How to use Airtable integrations: an introduction
Good work starts with good communication—and that’s just as true for your apps and services as it is for people. In that sense, an integrated software stack is a key prerequisite for building efficient workflows.
We live in an era of useful, innovative software, so it’s no wonder that many organizations have increased the number of apps they use to help them accomplish even more. The tools you use every day—like Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Jira—are just a handful of the apps we lean on to stay productive at work. But jumping around between multiple apps can come at a cost to productivity.
Think about the time, for example, that you might spend updating a customer record in Salesforce, and then using a messaging or email tool to tell the rest of the account team about the update. Without a strategy to unify tools like those in your workflow, it’s easy to lose valuable time to repetitive tasks. And it’s hard to reap the full extent of your apps’ benefits.
Using Airtable, you can integrate your apps of choice to create a cohesive, unified workflow. That helps you keep your team focused on your work—not your tooling.
How Airtable integrations work
Using Airtable Apps and Automations, you can integrate many popular tools with Airtable. Your number of available integrations expands even more when you leverage popular integration platforms as a service (iPaaS) connectors. These iPaaS providers like Zapier, Workato, Integromat, Automate.io, Unito, and Parabola provide connective glue to establish effective communications between apps.
And when you want to build a more custom-tailored connection between your apps—like a workflow that involves complex connections and multiple actions across apps—the Airtable scripting app and API can make it possible.
If you can identify a repetitive task across your workflow, odds are that you can streamline it with an integration. Tasks like collecting key notifications into a single source, or syncing information across multiple tools can help connect your tool stack to create a cohesive, connected workflow. Let’s take a look at some popular apps and how you can integrate them with Airtable to boost productivity.
Airtable integrations to connect to your workflow
Below you’ll find some of the most common apps people use to get things done in combination with Airtable. And they’re just a subset of the integrations available. Through Airtable, you can establish native integrations with Airtable's robust API, and built-in support for tools like Slack, Dropbox, Box, Gmail, and more. And using iPaaS connectors, you can connect to over 1000 other websites and apps.
For each app below, you’ll find common use cases, plus direct links to the integration services that can help you set them up. Many of these apps connect directly to Airtable, so you can set up your integration right away—even if you don’t already have a favorite integration platform.
Google Workspace
Connects natively to Airtable using: Airtable Automations
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Integromat, Workato, and Unito (Google Sheets and Google Calendar)
Google’s Workspace, previously known as G Suite, has become a staple in many companies’ workflows. Nearly every automation platform integrates with the apps in Google Workspace, like Gmail and Sheets, but some platforms can perform tasks in the Google Workspace Admin console, too (e.g. Workato). Automating the Google Workspace Admin console allows you to automate user setup and changes.
Because Google Workspace apps provide such a wide array of functionality, you can try plenty of different tasks, dependent on your workflow. A few popular options include:
- Automated emails for sales and support
- Collecting responses from Google Forms
- Synchronizing Google Calendar with a base
- Populating a presentation template with dynamic content
But that’s just scratching the surface. If your team relies heavily on Google services, there are plenty of other ways you can connect your workflow through Airtable.
Jira
Connects natively to Airtable using: Airtable Apps
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Integromat, Workato, Automate.io, Unito
Whether you use Jira to track bugs, or to manage other parts of your work, you can use integrations to keep your information synced with Airtable.
For example, you can take bug reports from your Airtable base and automatically sync them with Jira. With other integrations in the mix, you can even use Airtable to accumulate bug reports from various sources—like email inboxes, customer support portals, and the like—and send them all to Jira. It helps ensure nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
Salesforce
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Integromat, Workato, Parabola, Automate.io, Unito
Salesforce is known for their robust customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Through their CRM tools, they help multiple people across organizations serve and monitor customer needs. But each team—if not each team member—manages their work differently. And centralizing customer information from all of those different workflows can be a long, tedious process.
For example, let’s say your team is using Airtable to capture customer requests, or even leads. You can use integrations to sync those requests with Salesforce so no request gets missed. Or if you like to use Airtable to create reporting dashboards, you can pull in data from Salesforce—as well as other apps—for automatic status updates.
