You have two tabs open. One is Whalesync's pricing page, the other is ours, and the question is which one keeps your Airtable base and your Google Sheet telling the same story without you doing it by hand every Monday.
Both tools do that. They do it at different speeds, for different money, and they stop being the right answer at different points. This page is written by the people who make one of them, so the section that sends you to the other one comes with real numbers attached and it is the one to read first. Every Whalesync figure below was checked on their own site and docs on 22 July 2026.
Buy Whalesync if a change made in one tool has to appear in the other within seconds, if fewer than 500 records need to stay in agreement, or if your Airtable base also has to stay level with Webflow, Notion, Postgres or Stripe. Buy Airtable to Sheets if a three-hour refresh is fast enough, the table is big, and you want one flat bill of $39 a month for two-way sync between exactly those two tools.
Quick comparison
| Airtable to Sheets | Whalesync | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $9/month, one-way, up to 3 tables or views | $5/month Personal, which does not include the Google Sheets connector |
| Cheapest plan for this pairing | $9/month one-way, $39/month two-way | $20/month Starter |
| Refresh | Every 3 hours on a schedule, plus manual sync any time | Published as real-time. No interval figure stated on the site or in the docs |
| Direction | One-way. Two-way on the $39 plan, pushed when you press a button | Two-way on every plan |
| Record limit | None | 250 on Personal, 500 on Starter, up to 50,000 on Plus and Pro |
| Per-user charge | None | None shown on the pricing page |
| Where it runs | In your Google account, in the Sheets sidebar | On Whalesync's own servers |
| Apps it connects | Airtable and Google Sheets | 15 connectors listed in their docs, including Webflow, Notion, Postgres, Stripe |
| Free trial | 7 days, no credit card | 2 weeks |
| Airtable views | Sync a base, a table, or a view, with its filter and sort | Supported, and their docs say view-based syncing does not run with two-way sync |
All Whalesync figures checked on 22 July 2026.
The one axis that decides this
Everything else is detail. The decision is how long a change is allowed to sit in one tool before it appears in the other, and what that speed costs at your row count.
Whalesync runs on its own servers, and its Airtable connection asks for permission to watch the base for changes, so it reacts to an edit rather than waiting for a clock. Their published wording is "real-time updates" on every plan and, on the homepage, "when data changes in one app, it syncs to the other instantly". They publish no interval in seconds or minutes anywhere we could find, so treat "instant" as their claim rather than a measured number.
Airtable to Sheets is a Google Sheets add-on. It runs on Apps Script inside your Google account, and Google caps scheduled triggers in Workspace add-ons at roughly one run per hour. That limit belongs to Google, and no add-on on the Marketplace can code around it, ours included. Our scheduled sync runs every 3 hours, inside the ceiling with room to spare and paced for Airtable's own request limits. The full argument sits in syncing Airtable to Google Sheets automatically.
So the split is not a feature list, it is a platform difference. If your job needs minutes, a Sheets add-on cannot serve you and no pricing changes that.
Records are the second price axis
Whalesync prices by records in sync, and their pricing page defines that fairly: a record counts once when it first syncs, records are not double counted across the two apps, and updates to a record already counted are unlimited. Google Sheets is not one of the four connectors on the $5 Personal plan, so this particular job starts at Starter, which is $20 a month for 500 records in sync.
Above 500 you are on Plus at $40 a month for 1,000 records in sync, or Pro at $200 a month for 2,000. Both tiers carry a record-count selector, so the published figure is the entry point for that tier rather than the whole story, and the price climbs with the count you pick, up to 50,000.
Airtable to Sheets has no record cap. A 40,000 row table costs the same as a 40 row table, because the plan prices the sync, not the data. Airtable's own limits still apply to your base, and no sync tool raises them.
What two-way sync actually writes back
This is where a comparison page usually gets vague, so here is ours in plain terms. On the $39 Business plan, you edit cells in the synced tab and the add-on remembers which rows you touched. Nothing moves until you press Push edits to Airtable in the sidebar. Edited rows then update their records, and a row typed into a blank line creates a new one, with its record ID appearing in the locked first column.
What writes back: text and long text, numbers, currency, percent, dates, checkboxes, single select, multi-select, rating, duration, email, phone, URL and barcode.
What does not: anything Airtable calculates for itself, meaning formulas, rollups, lookups, counts, autonumber, created and modified stamps, buttons and AI fields. Nobody can write to those. Four more that Airtable would accept are deliberately left alone: linked records, attachments, and both kinds of collaborator field. A flat spreadsheet cell does not carry enough to rebuild those safely, so edits there are ignored rather than pushed as something wrong. Deleting a row in the Sheet does not delete the record in Airtable either.
Whalesync's Airtable documentation lists linked records, attachments and multi-select among the fields it syncs in both directions, and marks formulas, rollups, lookups, created-by, rating, duration and barcode as one-way out of Airtable. If a linked record or an attachment has to travel from the spreadsheet back into the base, that is a real capability difference and it points at them.
What lands in the cell, and where each one lives
Both tools flatten Airtable into a grid, and both put a system column at the left edge you should leave alone. Ours asks Airtable for display values, so a linked record arrives as the name a person would recognise rather than an internal code, and the record-ID column works as a join key in QUERY or VLOOKUP. Whalesync's docs describe their own arrangement: the first row defines the fields, one sync per sheet, and some column names carry a prefix so the connector knows a column holds a list or a link. What each Airtable field type looks like once it lands is covered in which Airtable columns survive the trip.
The bigger difference is where the tool lives. Airtable to Sheets installs into the sidebar of a spreadsheet and puts its schedule in your own Google account, so nothing else needs a login. Whalesync is a web app with a dashboard for mapping fields, previewing a sync and watching for errors: a separate account to keep an eye on, in exchange for not standing under Google's ceiling.
