now copy from. We will rebuild it in the demo as one capability on shared company records, and you can see what stops needing a sync.