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Airtable vs Embedly: What are the differences?
Developers describe Airtable as "Real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid *". Working with Airtable is as fast and easy as editing a spreadsheet. But only Airtable is backed by the power of a full database, giving you rich features far beyond what a spreadsheet can offer. On the other hand, *Embedly** is detailed as "Build Richer Content Into Your Websites And Apps". Embed- Get the world’s most powerful tool for embedding videos, photos, and rich media into websites. Extract- Use the elements—colors, text, keywords, and entities—that you want from articles. Discard the rest automatically. Display- Use the elements—colors, text, keywords, and entities—that you want from articles. Discard the rest automatically.Make the images you use look great—and display quickly—on any screen, every time.
Airtable belongs to "Spreadsheets as a Backend" category of the tech stack, while Embedly can be primarily classified under "Embedding as a Service".
Some of the features offered by Airtable are:
- Attachments
- Link Tables
- Fully mobile
On the other hand, Embedly provides the following key features:
- Add embeddable media and more to your site- Make your website more engaging with video, images, audio, and more. Embed turns any URL into embeddable content.
- Get more value from articles- Extract allows you to harvest important features from articles—so you can use written content how you want to. Control colors, text, keywords, and entities in any article on your site. Remove extraneous information
- Picture perfect—every time- Display adjusts images to display correctly on your site. It saves you the hassle of resizing every image, and saves your users—even those on mobile devices—the pain of waiting for incorrectly optimized images to load.
Zenefits, Hazeorid, and Cookly are some of the popular companies that use Airtable, whereas Embedly is used by reddit, Soundcloud, and Kickstarter. Airtable has a broader approval, being mentioned in 40 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to Embedly, which is listed in 25 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.
I'm trying to set up an ideally "no- code" way to have a backend of 3 different tables and be able to find a value in table #3 (contains businesses & cities) by first finding a record in table #1 (7,000+ zip codes) that corresponds to a city (table #2 has the unique cities), and then finding which businesses are located in these cities ( in this specific, original zipcode lookup). And return the business and a description via an API to a front-end results page, which happens to be a WordPress page - but doesn't need to be. I've tried Airtable's API, AirPress (a finicky WordPress plugin for Airtable's API), and I've looked at Sheetsu and a similar spreadsheet as backend and a simple API. I run into the issue where they work fine when you just need to query 1 table, but when you need to use the result from that query in another query to a different table. I'm back in SQL land - where sure it could be done with SQLite - needing to probably create an intersection table or a JOIN and build an API off of that. Is there a way to accomplish what I want without going back to SQL queries and some API?
You're right that there isn't a great way to join tables with Airtable's API. The closest you can get is to use a linked record field, which acts as a pointer to another record. You still end up with the problem you mentioned of having to run another query on the second table separately.
Your best bet is to stick with an actual SQL database. Using an ORM should make your life significantly easier so you don't actually have to write raw SQL. If you still want a graphical interface to your data, BaseDash lets you view and edit SQL databases just like Airtable. A full API with join support is coming soon, so that could be your perfect solution to this problem.
Let me introduce you to integromat. It connects these services without you having to work any code. And it even has a decent database built inside it.
It makes is an easy process to develop multistep workflows with multiple services and it’s free tier is surprisingly functional.
Pros of Airtable
- Powerful and easy to use19
- Robust and dynamic8
- Quick UI Layer6
- Practical built in views4
- Robust API documentation3
- Great flexibility0
Pros of Embedly
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