Outlook
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Workato, Automate.io, Unito
Love it or hate it, email is a necessary part of every workflow. Just like with Gmail (Google Workspace), you can integrate your inbox with your Airtable bases to automate almost any repetitive operation. You can even create a custom email client within Airtable that sends and receives messages using an Outlook email account. However, for most, a few key automations is a great place to start.
For example, you could configure your integration to create a new record in Airtable whenever you receive an email in Outlook that meets specific criteria. Let’s say you sent out an email to hundreds of people across your organization, and you want to manage the huge volume of replies you’ll inevitably receive. With this connection, you could create your own ticketing system, inputting all reply emails with that subject line into your Airtable to-do list. To respond to people en masse (without losing a personal touch), you could create a custom email template using formula fields in Airtable, and then use your Outlook integration to send them at a specified date and time.
HubSpot
Connects natively to Airtable using: HubSpot App Marketplace
HubSpot is a CRM platform that helps teams to serve every angle of your customer’s needs—and your team’s. Integrating HubSpot with Airtable provides a connection for data to flow both ways to help you sync and centralize contact information. A few examples of how you might use them together include:
- Capturing HubSpot form submissions in Airtable
- Updating HubSpot records when an Airtable form is submitted
- Creating Airtable records for new contacts in HubSpot
And that’s just the beginning. You can also use HubSpot to sync information on new email events, new deals, or even new products with Airtable.
Teams
Connects natively to Airtable using: Airtable Automations
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Integromat, Workato, Automate.io
Naturally, we all need notifications to keep up with the operations that impact our daily work. But notifications can also inhibit productivity if they’re not properly managed. Letting apps decide when and where to notify you can result in a deluge of unwanted information. Creating your own notifications, and channeling them into your communication platform of choice—like Microsoft Teams—can give you granular control over your notification flow.
For example, let’s say you’re managing tasks in Airtable, which each task assigned to a different teammate. When a change is made to one of those tasks, you can automatically notify the corresponding teammate in Microsoft Teams, plus anyone else associated with the task or project.
By connecting Teams and Airtable, you can even turn Airtable into an information hub. Collect updates from a variety of integrated apps, and route notifications to people and channels on Microsoft Teams to keep information flowing where you need it.
Slack
Connects natively to Airtable using: Airtable Automations
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Integromat, Workato, Automate.io, Unito
As we mentioned in the last section—and as we all know—notifications can be tough to manage on collaborative teams. Just like with Microsoft Teams, an integration with Slack and Airtable can help manage and direct notifications, or to log key Slack messages.
Through the Airtable and Slack integration, you can easily send key information from one platform to the other. By setting specific conditions, you can log important messages or even create new records in Airtable directly from a message.
Of course, pretty much any integration you can create for Slack can be created for other communication apps, like Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and more.
Confluence
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Workato
Confluence is a collaborative workspace for teams to plan and create together. Integrating Confluence can help synchronize that work with your base. This is especially useful when tracking tasks.
Say your team uses Airtable to manage tasks and their statuses, but that much of the work on those tasks happens in Confluence. Using an integration, you can automatically create a new document in Confluence when a relevant task is created in Airtable.
Typeform
Connects natively to Airtable using: Airtable Apps
Connects to Airtable via iPaaS using: Zapier, Integromat, Workato, Parabola, Automate.io
Typeform helps you create intelligent, personable forms for your customers. You can use Airtable Apps to generate forms and integrate responses from Typeform without ever leaving your base. If you already have a typeform and corresponding Airtable base set up, you can also connect the two via Typeform's native integration.
Integration platforms like Zapier, Integromat, and others provide similar functionality. For example, you can use integration platforms to send regular updates about who’s filling out your form. You can use the integration to create a cumulative digest of your form responses, and email it out to your team on a set schedule. You can even use integration platforms to enrich the data you get from your Typeform responses. For example, you can enrich lead data from Typeform with Clearbit before inputting it in Airtable.
Finding the right integrations for your workflow
This is just a sample of the hundreds of apps you can integrate with Airtable to build your own custom workflow. And the examples we shared are just the beginning—for each app, there are tens, if not hundreds of permutations of apps, triggers, and actions you can combine to create the workflow that makes sense for your team.
To learn more about connecting your workflow with Airtable, check out some of our most popular integrations here. Or sign up below to try your hand at integrations yourself.