A spreadsheet that behaves like a database is one of those tools you stop thinking about until the row count hits a wall. Then the invoice arrives, and it is rarely the number on the pricing page. Airtable, NocoDB and Baserow all sell the same basic idea, and each one charges for it in a different unit: seats, records, API calls, automation runs, or a mix of all four.
The free tiers look generous until you read the caps closely. Here is what each vendor published this fall, what a five-person team actually pays in year one, and where the self-hosted option stops being free.
Key Takeaways
- Airtable Team is $20 per collaborator per month billed annually, or $24 month to month. That buys 50,000 records per base, 100,000 API calls per workspace per month, and 20 GB of attachments.
- NocoDB Plus is $12 per seat per month billed annually, or a flat $108 per month for unlimited seats. The flat option is the only reason a small team should consider it over Baserow.
- Baserow Premium is the cheapest paid entry at $10 per user per month billed yearly, and its free tier gives you three times the rows of Airtable’s.
- Self-hosting NocoDB Community is genuinely $0 in license fees. Self-hosting Baserow Premium is not free at all, since the same per-user prices apply on the self-host tab.
- Airtable meters AI separately. Every plan includes monthly credits, and topping up 10,000 credits costs $20 per month or $200 per year.
How I Evaluated
I did not deploy all three for this piece, and I am not going to imply otherwise. What I did was pull the current pricing and plan-limit pages for Airtable, NocoDB, Baserow and Grist, then cross-check each figure against independent write-ups published in September and October 2026. Where a vendor publishes a number, I use it. Where the number only appears behind a quote, I say that instead of inventing one.
Two things got weighted heavily: the record cap on the first paid tier, and whether self-hosting removes the subscription or just moves it to your own hardware. Those two questions decide most of the cost difference between these tools. I do run Docker containers on a small home server for other jobs, so the server math below is not theoretical, but nothing in this article comes from a timed import or a benchmark I ran.
Free Tiers Compared
The free plans are where most teams start, and they are not close to equivalent.
| Limit | Airtable Free | NocoDB Free | Baserow Free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $0, up to 3 users | $0 |
| Records | 1,000 per base | 1,000 total | 3,000 per workspace |
| Storage | 1 GB per base | 1 GB | 2 GB per workspace |
| API calls | 1,000 per workspace/month | 1,000 per month | Automation credits, 2,000 |
| Automations | Not included | 100 runs/month | 2,000 credits |
| Seats | 5 editors | 3 editors, 10 commenters | Not seat-capped on Free |
| History | 2 weeks | Not published | 14 days |
Airtable’s Free plan is the most restrictive of the three in a way that surprises people. Automations, extensions and Interface Designer are not included at all, and the Airtable badge stays on your shared views. You get 1,000 records per base but unlimited bases, which is a useful loophole if your data splits cleanly into projects. It is a miserable one if you are tracking a single list of 4,000 contacts.
NocoDB’s Free plan has the lowest ceiling at 1,000 records total, and external database connections are locked away entirely. That last part matters. NocoDB’s main pitch is pointing it at an existing Postgres or MySQL instance, and the Free plan will not do it. Baserow gives you the most room to experiment: 3,000 rows, 2 GB, and grid, form and gallery views included.
What the Paid Tiers Cost a Five-Person Team
List price per seat tells you very little on its own, so here is the first paid tier for each tool plus the annual figure for five people.
| Tool and plan | Price per seat | Records | Five seats, year one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airtable Team | $20/mo annual, $24 monthly | 50,000 per base | $1,200 |
| NocoDB Plus | $12/mo annual, or $108/mo unlimited seats | 50,000 | $720, or $1,296 flat |
| Baserow Premium | $10/mo annual, $12 monthly | 50,000 per workspace | $600 |
| Grist Pro | $8/mo annual, $10 monthly | 100,000 per document | $480 |
Baserow wins on sticker price, and Grist undercuts all three if you can live with its document model. NocoDB’s per-seat math looks competitive at $720 until you notice the flat unlimited-seat plan at $108 a month. Five seats is the break-even point: below it, per-seat billing is cheaper; above it, the flat plan wins fast. A ten-person team pays $1,296 either way on NocoDB, which is the sort of detail that never makes it into a comparison chart.
Where Airtable’s Seat Price Hides the Real Bill
Airtable is the only one of the three that meters AI as a separate resource with its own top-up pricing. Every plan includes a monthly credit allowance: 500 pooled credits on Free, 15,000 per user on Team, 20,000 per user on Business. When you run out, you buy packs. 10,000 credits costs $20 a month or $200 a year, and the ladder runs up to 400,000 credits for $400 a month.
