Yeah it's common in business. Normally it's in a spreadsheet on a shared drive, so this is a step up.

Businesses change fast and don't always have internal development resources to create an application to do this sort of thing.

Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes (and to a lesser extent SharePoint) both had these characteristics and are quite popular for the long tail of business processes that aren't covered by dedicated vendors. The only problem is the tech tends to age and it becomes hard to migrate the 1000+ bespoke "apps" that live inside the enterprise.

"anyone change anything anytime" is much better than "hey can you email me that excel file? I'll make a few changes and then email it back to you" "actually I don't have the latest version, Person X has it and they're currently merging someone else's changes, so be patient"

It’s my understanding that the main selling feature of AirTable is the hard coded views that they offer; calendars, kanban style planners, things like that. The slightly more structured nature of relational tables over spreadsheets lets you implement those fairly reliably.

I use the free tier as a collaborative Kanban board for a tiny 5 person team.

Airtable allows me to define arbitrary fields for the Kanban cards, which happens to be a premium/paid feature in all the actual Kanban saas tools (Trello, etc).

It sounds like https://notion.so can do that too, besides being a real-time collaborative document editor, wiki, spreadsheet, etc etc

It isn't on Jira if you're <10 users, but Jira is a whole lot more than just Kanban and a huge beast.

JIRA would not just overkill but a bad fit for us, potentially requiring extensive configuration.

We're an academic research lab that also happens to do contractual work for other labs (mostly internal to the university), mostly designing and building mechanical prototypes and testbeds for other researchers.

It took like 5 minutes to set up an airtable base to track our WIP and all information we use for billing our "customers": hours, material purchased, internal budget reference, etc.