Airtable CRM vs Notion: How to Build a Custom CRM Database

Do not index

Hide CTA

Hide cover

Back in the day, a notebook with your contacts’ addresses and phone numbers was enough. Or a Rolodex with contact info painstakingly organized on alphabetized index cards. Pair that with a pocket calendar, and you were ready to hit the road as a 1960’s traveling salesperson.

But you dropped paper decades ago. Your phone is the one thing you won’t leave home without, and a paper list of phone numbers back in the office couldn’t be more useless. You need a CRM—a contact relationship manager—that can make sense of every lead, client, contact, customer, supplier, vendor, and service provider, every person and company with whom you and your team interact. And you need that CRM to be more flexible and easy to use than the paper address books that served generations before.

Start simple. Build a system around contact management that fits the way you work. Ensure it can grow with you, as your business and needs mature.

Here’s how, with a custom-built Airtable or Notion CRM, paired with powerful forms to make entering and updating data a cinch.

Airtable vs Notion for a custom CRM database

You likely already use Notion to keep track of your notes and ideas, that or Airtable to keep your business data in order. You could buy a purpose-built CRM like Salesforce, just like our last-century salesperson could have bought a Rolodex, but that’s overkill when you could build something better that slots right into what you already use.

The best place to build a CRM is in a tool you already use regularly.

An Airtable CRM, built with Airtable’s Lightweight CRM template

Airtable is one of the easiest ways to build a database to track anything: Projects, content, inventory, customers, and much more. It takes up the mantle from earlier visual database apps like Microsoft Access, and helped kickstart the no-code builder movement. Airtable’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet, but with the structure of a database to ensure, say, that your email field always has an actual email address. You start with a blank slate, list the data you need to track, then bring in your data bit by bit. That makes it perhaps the default choice for a CRM built the way you want.

A Notion CRM, built with Notion’s Sales CRM template

Notion, on the other hand, is one of today’s most popular notes apps, an external brain designed to keep you and your team from forgetting anything. Any time anything comes to mind, write it down in a Notion note to save it for later. That makes it, perhaps, the place you’d reach first to write down details about a call with a client, or to sketch out what a new customer needs from your team. Why not track your contact data right alongside your notes?

Both tools have their strengths and weaknesses when building a custom CRM. Airtable’s best for structured, organized, linked data—with basic notes tacked on. Notion’s best for rich notes and details—with basic database features tacked on.

What You Need in a Custom CRM

So before you start building out your CRM, it’s worth thinking about what you need to track.

Contacts.

You could keep track of them any way you want, much like a paper address book. A bit of structure, though, will make your CRM database manageable, searchable, and maintainable. If you just made a note and randomly wrote names, emails, and other details on the page, you could understand it, but your computer would have a hard time making sense of the details.

Instead, you want to track everything consistently. Have fields for first and last names, email, address details, phone numbers, and anything else you want to track. Then, you could leave a note field in Airtable or, in Notion, put freeform notes and details at the bottom of a page.

Relationships.

Then, you’ll want to track relationship details about the companies and teams each person works for. This time, you’ll make a new database table where you can store each company's name, location, industry, and other details you want to track (again, with space for freeform notes about each firm to track less standardized and structured information).

Back in your Contacts database table, you can now add a new linked field that connects each contact to their respective company—something that works in both Airtable and Notion’s tables, albeit with more features on Airtable’s side for advanced linking and nested views.

You can then expand on this idea. Your Companies table could include customers, suppliers, prospective clients, and more to keep every company together. Just add a field to the table to indicate their relationship to your company. Or, you might want to add linked fields inside of your Companies table to track when one supplier is partnered with another.

And, of course, the same could work on your contacts table, linking people who know each other across firms, so you know who to ask for an introduction. It’s a versatile approach to relationship tracking. Use it to create tables that track deals, orders, contracts, and more—anything with structured data that has any relationship to the people you interact with is fair game for your CRM to manage.

