Mayuresh Kumbhar in
On August 4, 2026, Bending Spoons announced a definitive agreement to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal, valuing the company at roughly $1.285 billion in enterprise value and about $2.25 billion in equity value once you account for Airtable’s cash reserves. If your team runs its projects, resourcing, or reporting on Airtable, the short answer is this: nothing changes today, but it is a reasonable time to know your options to find the perfect project management solutions.
That’s not fear talk. It’s what a lot of experienced project managers and PMO leads have been saying to each other on Reddit and elsewhere over the past two days, and it’s the same advice you’d give a friend whose landlord just sold the building. The lease is still valid. You just want to know where the exits are.
What Bending Spoons Buying Airtable Actually Means
Bending Spoons is the Milan-based company behind AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite, Evernote, Harvest, komoot, Remini, StreamYard, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. It went public on the Nasdaq on July 1, 2026, raising close to $1.7 billion, and this Airtable deal is its first acquisition since that IPO. Airtable, founded in 2013, combines a spreadsheet-like interface with database structure, and it has grown into a genuinely large business: roughly $480 million in ARR as of June 2026, still growing more than 20% a year. That’s a strong business by most standards. It’s also a steep comedown from the roughly $11 billion valuation Airtable carried during its 2021 funding round, which tells you something about how the market has repriced this whole category of tools.
Airtable’s CEO, Howie Liu, has framed the deal publicly as giving the company more resources and a longer-term backer to keep building what he’s called an AI-native platform. That’s a reasonable read from where he sits. Whether it plays out that way for the people actually paying the invoice each month is a separate question, and it’s the one worth spending your time on.
To be clear about timing: the acquisition is not closed. It’s subject to regulatory approval and is expected to complete sometime before the end of 2026. Pricing, feature roadmap, and support have not changed as of this writing. Anyone telling you Airtable is “shutting down” or that prices are “going up next month” is getting ahead of the facts.
Bending Spoons’ Track Record: What Evernote, WeTransfer, and Vimeo Tell Us
The reason this deal is generating more anxiety than the average acquisition isn’t Airtable specifically. It’s Bending Spoons’ operating playbook, which is public and consistent enough at this point to draw conclusions from.
After acquiring Evernote in late 2022, Bending Spoons roughly doubled subscription pricing over the following years and, in December 2023, capped the free tier at 50 notes total with no grandfathering for existing free users. When Bending Spoons acquired WeTransfer in July 2024, it cut around 75% of a workforce of more than 350 people within about two months of the deal closing. Vimeo, another Bending Spoons property, saw both price increases and layoffs in the months following its acquisition. None of this is secret. It’s documented in SEC filings, business press coverage, and the company’s own public statements about its acquisition strategy, which it has described as moving quickly to close the gap between where a product is and where the company wants it to be.
None of that guarantees Airtable will follow the exact same path. Bending Spoons has also said it intends to keep and grow the businesses it buys rather than strip and flip them, and it has genuinely invested engineering effort into products like Evernote after acquiring them. But if you’re a PMO lead or a CTO responsible for a platform your whole company depends on, “the acquirer has a repeatable playbook of price increases and staff reductions” is exactly the kind of fact that belongs in your risk register, whether or not you decide to act on it right away.
Reading the Room: What Airtable’s Own Users Are Saying
Scroll through the project management and Airtable communities on Reddit this week, and a pretty consistent picture emerges. Some of it is exactly what you’d expect: shock, a few jokes about the company’s name, and a wave of people quietly exporting their bases just in case. But underneath the reaction, there’s a more useful thread of practical advice from people who have actually lived through platform migrations before, and it’s worth pulling out because it applies whether you stay on Airtable or move somewhere else.
A few points came up again and again:
- Map what you’re actually using before you touch anything. Teams that treat a migration as “rebuild every table and automation” burn far more time than teams that first audit which fields, views, and automations are genuinely load-bearing versus leftover from a project two years ago.
- Test reporting and dashboards for accuracy, not just existence. Several commenters pointed out that the real failure mode isn’t a missing feature, it’s a report that looks fine but quietly drifts from reality because someone is patching it by hand in a spreadsheet nobody else sees.
- Check where permissions actually apply. “Advanced permissions” means different things on different platforms. Some tools only support workspace-level access, others go down to the individual field, and that distinction matters a lot once you have multiple departments in the same system.
- Stress-test how automations fail, not just whether they work. One commenter described a Zapier flow tied to a specific view that quietly stopped firing after a migration and went unnoticed for three weeks because nobody owned it. A tool that fails loudly is much easier to trust than one that fails silently.
- Pilot one real workflow before you commit. Rather than comparing feature lists or watching ten demo videos, the advice that came up most often was to run a single live project end to end on a candidate platform, with the actual people who’d use it daily, before deciding anything.
There was also a fair amount of pushback in the same threads against panicking. A few commenters made the point that most acquisitions don’t produce meaningful roadmap or pricing changes for six to twelve months, and that a rushed migration can end up costing more, in time and disruption, than the price increase people are worried about. That’s a fair point, and it’s worth holding alongside the risk-register argument above. The honest position is somewhere in the middle: you don’t need to migrate this week, but you should know what you’d migrate to if the decision got made for you.
Before You Migrate: A Framework for Evaluating Any Airtable Alternative
Whatever you end up choosing, and whenever you choose it, the evaluation process matters more than the brand name on the shortlist. Here’s a practical way to run it, built directly from the patterns above.
Start with an audit, not a shopping list. Pull an inventory of every table, view, automation, and integration currently doing real work in Airtable. Flag anything nobody can explain the purpose of. You cannot evaluate a replacement for a system you haven’t fully mapped.
Separate “different” from “worse.” Every alternative will feel different from Airtable at first, because Airtable’s flexibility encourages every team to use it a little differently. That’s not the same as the new tool being worse. Judge candidates against your actual requirements, not against muscle memory.
Involve the people who’ll feel the pain first. Resource owners need to see who’s overloaded across projects. PMs need to build and update timelines without help from IT. Leadership needs dashboards they can trust without a side spreadsheet propping them up. Get all three in the room before you sign anything.
Ask how big this needs to get. A single source of truth for 50 people doing similar work is a fundamentally different requirement than one for 500 people spread across product, marketing, ops, and finance. Enterprise project management software and a lightweight task tracker solve different problems, and it’s worth being honest about which one you actually need.
What Large Teams Need From a Project Management Platform
Strip away the branding and most large-team requirements come down to five things.
Timelines and Scheduling
You need real Gantt-style timelines and scheduling, not a calendar view dressed up as one. For anything beyond a handful of interdependent tasks, you also want proper dependency logic and, ideally, critical path visibility so you can see which delays actually threaten your delivery date and which ones don’t.
Resource and Capacity Planning
This is where a lot of Airtable-style setups start to strain. Resource management software and capacity planning tools need to show you, in one place, who is overallocated across every active project, not just within one. Without that view, resourcing decisions get made project by project, and nobody notices the same person is double-booked across three of them until it’s too late.
Reporting Dashboards People Actually Trust
Dashboards are only useful if leadership can pull accurate numbers without someone quietly maintaining a shadow version in a spreadsheet. Good reporting dashboards update automatically from the same underlying project data everyone else is working from, so there’s one version of “on track” instead of three conflicting ones.
Permissions and Governance
Large teams need permission structures that go deeper than “everyone can edit everything” or “everyone can see everything.” That means role-based access that can be scoped by workspace, by project, and in some cases down to individual fields, so finance can see budget data that marketing doesn’t need and shouldn’t have.
Automation You Don’t Have to Babysit
Automations are only valuable if they’re reliable and visible. A platform that flags a broken automation clearly is worth more than one that quietly stops writing data and lets a report be wrong for weeks before anyone notices.
Top Airtable Alternatives for Large Teams
Based on the requirements above, here are the platforms worth putting on a shortlist if you’re evaluating project management software as a large team or PMO.
- Celoxis — Enterprise-grade project and portfolio management built specifically for organizations running multiple concurrent projects across departments.
- Wrike — Portfolio-level work management with strong reporting and cross-team visibility.
- Monday.com / Monday Work Management — Flexible, highly visual project tracking that scales reasonably well but often needs a separate CRM product for anything sales-adjacent.
- ClickUp — All-in-one work management with a wide feature set and a genuine learning curve to match.
- Smartsheet — Spreadsheet-familiar interface with solid enterprise controls, popular with teams that want something closer to Excel logic.
There’s also a smaller category worth a mention: Airtable-style database tools like Baserow and Grist, which several commenters in the Reddit threads pointed to as close structural clones, including import tools for moving Airtable bases over directly. These are worth a look if what you actually need is a flexible database with a spreadsheet face. But they inherit the same governance question Airtable users are wrestling with right now: without a dedicated data model owner, any sufficiently flexible tool tends to sprawl. If your primary need is project timelines, resource planning, and reporting at scale rather than a general-purpose database, a purpose-built PM platform will usually get you there faster.
