Architecting Your Airtable Workspace To Optimize Collaboration And Billing

What is an Airtable workspace?

A workspace in Airtable is an organization mechanism that lets you share a group of bases between a group of users, known as workspace collaborators.

Let’s take a look at two different examples where you might want to utilize workspaces.

Airtable workspace examples

A small business with multiple departments

Many small business love to utilize Airtable because of how versatile it is. Rather than purchasing a separate CRM software for sales, product roadmap tool, and project management tool, they opt for creating relevant bases inside of Airtable.

But as a business owner, you may want to restrict some of your employees from accessing data that is not needed for their particular role within the organization. For example, you might let your sales team and account management team leverage your sales database that contains valuable client information. But there may not be a need for your product team to have access to this information.

And the opposite may be true as well; your product team is working hard on developing a roadmap that you don’t want your sales team to share with your prospects until it is ready to be delivered.

By creating workspaces for each of these teams, you allow them to operate independently within the organization and collaboratively within their teams to be able to create and share bases for the needs of that team.

An agency with multiple clients

If you’re running an agency, chances are you’ll need a way to collaborate with your external stakeholders. Any with any luck, your book of business keeps growing year over year, so you need to be able to manage multiple projects simultaneously.

While your internal operations might use a single base for project or client management, you’ll want to create a shared, collaborative environment with each client. And it’s important that this environment also prevents details being leaked between clients. After all, you want to be able to consult with each of your clients, but not have data shared between these separate companies that you consult with.

This is another great use case for utilizing workspaces. You may have a single internal workspace for your team, along with a workspace for each client you work with.

Airtable workspace pricing

But before you get too eager in dreaming up ways to utilize Airtable workspaces, it’s important to understand how workspaces fit into the way that Airtable bills you.

Airtable charges per user per month, which is very common amongst SaaS companies.

However, Airtable plans are per workspace, and not per account.

That means you as a user may choose to upgrade certain workspaces, while still utilizing other free workspaces.

Note: Airtable clients who pay for the Enterprise (not Pro, Plus or Free) subscription receive access to unlimited workspaces.

Airtable workspace pricing examples

A small business

In our previous example, we discussed a small business with a sales and product department, each with their own workspace.

Let’s say there were 5 sales reps and 5 product managers, each user as a workspace collaborator within their respective team’s workspace.

In this case, the math would be pretty simple. It would be 10 users * the monthly plan price. This would be no different than if you had all 10 users operating in a single workspace.

But what if the CEO wanted access to both the Sales and Product workspaces?

There would be 5 sales + 5 PMs + 1 CEO = 11 users.

However, because the CEO is a collaborator in two workspaces, it would look like:

6 sales collaborators + 6 product collaborators = 12 * the monthly plan price (not 11).

Now, that additional user/moth cost might not break the bank, but it’s important to plan ahead to balance your collaboration needs with your budget.

An agency

In the agency example above, we discussed creating a workspace for each client. Let’s assume that for each client, you have an account manager and a consultant assigned to the project. And from the client’s side, they have three collaborators as well.

In this case, for each workspace, you’d be looking at 5 collaborators or 5 * # of clients * monthly plan price.

For many, this would be cost prohibitive.

You might choose instead to have a single workspace and have a single base per client, so that while you would have to still pay per each client collaborator, you could double dip with your account managers and consultants being assigned to multiple bases as base collaborators without paying multiple times.

Or, you might want to utilize a single workspace per client but increase your bill rate to cover the cost of the software expense.

Or, you might want to have your client pay for their own Airtable subscription and add your consultant as a user for the term of the project, including it in your services agreement.

Working with Airtable workspaces

Creating a new Airtable workspace

Every new Airtable user account automatically has a workspace provisioned when you create your first base, since every base is part of a workspace.

You can create a new workspace from your home screen by clicking the + Add a workspace button, which will prompt a reminder about how the pricing plans are tied to individual workspaces.

Once you create the workspace, you’ll be prompted to give it a title and you can proceed to start adding bases or adding new collaborators to the workspace.

Deleting an Airtable workspace

To delete a workspace, find the workspace in your home page and click the dropdown next to the workspace title.

If you’re nervous about deleting a workspace, you’ll have seven days to restore the workspace from the trash, which you can find located under the workspaces section.

Bear in mind that deleting a workspace will delete the bases contained within the workspace. However, just like the workspace itself, restoring the deleted workspace will also restore the bases that were deleted.

Transferring a base to a different workspace

Thankfully, you are able to quickly transfer bases between workspaces if you’re trying to optimize your billing or simply are reorganizing your bases.

From the home screen, hover over the icon for the base you want to move and click the arrow in that displays in the bottom right-hand corner of the icon.

A dialog will open up which displays the color and icon picker for the base. Select the option to “Move Base” and you’ll be presented with a modal to select the workspace you want to move it to.

Airtable Workspace FAQ

What is an Airtable base vs. workspace?

An Airtable base is a database that stores the actual data or records. An Airtable workspace is a collection of multiple bases that you can share with workspace collaborators.

An analogy would be thinking of a workspace as a directory or folder on your computer. That folder can store multiple documents, but the actual content is stored in an individual document (or base, in the case of Airtable).

Does Airtable have a workspace limit?

There is no hard limit to the number of workspaces you may have. However, remember that upgraded features are priced per workspace, so you’ll want to plan your workspace architecture accordingly.

Within each workspace, however, there is a limit of 500 bases and 5,000 collaborators.

How do Airtable workspace permissions work?

Users can be added as workspace collaborators or base collaborators.

There are five roles available to workspace collaborators:

• Owner: Can fully edit and configure bases and manage workspace settings and billing
• Creator: Can fully edit and configure bases
• Editor: Can edit records and views, but cannot configure tables or fields
• Commenter: Can comment on records
• Read only: Cannot edit or comment

You can add workspace collaborators and assign their role by clicking on the share button in the workspace, or clicking the dropdown next to the workspace name and selecting “Share workspace.”

How do I find my Airtable workspace ID?

When you’re working with an Airtable workspace, you typically refer to the name of the workspace, such as “Automation Helpers.” However, this is really just a label for the workspace.

In order for software applications to distinguish between workspaces, they typically assign a unique identifier made up of random letters and numbers.

There may be a support situation or an integration use case where you need to utilize the Airtable workspace ID rather than just the name of the workspace.

Start by going to your workspace settings with the dropdown next to the workspace name.

When you follow the link through to the workspace settings page, take a look at the URL in your browser. It should follow the format airtable.com/{ Workspace ID }/workspace/billing

So if you see https://airtable.com/wspd5PIL2tL0Dqw7T/workspace/billing → your workspace ID is wspd5PIL2tL0Dqw7T (starting with wsp for “workspace”)