Airtable vs Slate

Overview

Airtable

Stacks1.0K

Followers890

Votes40

Slate

Stacks101

Followers130

Votes8

Airtable vs Slate: What are the differences?

What is Airtable? *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.

What is Slate? Beautiful static documentation for your API, inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. Slate helps you create beautiful API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, responsive documentation template for your API.

Airtable belongs to "Spreadsheets as a Backend" category of the tech stack, while Slate can be primarily classified under "Documentation as a Service & Tools".

Some of the features offered by Airtable are:

Attachments
Link Tables
Fully mobile

On the other hand, Slate provides the following key features:

Clean, intuitive design — with Slate, the description of your API is on the left side of your documentation, and all the code examples are on the right side. Inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. Slate is responsive, so it looks great on tablets, phones, and even print.
Everything on a single page — gone are the days where your users had to search through a million pages to find what they wanted. Slate puts the entire documentation on a single page. We haven't sacrificed linkability, though. As you scroll, your browser's hash will update to the nearest header, so linking to a particular point in the documentation is still natural and easy.
Slate is just Markdown — when you write docs with Slate, you're just writing Markdown, which makes it simple to edit and understand. Everything is written in Markdown — even the code samples are just Markdown code blocks!

"Powerful and easy to use" is the top reason why over 9 developers like Airtable, while over 3 developers mention "Easy setup" as the leading cause for choosing Slate.

Slate is an open source tool with 27.4K GitHub stars and 17.1K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Slate's open source repository on GitHub.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Airtable, Slate

DetStartups

Nov 11, 2019

Needs advice

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?

59.9k views59.9k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Airtable	Slate
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.	Slate helps you create beautiful API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, responsive documentation template for your API.
Attachments;Link Tables;Fully mobile;Instant collaboration;Easily undo mistakes	Clean, intuitive design — with Slate, the description of your API is on the left side of your documentation, and all the code examples are on the right side. Inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. Slate is responsive, so it looks great on tablets, phones, and even print.;Everything on a single page — gone are the days where your users had to search through a million pages to find what they wanted. Slate puts the entire documentation on a single page. We haven't sacrificed linkability, though. As you scroll, your browser's hash will update to the nearest header, so linking to a particular point in the documentation is still natural and easy.;Slate is just Markdown — when you write docs with Slate, you're just writing Markdown, which makes it simple to edit and understand. Everything is written in Markdown — even the code samples are just Markdown code blocks!;Write code samples in multiple languages — if your API has bindings in multiple programming languages, you easily put in tabs to switch between them. In your document, you'll distinguish different languages by specifying the language name at the top of each code block, just like with Github Flavored Markdown!;Out-of-the-box syntax highlighting for almost 60 languages, no configuration required.;Automatic, smoothly scrolling table of contents on the far left of the page. As you scroll, it displays your current position in the document. It's fast, too. We're using Slate at TripIt to build documentation for our new API, where our table of contents has over 180 entries. We've made sure that the performance remains excellent, even for larger documents.;Let your users update your documentation for you — by default, your Slate-generated documentation is hosted in a public Github repository. Not only does this mean you get free hosting for your docs with Github Pages, but it also makes it's simple for other developers to make pull requests to your docs if they find typos or other problems. Of course, if you don't want to, you're welcome to not use Github and host your docs elsewhere!
Statistics
Stacks 1.0K	Stacks 101
Followers 890	Followers 130
Votes 40	Votes 8
Pros & Cons
Pros 19 Powerful and easy to use 8 Robust and dynamic 6 Quick UI Layer 4 Practical built in views 3 Robust API documentation	Pros 5 Easy setup 3 Simple to Use

What are some alternatives to Airtable, Slate?

Postman

It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

ReadMe.io

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Docusaurus

Docusaurus is a project for easily building, deploying, and maintaining open source project websites.

Read the Docs

It hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar.

Gelato.io

Gelato.io is a SaaS tool for creating API documentation and developer portals.

MireDot

Generate REST documentation directly from your Java source code. This ensures always up-to-date and accurate documentation with minimal effort.

Gitbook

It is a modern documentation platform where teams can document everything from products, to APIs and internal knowledge-bases. It is a place to think and track ideas for you & your team.

Sheetsu

Use spreadsheet as your database. Give data to your users the nice way, directly from the tool you know. Without bothering webdeveloper.

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