
I have been hearing about “no-code” solutions for a while but never had the chance to use one. The concept is interesting because programming is usually a barrier for the average person. If they are not required to code, many more people would be able to develop digital and automated solutions to their problems.
Goal
Let’s say I want to create a website with a curated list of local clubs and other infrastructures that promote a high quality of life.
Given a person wants to practice basketball
When they visit the site and search for "basketball"
Then they see a list of local basketball groups
And they see a list places to practice basketball
Requirements
- Collect data in rows
- Categorize data with tags
- Display data online
- (nice to haves)
- With search
- With filters
- With modern look
- With free upkeep (domain + hosting)
Candidates
- To implement requirement 1 and 2:
- To implement requirement 3:
- Pory (requires Airtable)
- Table2Site (requires Airtable, paid, invite-only)
Given requirement 3 is a must, Airtable was a strong contender from the start.
I concluded Notion is more suited to create and manage knowledge bases – documents, notes, and markdown content in general. On the other hand, Airtable resembles a Google Sheet and seems to have more integrations to turn that table data into something else (like a website).
I found a few examples of Airtable powered websites, like the job board Nolojo or the curated list of newsletters Pidgeon.
Here’s the detailed breakdown of my experience:
- Webflow
- ❌ It’s for websites
- ❌ You can’t use it properly without paying
- Job Board Fire
- ❌ Specific to job boards
- ❌ Horribly expensive
- Tabbli
- ❌ Paid after 15 days
- Notion
- ✅ Useful free plan; Many features; Good for docs and knowledge bases; Big player
- ❌ Doesn’t implement well requirement #3, see example
- Airtable
- ✅ Useful free plan; Many features; Good for sheets and lists of data; Big player
- ✅ Plenty of examples and tools to implement requirement #3
- 🏆 Airtable wins (Notion vs Airtable)
Implementation
- ✅ Requirement 1+2: collect data in rows, using Airtable
- Easy to create the base’s structure, plenty of field types
- Modern and friendly UI, a pleasure to use
- ✅ Requirement 3: display data online, using Pory
- Video guide
- Pory links with Airtable via API key
- Mapping from Airtable’s base to Pory’s UI blocks is straightforward
- ⚠️ Nice to have: How to show categories and tags as search filters?
- First pain: far from “it just works” like until now, not intuitive at all
- I had to follow this official guide
- ❌ You have to create another base and manually add the values you want as filters
- From your source base, select a Filter column, copy all values
- Copy-paste to a text editor (e.g. Sublime Text or VS Code)
- Replace all commas with new lines (e.g. multiple cursor)
- Use a command to filter only unique values and then sort them
- Copy the results to the Filter base
- ✅ Nice to have: How to collect user submitted data via form?
- Official guide, easy to follow
- You take your existing base and create a “Form” view – neat!
- Customise which fields appear in the form
- And what happens when the user submits the form
- The best way is to create a separate “User submissions” base
- Then you moderate by cut-pasting the moderated submissions to the “Live” base
- Official guide, easy to follow
- ⚠️ Nice to have: How to track number of visitors?
- Not possible to add Google Analytics in the free plan