How to connect and sync Airtable to Supabase in 5 minutes with Whalesync

If you’re building today, Airtable and Supabase should be part of your tech stack. Supabase provides a scalable, production-ready backend built on PostgreSQL, perfect for building and deploying apps. Airtable is user-friendly and spreadsheet-database hybrid, making it ideal for organizing and editing structured data. 

What’s even better? Connecting and syncing the two. The challenge? These tools don’t naturally talk to each other. Integrating Airtable and Supabase, and keeping it updated often means writing scripts, setting up cron jobs, or constantly exporting and importing CSVs.

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how you can connect and sync Airtable to Supabase in five minutes.

Let’s begin.

Why should you connect Airtable and Supabase?

Airtable offers an intuitive, familiar spreadsheet-style interface that makes it easy to input, edit, and organize structured data. Supabase is ideal when that data needs to power a production app, dashboard, or website.

By syncing Airtable to Supabase, you can:

• Manage and update your data in Airtable while Supabase handles the backend
• Power live apps with real-time data, no manual imports or custom scripts needed

This setup gives you the flexibility of a user-friendly frontend with the strength of a scalable backend, all without writing code!

When should you connect Airtable and Supabase?

Here are a few scenarios where syncing Airtable and Supabase makes perfect sense:

• You need an admin panel for your Supabase data: Instead of building a custom admin interface, use Airtable as your control center. With syncing enabled, you can manage, update, and review data directly in Airtable, without the need to touch your backend.
• You manage product data in Airtable, but your dev team works in Supabase: Your product or ops team might be organizing features, tags, or release plans in Airtable, while developers pull data from Supabase into the live app. Syncing keeps both sides aligned, without back-and-forth updates or duplicated work.
• You enrich Supabase data with notes or additional context in Airtable:
  Customer data might live in Supabase, but your team adds context like notes, tags, or relationship insights in Airtable. Syncing ensures your enriched data is accessible wherever it’s needed, without losing consistency.
• You’re vibe coding and need data to just work: You might be building a project without deep database experience, or simply want to avoid backend complexity. Syncing Airtable and Supabase lets you stay productive without needing to manage infrastructure or write custom scripts so you can keep shipping.

How to sync Airtable and Supabase

Here’s a step by step guide to sync Airtable and Supabase.

Step 1: Create a new sync

Log in to your Whalesync account and click ‘New sync’

Step 2: Authorize your apps

Select the apps you want to connect. In this case, it’s Airtable and Notion. Then, authorize these two apps. Authorizing the apps enables Whalesync to have access to your app data in order to complete the syncs. 

When you’re authorizing the apps, you need to select the Airtable base you want to sync the data from and the Supabase organization workspace.

When you’re setting up any sync with Supabase, Whalesync automatically creates a dedicated database user, whalesync_service_account_[ID] to manage the sync. 

This dedicated user has the same permissions as your default postgres role. You’re always in control and can manage or delete this user anytime using standard Postgres commands.

Step 3: Map your tables

Choose the tables that you want to sync from Airtable to Notion. You can add multiple table mappings to a sync and related fields. You can also create the tables you want to map from Whalesync’s user interface, making it much faster to get started with your syncing.

Step 4: Map your fields

You can choose how many fields you want to map, whether you want to map all of the fields or just a few. 

If you have existing data in your Airtable base, Whalesync will match the records according to the fields you mapped.

If you are starting from a new base that doesn’t have any data, once you start entering data into your Airtable base, the data will automatically sync to Supabase.

Step 5: Activate sync

The final step is to activate your sync! Before you activate your sync, you’ll see a preview that shows you how many records will be added to each tool.

Done! Airtable and Supabase is now synced 🤝

Now it’s time to start adding to your Airtable base and view your data across both tools.

Start syncing today

Whether you’re building a full-stack app, setting up a lightweight admin panel, or just want your data to flow cleanly between tools, you need an easy way to view and access your data across both tools. 

Did you know that you can also set up a two-way sync between Airtable and Supabase? Ready to connect Airtable and Supabase? Get syncing today