Management.

Now that everything’s in one structured, linked database, you’re lightyears ahead of the salespeople who came before you.

When you need to find someone, you can search by name, email, or date of last contact and find exactly who you need. You can find people based on relationships, employers, or suppliers.

Beyond search and filter capabilities, there’s the need to make bulk changes—updating, perhaps, a list of company email addresses after a rebrand or domain change. You could automate the process, using a tool like Zapier to find a contact by name and then update their email if it changes. Or, use mail merge to personalize PDF documents in bulk, with dynamic contact information and messaging for each individual.

What’s more, a custom-built CRM gives you more freedom over the look and feel of your database. That might be a Kanban layout for contact in your sales funnel, a list view for sorting clients by the last time you spoke with them, or a timeline to track how often a customer reaches out to your support team. You don’t need an enterprise app to achieve any of this.

It’s only when your CRM reaches a certain size that you might want something that can analyze sales trends, map out customer and supplier relationships, or track conversion rates at various touchpoints. But you’ll grow into that—and organizing your data before you get to that point will make your eventual transition a matter of minutes instead of days.

So first, let’s get your CRM built in either Airtable or Notion.

How to Build an Airtable CRM

Airtable gives you the most direct path to building a CRM. As a database, it’s made to store organized details about anything—and contacts are a natural fit.

You could start out with Airtable’s Lightweight CRM template and customize it as you want. If you have a well-organized spreadsheet with your contact details, you could import it into Airtable to jumpstart your CRM. Or you could build your CRM from scratch.

Add fields for everything you want to track in your Airtable CRM

Airtable, by default, looks like a spreadsheet, with columns and rows of data. Add a column for contacts’ phone numbers, emails, addresses, names, and dates of meetings or calls. For each field, choose the correct field type so Airtable will ensure you’ve entered the right data—or at least, data that looks right—in the proper place.

Start out with contacts. Then add a new Table—essentially a new sheet, in a spreadsheet—to list Company data. Here again, add the details important to companies, such as their website, industry, and perhaps their status as your company’s client, supplier, or other corporate relationship.

Create tables for contacts, companies, and more, then add Linked records to tie them together.

Then back in your Contacts table, add a new Companies column, and select the Link to another record field type. Pick your new Companies table, select to link the Name field, and you’re good to go.

And that’s a basic CRM. Now you can add all of your contacts, link them to the companies they work for, and track relationships with leads, customers, suppliers, and business partners.

You can also take it to the next step with additional tables and views. Views let you filter data—perhaps to see every company with 3 active deals or with 10 or more employees—then rearrange data in calendars, kanban boards, and more.

Linked records and status fields, combined with filters and views, let you build powerful, detailed CRMs in Airtable

Another option is to combine views with new tables. Say you want to keep track of more details about deals. For instance, you could add a new Deals table and choose Airtable’s Kanban board, organizing it by a Stage field where you indicate if deals are at the proposal, won, or in-progress stage. And, of course, you can link those deals back to the company and related contacts, to keep everything everywhere all at once.

Airtable’s only limitation is in notes—with only space to add small, basic details to contacts.

There’s only one downside to an Airtable CRM: Notes. You can add notes on each bit of data—each contact, company, and deal, that is—but notes are only basic rich text in a tiny form field, hardly conducive to writing details about every call you have with clients. So you could improvise. You could add call notes in the comments, perhaps, or add a new table for Calls that’s linked to contacts with more granular details.

Airtable’s strength is in its flexible database—and as long as you aren’t worried about keeping detailed notes, it might be the perfect place to start out your CRM journey.

How to Build a Notion CRM

For a notes-centric contact workflow, Notion is another custom CRM option. Out of the box, Notion’s sole focus is rich, detailed notes, with headings, images, embedded data from other apps, and long-form text. It’s the natural place to jot down summaries of calls, meetings, and other client interactions—and that makes it a great CRM companion, at least.

