Airtable vs SeaTable: pricing, row limits, and EU hosting

The short version

SeaTable is cheaper than Airtable at every equivalent tier, gives you a far larger free plan, and stores cloud data in Germany rather than the United States. Airtable is the bigger product with the deeper integration catalogue and the interface most people have already used. If your decision hinges on cost per seat or on where the data physically sits, SeaTable answers both. If it hinges on ecosystem, Airtable still wins.

Airtable pricing

Airtable's pricing page lists four tiers, all cloud-only:

Figures checked against airtable.com/pricing in August 2026. There is no self-hosted Airtable at any of these tiers, including Enterprise Scale.

SeaTable pricing

SeaTable sells a hosted cloud and a self-installed server, and the two are priced on completely different logic. The cloud tiers, from seatable.com:

Figures checked against seatable.com/prices on 9 August 2026.

The free plans are not close

Airtable's free plan holds 1,000 records per base. SeaTable's holds 10,000 rows per base, ten times as many, plus 2 GB of storage and up to 25 users on unlimited bases and tables. For a small team keeping an inventory, a content calendar, or a client list, that gap is often the difference between paying nothing and paying per seat.

The same pattern holds one tier up. Airtable Team gives 50,000 records per base for $20 a seat billed yearly. SeaTable Plus gives the same 50,000 rows per base for €7 a user billed yearly. You are paying roughly a third as much for the same headroom. Airtable Business buys 125,000 records per base at $45 a seat, more than SeaTable Enterprise's 100,000 rows at €14, so Airtable does pull ahead on raw capacity at the top of the self-serve range, but at more than three times the price per user.

Where the data lives

SeaTable is made by SeaTable GmbH, a German company founded in July 2020 by Ralf and Christoph Dyllick-Brenzinger. SeaTable states that data stored in its cloud is processed exclusively in German data centres. For a European organisation that has to answer questions about where personal data is processed, that is a shorter conversation than explaining a US cloud provider and the transfer mechanism behind it. Airtable is a San Francisco company and hosts its cloud on its own US-based infrastructure.

This is worth being precise about. EU hosting is not the same as compliance, and no vendor's data centre location makes your processing lawful on its own. It removes one specific problem, the international transfer, and leaves the rest of the work with you.

Self-hosting, and the catch

SeaTable Server installs on your own hardware through Docker and is free for up to 3 users, which is genuinely usable for a solo operator or a pair. Above that, the 10, 25 and 50-plus user licences are quoted by SeaTable's sales team on annual terms of one, two or three years. There is no published per-user figure for those tiers. Self-hosted SeaTable runs the full Enterprise feature set rather than a stripped-down community build, so the trade is money for capability rather than the usual open-core arrangement where the free edition is deliberately thinner.

The licensing is mixed. SeaTable's own repository lists dtable-web, dtable-events and thumbnail-server under the Apache License v2 and seaf-server under AGPLv3, while dtable-server, the component that handles live table data, is under a proprietary licence. SeaTable is source-available in parts, not a fully open-source product, and it should not be described as one.

That matters if the reason you want to self-host is independence rather than data location. If you want software you can run, fork, and keep running with no vendor relationship at any team size, Baserow's MIT-licensed edition is the closer fit, since it carries no user cap and no licence fee at all. SeaTable's self-hosting is better understood as running the commercial product on your own metal.

What Airtable still does better

Airtable has more third-party integrations, a much larger template library, and an interface that new hires are likely to have used before. Its automation and interface-builder features are more developed, and the amount of community documentation, tutorials, and consultants available is not comparable. SeaTable's ecosystem is smaller, and more of its documentation and support conversation happens in German.

Both are worth testing on the same real dataset before deciding. The pricing difference is large enough to be the deciding factor for many teams, and the hosting difference is decisive for some, but neither survives the tool being wrong for the actual work.

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