# Airtable vs Grist (slim)

> Airtable scores 70.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Grist's 50.1 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Grist leads on maintenance & community. Both do sheets records. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtable-vs-grist.md (~2,350 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtable-vs-grist.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtable-vs-grist
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Airtable scores 70.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Grist's 50.1 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Grist leads on maintenance & community. Both do sheets records.

- Airtable: BB 70.9, rank #124 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/airtable.min.md
- Grist: D 50.1, rank #597 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/grist.min.md
- Airtable, good for Teams that already keep operational data in Airtable and want an agent to read, filter and update typed records or build bases through MCP. Ahead on Reliability, 94 against 39; Schema & documentation, 73 against 63; Agent ergonomics, 68 against 57; Security & auth, 78 against 62; Transparency & trust, 86 against 61. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; No incidents deducted, where Grist loses 4 points for them.
- Grist, good for Teams that want a relational spreadsheet with Python formulas and per-document OAuth grants for an agent, or that need to self-host. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 78 against 49. Also Open source.

| Category | Airtable | Grist |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 94 | 39 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 73 | 63 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 68 | 57 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 78 | 62 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 49 | 78 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 86 | 61 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Airtable | Grist |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Formagrid Inc (Airtable) | Grist Labs Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.airtable.com` | `https://docs.getgrist.com/api` |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Airtable's Terms of Service and Developer Terms. The airtable.js client and the MCP CLI on GitHub are MIT | Apache-2.0 for the community edition in gristlabs/grist-core. The full edition, which adds the MCP server, the OAuth server and audit log streaming, is proprietary and needs an activation key after a 30-day trial. Docs are CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Tools exposed | 40 | 34 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| MCP registry | `com.airtable/mcp` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-08-07 | 2026-09-28 |
| Terms last updated | 2024-05-31 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-07-15 | 2019-04-01 |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 2.2k stars, 569k npm/wk | 12k stars, 341 npm/wk, 240 PyPI/wk |