Stacker

Overall: It has allowed us to give controlled access to our Airtable database to the outside world.

Pros: Stacker is a brilliant platform to transform your existing Airtable database into a portal which can be accessed by internal or 3rd party users. We love the platform because it allows us to get 3rd party access to a very limited part of our database. Also, it helps us cut costs on Airtable licences since our internal staff can use it too.

Cons: First of all the UI -albeit very clean, needs a few advanced functions like custom action buttons, multi-layered navigation etc. But the stacker team seems to be very active in releasing new features fairly often, so hopefully these features are on the horizon. Also, it's not the cheapest thing to run -at 300usd per month for per each multi-role portal.

Alternatives Considered: AppSheet and Glide

Reasons for Choosing Stacker: We love Airtable - and stacker was pretty much the only real option for us to achieve the goal of allowing other people access our database in a secure, controlled fashion.

Overall: We chose Stacker because at the time it was the best option of what was available. It has some nice features and what they have is well executed, I just feel that it's expensive for what it is as a small team tool. If we were a large organization the cost would be trivial, but we only use it for our small team, not the whole company. However, while they are developing the platform, we are waiting for Airtable's Interfaces platform to catch up for us to switch. The release of new features by Stacker is pretty slow compared to Airtable's releases; so we aren't committing to an annual plan and instead doing month to month so we can jump to Airtable which we already pay for and it is a better value.

Pros: It got our concept up and running pretty quickly and the logins of users is simple. I do like that they're adding in new data sources, which has potential in the future.

Cons: The cost of their tiers and features is very high for what you get, a lot of what seems like should be part of a basic set of features for any paid plan, you need to go to the highest level plan.

Alternatives Considered: Airtable and Softr

Reasons for Choosing Stacker: At the time it had a feature set that aligned better with our use case, the UI looked a bit nicer too.

Pros: The ability to integrate with Stacker, and build out a database in any way I needed. The ability to link sheets with each other has helped to boost productivity and efficiency in my day to day operations immensely.

Cons: The communication functionality seems glitchy and needs refined. I love that each page has a communication thread linked to it. This will help with client communications, though right now we are still using email for communications since this feature still needs a lot of work.

Reasons for Switching to Stacker: Appfolio was robust and had a lot of what we needed, but didn't offer any integrations or customization for our unique workflow and services we offer to our clients.