Hi everyone, new here! 👋 We've been using Airtable for about six months to manage our client onboarding and internal IT ops. We started adding automations for things like sending welcome emails and updating status fields.
But lately, when a record updates, everything just... hangs. The whole base gets slow for a few seconds. It's especially bad when multiple automations trigger at once. Our team is getting frustrated waiting for pages to load.
Is this a known issue? We're on a Pro workspace plan. Does the performance get better on the Enterprise tier, or is it just the nature of how Airtable handles automations? Should we be looking at a different tool for processes that need to be real-time?
Oh that slowdown is the worst! We ran into something similar when our onboarding automations started stacking up. It's definitely a known quirk, especially with multiple triggers firing at once on the Pro plan.
From what we've seen, Enterprise tier can handle more concurrent automations without the lag, but it's not a magic fix. The real culprit is often how the automations are chained. For example, if one automation updates a record that triggers another, and that one triggers a third, you get this domino effect that bogs everything down.
Have you checked if your welcome email and status update automations are running on the same trigger? Sometimes just separating them, or adding a short delay to stagger them, makes a huge difference. Also, heavy use of lookup fields inside an automation step can really add to the processing time.
test everything twice