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How to choose an Airtable import tool
Getting API data into Airtable once is easy. Keeping a table of customers, orders or stock in sync every hour without ever overwriting the wrong record is harder. These are the questions worth asking of any tool, including ours.
Write safety
| Ask | Why it matters | Rowvela |
|---|---|---|
| Can I see the changes before anything is written? | A wrong mapping or a changed API is caught before it reaches your table, not after. | Row-by-row preview of new, changed, unchanged and deleted records with old and new values. |
| How are existing records matched? | Matching by row order or by an ambiguous field can overwrite the wrong record when the source changes order. | Upsert needs a key of one to three fields; duplicate or empty keys block the write. |
| When does it delete records? | An empty or partial response must never wipe a table. | Deletes are optional, listed in the preview, never happen on an empty response and need confirmation above a threshold. |
| How does it know the last page was reached? | Stopping at the first short page silently imports only part of the data. | Stops on an empty page or when the API says there are no more pages; a repeated page or a reached cap is an error. |
| What happens when a scheduled run looks unusual? | Automated runs happen when nobody is watching. | Runs that would change more than 25% of records or lose more than 30% of rows wait for approval. |
| Can I undo a run? | Mistakes happen; the question is how much work they cost. | Every run keeps field-level history and can be reverted, leaving anything edited since untouched. |
Practical questions
| Ask | Rowvela |
|---|---|
| Where does it run? | A separate web app connected to Airtable by OAuth or a personal access token. |
| Which sources does it read? | REST with any method, GraphQL, CSV, JSON, XML and RSS by URL or upload, and other Airtable bases. |
| How often can it run? | On a schedule down to every 5 minutes, from webhooks, Airtable buttons and triggers. |
| Does it work for a team? | Owner and Creator roles in every workspace, with history of who ran what. |
| Can it move my existing setups? | It imports exported configurations; see sources. |
| Does it have a fixed outbound IP? | Not yet. APIs that allow only listed IP addresses cannot be used. |
Pricing to look at
Check what a plan counts. In a typical sync most rows are unchanged, so a limit on records read grows with the size of the source, while a limit on records written grows only with real changes. Rowvela counts only rows it writes (new, changed or deleted). During the pilot Rowvela is free; paid plans will be announced after it.