Migrating From Airtable: A Practical Guide
Your data deserves real infrastructure. Here's how to move from Airtable to a proper database without disrupting your team or losing data.
Migrating from Airtable sounds daunting, especially when your team relies on it daily. But the process is well-understood, the tools exist, and the result is dramatically better infrastructure.
This guide covers everything: data export, schema design, API development, the admin interface that replaces Airtable's UI, and the switchover process.
Step 1: Map Your Airtable Structure
Before anything else, we document every table, field, and relationship in your Airtable base. This creates the blueprint for your database schema.
Table Inventory
Every table, its fields, and their types. Text, numbers, dates, attachments, formulas.
Relationship Map
All linked record fields. Which are one-to-many? Which are many-to-many? This defines your foreign key structure.
Computed Fields
Rollups, lookups, and formulas. These become database views, computed columns, or application logic.
Automations
Every Airtable automation and what triggers it. These become backend event handlers or scheduled jobs.
Step 2: Design the Database Schema
Airtable's data model maps surprisingly well to relational databases. Tables become tables. Fields become columns. Linked records become foreign keys. The translation is usually straightforward, with some improvements:
Proper indexing for fields you query frequently. Foreign key constraints to prevent orphaned records. Computed columns for expensive calculations. Proper data types (Airtable stores everything as strings internally).
Step 3: Build the API Layer
Your application currently talks to Airtable's API. We build a custom API that provides the same data in the same way, but faster and without limits. Existing integrations (Zapier, Make, custom scripts) can switch to the new API with minimal changes.
The custom API includes proper authentication, rate limiting you control, batch operations that actually work, and real-time webhooks for event-driven integrations.
Step 4: Build the Admin Interface
Your team uses Airtable's grid interface daily. We build an admin dashboard that preserves the workflows they know while adding capabilities Airtable can't provide: row-level permissions, advanced filtering, bulk operations, and custom views.
The admin interface is a web application your team accesses in their browser — same as Airtable, but purpose-built for your data and workflows.
Step 5: Migrate the Data
Airtable supports CSV export for all tables. We build migration scripts that transform the exported data into your new database schema, handling Airtable-specific quirks like record ID formats and attachment URLs.
We validate every migrated record against the original to ensure nothing is lost or corrupted. For bases with active users, we do a staged migration: bulk historical data first, then a final delta sync at switchover.
Step 6: Switchover and Validation
Once the new system is tested and validated, we switch over. Your team starts using the new admin interface. Your integrations point to the new API. The Airtable base stays available as read-only reference for 2-4 weeks, then gets archived.
Post-migration, you'll immediately notice the difference: faster queries, no row limits, and reliable automations that don't fail silently.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does an Airtable migration take?
Will we lose any data?
What about our Zapier/Make automations?
Can we keep using Airtable for some things?
What if our Airtable structure is messy?
Ready to Move Off Airtable?
Book a free migration assessment. We'll review your Airtable base and give you a plan with timelines, costs, and zero data loss.