Comment by DaveWalk

From a business side of things, the advantage of Salesforce is that it can very easily be managed by non-devs. It has straightforward sales functions baked in: reporting, forecasting contact management. For sure, Airtable can be used as a lightweight CRM. Depending on your business, it might be all you need -- it might even be preferred if you're bootstrapping and constantly iterating early on! But Airtable falls down when your sales/marketing needs grow -- those hires probably won't have the patience to develop tools that tie into Airtable. To reference the old Jim Barksdale line, Salesforce is the "bundle" option, and Airtable is the "unbundle" one.