Comparing the Top Alternatives
| Platform | Best For | Resource & Capacity Planning | Reporting Dashboards | Permission Granularity | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Celoxis | PMOs and enterprises running multiple projects across departments | Built-in, portfolio-wide resource allocation | Real-time, customizable dashboards | Field, project, and workspace level | From $10/user/month |
| Wrike | Cross-functional portfolio management | Native resource view with workload charts | Strong, but reporting depth varies by plan | Project and workspace level | Custom enterprise pricing |
| Monday.com | Visual, highly flexible task and project tracking | Available on higher tiers | Good for single-project views, weaker at portfolio level | Board and workspace level | From roughly $12/user/month |
| ClickUp | Teams wanting one tool for everything | Available, but requires setup investment | Extensive but can require configuration to trust | Space, folder, and list level | Free tier, paid from roughly $7/user/month |
| Smartsheet | Teams that think in spreadsheet logic | Resource management as an add-on module | Solid, spreadsheet-native reporting | Sheet and workspace level | Custom enterprise pricing |
Pricing shifts frequently across all of these vendors, so treat the figures above as a starting point for your own project management software comparison rather than a final number, and confirm current rates directly before budgeting.
Why Celoxis Is Built for This Specific Moment
A quick disclosure, since this article lives on Celoxis’s own blog: take the section below with that context in mind. The sections above weren’t written to set up a sales pitch, they’re the same evaluation criteria you’d use regardless of which vendor you land on. This section is where we make the case for why we think we hold up well against them.
Celoxis was built as enterprise project and portfolio management software from the ground up, not as a flexible database that grew project management features over time. That difference shows up directly against the concerns raised in the Reddit threads above:
Timelines that don’t need workarounds. Celoxis includes full Gantt charts with dependency logic and critical path visibility out of the box, so PMs aren’t building scheduling logic out of linked records and formulas the way many Airtable setups end up doing as they grow.
Resource planning across the whole portfolio, not one project at a time. Celoxis shows resource utilization and overallocation across every active project a person is assigned to, which is exactly the “who’s overloaded across multiple projects” visibility that Reddit commenters flagged as a common gap.
Dashboards that don’t need a shadow spreadsheet. Reporting pulls directly from live project data, so a dashboard leadership looks at reflects the same numbers a PM sees when they open a task, not a manually reconciled export from last week.
Permissions down to the field. Celoxis supports role-based access at the workspace, project, and field level, which addresses the exact governance question that came up repeatedly in the threads about where “advanced permissions” actually apply.
Automations with financial tracking built in. Custom workflows and automations run alongside time tracking, budgeting, and cost tracking in the same system, so you’re not stitching together a separate tool just to see whether a project is actually on budget.
A platform sized for large, cross-department teams. Celoxis is used by PMOs managing thousands of tasks across dozens of concurrent projects, with pricing plans (starting around $10 per user/month for the Core edition, scaling up through Essentials, Professional, and Business tiers) and an on-premise option for organizations with stricter data control requirements.
If your team is currently deep in Airtable and wondering how painful a move would be, the honest answer is that any migration takes real planning, and we’d rather you go into it with clear eyes than a rushed one. What we can offer is a system built specifically for the problems large teams run into as they scale past what a flexible database was ever designed to handle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Airtable shutting down? No. Airtable continues to operate normally, and the Bending Spoons acquisition hasn’t closed yet. It’s expected to complete by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approval.
Will Airtable’s pricing go up after the acquisition? No pricing changes have been announced. Based on Bending Spoons’ history with Evernote, WeTransfer, and Vimeo, price increases and staff reductions have followed prior acquisitions, typically within months of closing, so it’s reasonable to expect Airtable’s pricing model may eventually change, even though nothing has changed yet.
What is the best Airtable alternative for large teams? It depends on whether you need portfolio-level project management or a flexible general-purpose database. For teams that need real timelines, cross-project resource planning, and enterprise-grade reporting and permissions, Celoxis, Wrike, and Smartsheet are the strongest fits. For teams that mainly need an Airtable-style database, Baserow and Grist are closer structural equivalents.
Should we migrate off Airtable right now? Not necessarily. Nothing has changed in Airtable’s product or pricing yet, and a rushed migration often costs more in disruption than a price increase would. The more useful move right now is auditing what you actually use Airtable for and identifying a fallback option, so you’re ready to act on your own timeline instead of a forced one.
How hard is it to move a large team off Airtable? It depends far more on how much custom logic (formulas, linked records, automations) you’ve built up than on the destination platform. An audit of what’s actually in active use, followed by a pilot on one real workflow before a full rollout, is the approach that consistently comes up as the least painful in practice.
Making the Call
None of this means you need to make a decision this week. Airtable still works, the deal hasn’t closed, and panic migrations tend to create more problems than they solve. What’s worth doing now is the unglamorous part: audit what you actually use, get clear on what your resourcing, reporting, and permission needs really are as you scale, and have a shortlist ready so you’re evaluating from a position of choice rather than urgency.
If you want to see how a platform built specifically for large-team project and portfolio management stacks up against what you’re running today, that’s a conversation worth having before you need to have it.
If Airtable’s ownership change has you rethinking your stack, the fastest way to know whether Celoxis actually fits is to run it against your own timelines, resources, and reporting needs. Start a free trial or book a short demo, and you’ll have a real answer within a week, not a quarter.