MongoDB vs Airtable: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Greg. I am an operations fellow at an entrepreneurship center. And I give MongoDB a four out of five. So we switched from Google Sheets, we were using it to store a lot of our membership data, but we found that it was just too unorganized and it wasn't able to handle the amount of data we were processing. We chose MongoDB for a variety of reasons, the primary one is that our staff rotates pretty frequently just as a part of the program and MongoDB is really easy to learn and understand. It's customer friendly for developers, but also it is able to be used by people who don't necessarily have database experience. We found MongoDB to be pretty easy to integrate with our apps. And while there are other services out there that provide similar functionality, the free tier on MongoDB was really a benefit to us and provided us with enough support to get started on the platform, but allows us to grow if we need it in the future. MongoDB was relatively easy to integrate with our system. We were lucky in that we were overhauling a lot of our backend data processing stuff anyways. So MongoDB was just one extra step to add on top of our existing code base. It was relatively easy to add different models and different ways of storing data. And we found that compared to things like SQL that may have a higher learning curve, because MongoDB's very user-friendly experience, we were able to do so without much time committed to learning, which as I mentioned earlier is really great given how often our staff rotates. So it really made the whole process a lot easier and it was one less thing that we had to think about as we were shifting away from our old model. So if you're thinking about trying out MongoDB for your business or service or project, I'd recommend messing around with their playground option. Their free tier is more than enough for a lot of smaller projects and it gives you a chance to learn MongoDB, all the ins and outs and see how easy it is to integrate into your system. I had some questions that were quickly answered through their online programs. But more than that, just being able to use it in my own application, just trying it out. That said, if you are considering MongoDB, look at Google Firebase as well. They have a database, I think it's called Firestore, as a part of the Firebase platform as a whole, but it integrates really nicely with all of the other Google services that are part of the Firebase platform. And what's on top of that, it still uses the same database structure and that all objects are stored as JSON objects. But it integrates with all of their other services pretty well.

Onome D.: Hello, my name is Onome. I am an artist and facilitator. I am a solopreneur and I give Airtable four out of five stars. Prior to Airtable, I was using Google Drive as my content library, and I find Airtable to be better suited to the job. Well, it just so happened that I was able to receive a template for doing my content management system that made it easier for me to figure out how to organize my content in a fairly straightforward way. It was a bit of a learning curve, even with the template because I mean, there's so many options and so many customizations. So I'd say overall it's a pretty steep learning curve. In my case, having a template made a bit of an easier entry point for me. But even with that entry point, it was a little difficult to understand how to add new columns and customize the database. So I'd say it's a little bit of challenge. I would say that though Airtable has worked just fine for my purposes as a solopreneur, it's better suited to a team of people just because it has so many potential moving parts. And the way in which it is customizable, I think it would be better suited to a team of people, like a group of archivists or a group of social media content managers, that kind of thing. Those teams would be the ones that would best be served by a software like Airtable.