Softr Review: What It Does Well, Where It Falls Short, and the Alternatives

Catalytics is a Softr partner. We build client portals on Softr for our clients, and we are listed in Softr’s partner directory. Please read this review with that in mind. We have tried to be as specific about Softr’s limits as about its strengths, because the limits are the part a partner has the least reason to write about.

Is Softr a legitimate site?

Yes. Softr is a real company with a real product: its pricing page shows SOC 2 Type II and GDPR badges, its site names customers such as Netflix, Google, Stripe and UPS, and Softr says more than a million builders use it. We have built client portals on it for our own clients.

What Softr does well

Showing each person only their own records. This is the reason most of our Softr projects exist. Softr’s permissions reach down to the individual record, so one portal can serve dozens of clients who each see only their own projects, documents and invoices. In a custom build that isolation takes real development work, and on Softr it is configured rather than coded.

Working with the data you already have. Softr can sit in front of an Airtable base and stay in sync with it, or it can run on its own database. A team that already lives in Airtable does not have to move anything to give clients a login.

Building standard pages from existing blocks. Lists, detail pages, forms, charts and dashboards come ready-made, so most of the effort in a portal goes into deciding who sees what, rather than into building screens.

Pricing that suits portals. Each paid plan includes a set number of client users, 50 on Pro at $99 a month billed annually, which is a very different shape from paying per external guest.

Where Softr falls short

Complex logic. Softr offers custom code from the Pro plan. When most of an app turns out to be edge cases, though, the custom code starts doing the real work, and at that point Softr is carrying less of the build than it seems.

Unusual designs. Pages are assembled from blocks. That keeps them consistent and quick to change, and it also means a layout that does not fit the blocks is hard to achieve.

Apps for the App Store. Softr offers installable web apps and push notifications on the Business plan, and those cover most portal use. They are web apps, though, rather than native ones you can publish to an app store.

Single sign-on. SAML and OpenID sign-in are only available on Enterprise.

Costs that move with people. Extra builders cost $5 to $20 a month depending on the plan. Softr also counts anyone who logs in with a free email address, Gmail included, as a client user, so staff on personal addresses use up client seats.

Workflow limits that pause automations. Every plan caps the workflow actions executed each month, and when a workspace hits the cap Softr pauses the workflows until the limit renews or you upgrade.

Is Softr free forever?

Softr says its Free plan is free forever. It includes unlimited apps, up to 3 builders, 5 app users, 1,000 records per database and 500 workflow actions a month, which is enough to build and test a real app before paying for it.

How much does Softr cost?

Softr’s paid plans cost $19, $99 and $329 a month on annual billing for Basic, Pro and Business, or $25, $119 and $395 billed monthly. For client portals, Pro is the usual starting point, because Basic includes only five client users. We broke the numbers down by team size in Softr pricing.

Softr alternatives, and when each one fits better

These are the tools that come up when clients ask us what else they should look at.

Airtable Interfaces and Portals. If your team already works in Airtable and only a few outside people need access, Airtable’s own Interfaces and its Portals add-on can be enough. Portals starts at $120 a month for 15 guests on the Team plan, so the cost climbs as the guest list grows. We covered that in Airtable client portal limits.

Glide. Glide is the tool we point people to when the app is mostly used on a phone and the data lives in Google Sheets. For a client portal on Airtable data, we usually find Softr the better fit.

Bubble. Bubble gives you much more control over logic and design. That control comes with a much higher build cost and more time to get it right, and most portals do not need it.

Noloco. Noloco covers similar ground to Softr, portals and internal tools on top of existing data, and it is worth comparing side by side if you are choosing between the two.

Baserow and Stackby. Both are closer to databases than to portal builders. Baserow is open source and can be self-hosted, which matters to teams that need to keep data on their own servers.

Lovable and other AI coding tools. They generate the code for an app from a description. That gives you more freedom than Softr and more to look after, because the code, the sign-in and the permissions become largely yours to look after.

A custom build. When an app needs logic, design or integrations that no no-code tool handles cleanly, a custom build is usually the next step, and it is the one we recommend when a client reaches Softr’s limits.

Which is better, Glide or Softr?

It depends on where the app will be used. Glide suits apps people mostly use on a phone, often built on Google Sheets. Softr suits portals and internal tools used in a browser, where different people need to see different records, especially when the data is in Airtable.

Should you use Softr?

Use Softr when the job is a client portal or an internal tool, where the hard part is making sure each person sees the right records, and especially when your data is already in Airtable. Look elsewhere when the app is a product for the public, needs to be in an app store, or depends on logic that keeps growing.

If you want the basics first, what Softr is and whether you still need Airtable covers them, and Softr examples shows what businesses actually run on it. For a portal built by the team that wrote this review, Softr development is how we work.