The original version of this comparison ran in March, when Airtable's paid tier started at $10 a seat. Checking the live pricing page for this refresh, that number is gone. Airtable's cheapest paid plan is now $20 a seat, and the tier above it costs more than double what the whole comparison used to assume. That's the headline of this refresh. Everything else in the comparison moved far less, or not at all.
Airtable doubled its entry price and renamed the tiers
Airtable's pricing page confirms it directly, in the site's own FAQ text: Team is $20 a seat a month billed annually, and Business is $45 a seat a month billed annually. Enterprise Scale is custom, quoted through sales. The old Plus and Pro names are gone. What used to be a $10 entry point is now a $20 one, and the old $20 mid-tier is now a $45 one. Free is unchanged: 1,200 records a base, unlimited bases, five editors.
If you evaluated Airtable in March and the $10-a-seat math worked for your team, redo it. A five-person team on the old Plus tier would have paid $50 a month. On today's Team tier, the same five seats run $100 a month, and that's before anyone needs what used to require Pro. This isn't a rounding change. It roughly doubles the cost of the product at every paid tier.
Notion and Google Sheets haven't moved
Notion's pricing page still shows Plus at $10 a seat a month and Business at $20, with Business marked "Recommended" on the page itself. Both numbers match what I confirmed in a separate check two weeks ago. Nothing has shifted here since March either. Notion's free tier is still unlimited pages for individuals, 10 guest collaborators, and 7-day page history; Plus adds unlimited guests and 30-day history; Business adds SAML SSO and 90-day history.
Google Workspace's pricing, which is what actually gates Sheets for a business account, still lists Business Starter at $7 a seat, Standard at $14, and Plus at $22. The page is currently running a promotional discount on top of those numbers, which is not the standing rate and shouldn't be the number you budget from. A personal Google account still gets full Sheets functionality free, which was true in March and remains the honest answer for anyone asking what Sheets costs: nothing, unless a business account's admin controls and storage tiers matter to you specifically.
What actually changed about the recommendation
The core argument from March hasn't reversed. Airtable is still a relational database wearing a spreadsheet's clothes, and nothing else here handles linked records, filtered views, and an API as cleanly. Google Sheets is still a spreadsheet that people force into being a database, and it still buckles the moment you need real relationships between rows instead of VLOOKUP duct tape. Notion databases are still a workspace feature bolted onto a documents tool, more capable than a spreadsheet for lightweight structured data, less capable than Airtable for anything relational at scale.
What's genuinely different is the price gap between Airtable and its two competitors. In March, Airtable's Plus tier at $10 a seat matched Notion's Plus tier exactly, so the decision came down to features, not cost. That's no longer true. Airtable's Team tier at $20 a seat now costs double what Notion Plus costs for the same headcount, and the feature gap between the two doesn't double to match. If your actual use case is a database with a handful of linked tables, that price gap is real money you're now paying specifically for Airtable's relational depth, not for anything Notion genuinely lacks at the low end.
Admin controls, at the price that actually buys them
Airtable's price jump isn't just a number, it changes what a security review should expect at each tier. Business at $45 a seat is the plan Airtable positions for "additional customization, data scale, flexibility, and administrative features," per the vendor's own pricing FAQ, which means centralized admin controls now sit behind a $45 seat rather than a $20 one. A team that budgeted for Team-tier Airtable expecting Business-grade admin tooling will be disappointed, and should check the feature comparison table on the pricing page directly rather than assume the previous tier structure still applies.
Notion's admin story hasn't changed: SAML SSO and advanced permissions still live on the $20 Business tier, the same tier that was already the sensible floor for any team with real access-control requirements. Google Workspace's admin controls scale the same way they always have, with meaningful centralized management arriving at Business Standard and above. Of the three, Notion is the only one where the entry price for "IT can actually manage this" didn't just move.
Cost at real team size
A 10-person team on Airtable Team pays $200 a month, up from $100 a month in March under the old Plus pricing. The same team on Notion Plus pays $100 a month, unchanged. The same team on Google Workspace Business Standard pays $140 a month, also unchanged. Airtable went from being the cheapest of the three at this headcount to the most expensive, without a corresponding jump in what the free-tier-to-paid-tier upgrade actually unlocks.
Scale to 25 people and the gap widens further: Airtable Team runs $500 a month, Notion Plus runs $250, Google Workspace Standard runs $350. That's a genuine budget conversation at any company sizing seats past a single small team, and it's worth having before renewal rather than after a surprise invoice.
Where each one still wins
Airtable still wins when the actual workflow is relational: content pipelines with linked assets, inventory tracking across multiple tables, a lightweight CRM built from scratch. The record limits per base (1,200 free, scaling up through paid tiers) and the new pricing make it a tool you should be certain you need before committing, not one to reach for by default the way a $10 price point used to invite.
Notion still wins for teams that already live in Notion for documentation and want lightweight databases without adding a second subscription. It won't replace Airtable for anything genuinely relational, but for a content calendar or a simple tracker, paying for Notion you already have beats paying for Airtable you'd have to introduce.
Google Sheets still wins for anyone who doesn't actually need a database, just a shared spreadsheet with real-time collaboration. It's free for personal use and cheap for business accounts, and most teams asking "Airtable or Sheets" haven't actually hit the point where Sheets breaks.
The recommendation, adjusted
Choose Airtable only if your workflow is genuinely relational and you've confirmed the new $20 or $45 seat price against your actual headcount, not the $10 figure a lot of older comparisons, including the March version of this one, still cite. Choose Notion if you're already paying for it and your database needs are lightweight. Choose Google Sheets if you haven't actually outgrown a spreadsheet yet, which is more teams than admit it.
If Airtable's new pricing pushes your evaluation toward a self-hosted alternative, the NocoDB vs Airtable comparison covers that option directly, and the original Airtable vs Sheets vs Notion comparison has the fuller feature-by-feature breakdown this refresh builds on.