That is not a small line item if your team leans on AI fields for categorization or summarization. A five-person team on Team gets 75,000 credits a month in total, which sounds like a lot until you point an AI field at a 50,000-row base. Two full passes through that table burn most of the allowance. The upgrade path from there is either a credit pack or the Business plan at $45 per seat annually, which raises records to 125,000 per base and removes the API call cap.
The API cap is the other quiet cost. Team includes 100,000 calls per workspace per month. If you sync Airtable to a warehouse, a CRM, and a support tool, that ceiling arrives faster than the record ceiling does. Business removes the cap at $45 per collaborator per month billed annually, which for five people is $2,700 a year. That is the jump most teams do not see coming when they budget from the $20 headline.
Airtable does remain the most complete product here. Automations, Interface Designer, forms, and timeline views are native rather than add-ons, and none of that requires a developer. You are paying for maturity, and the pricing reflects it. If you want to see the current plan split for yourself, Airtable publishes the full tier breakdown here.
NocoDB: Free to Self-Host, Not Free to Resell
NocoDB Community is the reason people shortlist it. The vendor calls it “$0 forever, self-deployed” and labels it Fair-Code, and the repository sits at roughly 65,000 GitHub stars. You can run it in Docker against your own Postgres, and the license permits internal use, copying, modification, and distribution.
Read the license before you build a business on it. The Sustainable Use License covers content on the master and develop branches, and it does not grant the right to host NocoDB for third parties or resell it. Agencies that want to run a client’s database on NocoDB need to check that clause before signing anything. Running it inside your own company is squarely inside the grant.
The hosted tiers meter more than seats. Plus gives you 50,000 records, 20 GB, 30,000 automation runs, and 100,000 API calls. Business doubles the seat price to $24 per seat per month annually and raises records to 300,000, storage to 100 GB, automation runs to 120,000, and API calls to a million. It also unlocks the feature that matters most for self-hosted teams: up to ten external database connections. On Free and Plus, your own Postgres is not an option.
If you want to run the community build, NocoDB’s pricing page lists every cap, and the Docker image is the fastest way to test it on a spare box. A $6 to $12 a month VPS plus backups handles a small team’s data comfortably. Budget an afternoon for the reverse proxy and TLS setup, and a second afternoon when you realize nobody wrote down the backup restore procedure.
Baserow: Self-Hosting Is a Subscription
Baserow publishes one per-user ladder under two tabs, cloud and self-host, and the prices are identical. Premium is $10 per user per month billed yearly, or $12 monthly, and it buys 50,000 rows per workspace, 20 GB of storage, 100,000 automation credits, and 90 days of row history. Advanced is $18 per user monthly billed yearly for 250,000 rows and 100 GB. Self-hosting Advanced does not remove that charge.
That is a real difference from NocoDB, and it is the single most misread detail in comparisons of these two. Baserow’s repository reports its license as “Other” or NOASSERTION rather than a standard identifier, because the premium and enterprise directories carry their own terms while the client-side JavaScript is MIT. Calling the whole project open source is inaccurate.
What Baserow does better is consistency. The free tier gives you 3,000 rows and 2 GB, which is enough to finish a real project before paying. The interface does not change between cloud and self-host, so a migration is a deployment detail rather than a retraining exercise. Automation is metered in credits rather than API calls, which is easier to reason about if your workflows are event-driven instead of request-driven. The Baserow pricing page shows both tabs side by side.
Picking Between Them
For a team with no appetite for servers, Airtable Team at $1,200 a year for five people is defensible. You get the most finished product, and the AI credits are enough for light use. Watch the API cap and the credit meter, because those are the two places the bill grows without a plan change.
For a solo operator or a two-person shop that already runs a server, NocoDB Community at $0 in license fees is hard to argue with. The catch is that you own the backups, the upgrades, and the 2 a.m. page when the container will not start. I would not put client data there without a tested restore.
For a five-person team that wants low cost without running infrastructure, Baserow Premium at $600 a year is the sweet spot in this comparison. You get three times the free rows of Airtable, a cleaner per-user price, and no AI credit meter to watch. The trade-off is a smaller feature set than Airtable and a license that is not what it appears to be.
One more option worth pricing before you commit: if the database is really a front end for workflows, pair it with an automation layer and keep the data layer cheap. Make handles the hosted case, and n8n is the self-hosted equivalent if you would rather run that container too. Both connect to Airtable, NocoDB and Baserow through native nodes, so the choice does not lock you in.
Start With the Cap, Not the Price
All three tools will feel fine during a trial with 200 rows. The decision only gets real at 50,000 records, or when your integration traffic crosses 100,000 calls in a month. Write down your actual row count and your sync frequency first, then compare the tier where those two numbers land. That single exercise will tell you more than any feature grid, and it usually moves the answer one tier up from where the marketing page points.