But it can also be a solid starter CRM, one built around intuitive insights into customers more than the raw data. You could start Notion’s Sales CRM template or start fresh on your own.

In Notion, everything’s a note—even databases.

To build a CRM in Notion, start with a new blank note. There, type /database and add a new database to your note, adding columns for contact name, email, and more to track everything you need to know about your clients and customers and more.

Below that—or on another note, if you want—add another database, this time to track companies. List the important details again, including the company name, address, website, and more.

You can’t add multiple tables in a Notion CRM, but you can add Relations between two separate Notion databases.

Finally, bring them together with a Relation field that lets you link data between tables. Add a new Relation field to your Contacts table, select the Company table, and choose to show the relationship on both the contact and company. That’ll let you mark that Jane works at Acme Corp, along with any other details you’d like to track.

Notion’s notes let you add details about anything to your contacts.

You can dig deeper if you want, adding a new field for deal status, along with a new view to organize deals in a Kanban board or visualize due dates on a calendar. But Notion’s best for notes. For that, click the Open button on any contact or company to open a full note where you can add any details you want. Type away, add formatting, and bring in your whole team to share their thoughts about this deal. Linking data is a bit tricky in Notion, and having separate databases for everything can be confusing, but it's with notes that Notion shines as a CRM.

Forms: The CRM Glue

Now that you’ve sorted out the data storage side of the equation, how about actually populating your CRM with new records? Adding new contacts. Logging calls, emails, and other interactions. Everything hinges on how data entry is handled. Most of the time, it’s with a form.

With the form route, you could move CRMs, rebuild your entire data system, and let your team rely on the exact same workflow. All you have to do is connect your form to a new database, say, pushing submission data to Salesforce instead of Airtable, and most people won’t even notice anything has changed.

Fillout forms are the bridge you need between you and your CRM. It makes it especially easy with deep integrations with Notion and Airtable along with CRM integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and more. You can map any Fillout form field to an Airtable or Notion database entry—or change that form field to link to a Salesforce or HubSpot contact field, if you ever decide to switch.

So let’s build forms for our Airtable CRM, then switch them over to Notion if we decided later to switch.

Fillout pulls in all of your Airtable and Notion database fields, so you can build forms for your CRM in seconds

Start out with a free Fillout account. Create a new form, choose to Connect, then pick an Airtable form (or a Notion form, if that’s where you built your CRM). Choose a theme, then connect Airtable, select your CRM database, and choose the Contacts table.

Fillout will automatically create the correct fields for every contact field in your database. Drag and drop the ones you want into your form, and they’ll be automatically linked to their corresponding field in Airtable or Notion.

Fillout works with linked fields, too, so you can select and even add a new company to contacts as you add them to your CRM.

That works for linked, relational fields too. Add the Company field to your form, and you’ll see an option to add new records in the right sidebar. Enable that, and your team can add new contacts and companies at the same time.

Save your form, publish it, and make that the primary way your team adds new contacts to your CRM. From there, you can create other forms to log interactions, list new deals, update relationships, and track anything else you want in your CRM. You could even use AI to help make your forms to speed up your work in Fillout even more.

Decide to switch CRMs? Fillout’s integrations let you redirect your form data to any other app you want.

If you ever decide to switch to a different CRM, you can tweak your Fillout form to work with the new tool. To do that, open your form, click the Integrations tab, then select your new CRM. With Salesforce or HubSpot, you could set Fillout to add data to both of those apps and Airtable at the same time. With Notion, though, you’d first need to disconnect your form from Airtable, then connect it to Notion, and go through the form to re-link your form fields to their alternative homes in Notion.

Or, just keep tweaking. The beauty of a hand-built CRM with a form-powered UI is that it can be exactly what you want, as simple or as detailed as you need. And it can grow with you right up until it needs to be replaced—with forms helping bridge the gap.