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Apr 05, 2022

Airtable Page Designer Alternative

Customer Support Engineer

In this article, we'll look at Plumsail Documents, a more functional alternative to Airtable's built-in Page Designer tool. If you'd like to extend the functionality of Page Designer and streamline your document generation processes, you've come to the right place.

Throughout this article, we will compare both and explain their strengths and weaknesses so you can decide if you need an alternative.

What is Plumsail Documents?

Plumsail Documents is a tool that allows you to automatically generate documents from templates, send the result by e-mail, collect e-signatures, or save to your favorite apps. With Zapier, you can fully integrate Plumsail Documents with Airtable.

Learn how to automatically generate contracts from Airtable data in Zapier in the documentation.

What is Airtable Page Designer?

Airtable Page Designer lets you create a variety of documents using data from your records, ranging from business cards to catalogs and invoices. The created documents can be printed or exported as PDFs.

Now let's compare Plumsail Documents to Airtable Page Designer by the following parameters:

  • Document formats
  • Delivery methods
  • Document customization

Document formats supported

Plumsail Documents

Document generation is available in multiple formats, including Word DOCX, PowerPoint PPTX, Excel XLSX, and PDF formats. For each of these formats, there are also dozens of ready-to-use templates that you can create your documents from:

Showcase of ready-made document templates to generate new documents from

Airtable Page Designer

Works only with PDF documents. There are no ready-made templates available in Airtable Page Designer.

Delivery methods

Plumsail Documents

Once the document is populated with data from Airtable, it can be saved to the cloud, sent by email, or sent for the e-signature. There are a lot of built-in delivery methods in Plumsail Documents. Here are just a few of them:

  • Gmail
  • Outlook
  • SharePoint
  • OneDrive
  • DocuSign

Showcase of Plumsail Documents built-in deliveries for the generated documents

Airtable Page Designer

Created documents can be exported by manually saving or printing them. Several options are available to help you tailor the document to your needs, such as setting the number of records to export, choosing their layout, changing page orientation, and a few other options:

Exporting the created document from Page Designer

Document customization

Plumsail Documents

All document templates are created and configured using Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — the tools you likely already know. This allows you to create versatile and beautifully designed documents, and saves you a great deal of time.

A straightforward step-by-step configuration interface with the functionality to test both your template and process won't let you make any mistakes:

Plumsail Documents process configuration interface with a pre-made Sales Quote template

Airtable Page Designer

Document templates are built with Page Designer's custom grid-based editor. You set up your templates by dragging the elements onto a grid; it's relatively easy to use, but it might take a while to smooth out and add beauty to the overall picture.

Overall, the Page Designer's editor is not very flexible and is unlikely to be suitable for creating large or complex documents.

Airtable Page Designer interface with a grid view

Summary

Pros and cons of Airtable Page Designer and Plumsail Documents: summarized

Conclusion

Now you should have an idea of what are the differences between the two. As we learned, Plumsail Documents is an excellent tool for creating large and complex documents, while easily handling the creation of small and simple ones as well. The wide range of powerful features allows you to generate almost any kind of document and eliminate all the paperwork.

However, if your goal is to create simple one-page documents that don't need any special functionality and much automation, Airtable Page Designer should be sufficient.

Getting started with Plumsail Documents

Sign up for a one-month free trial, if you’re new to Plumsail Documents.

Have any questions?
Join our community or contact the support team: