Tutorials
How to use Whalesync for two-way syncing between Airtable and Webflow

How to use Whalesync for two-way syncing between Airtable and Webflow

connor finlayson
Connor Finlayson
November 19, 2022

What is Whalesync?

Whalesync is a no-code automation tool that allows you to sync data between two platforms like Webflow and Airtable, Notion and Bubble, and plenty more.

Unlike a lot of automation tools like make.com or Zapier, Whalesync makes easy for you to set up a two-way syncing workflow that ensure that both databases stay consistent regardless of whether you make a change in one platform or the other.

Editing content via the Webflow CMS

One of the key advantages of a two-way syncing tool is that you can easily edit content in whatever platform you want. I created a demo where I synced a Webflow CMS with Airtable.

To my delight, syncing worked flawlessly when I started making changes in the Webflow CMS. After you have clicked the publish button in Webflow, you will see the changes updates in Airtable instantly.

Editing content via Airtable

The same works the other way around too. If you decide to make some changes to a record inside of Airtable you will see that those changes are reflected immediately in Webflow.

For use cases where you only use Webflow and Airtable, this hear will save you a lot of time and it is really seemless.

How to setup Whalesync?

The process of setting Whalesync up is surprisingly, especially when you compare it to other automation tools that usually required a lot of more manual configuration.

There are three steps involved with getting started:

  1. Connect your apps.
  2. Map your tables to each other
  3. Map your fields to each other

Field mapping is usually something that can be a bit finicky with automation tools, but Whalesync has an automapping tool that makes this step super easy.

All you need to do is make sure is that you have consistent naming conventions for your fields across different platforms. If you do, you will find that you won’t actually need to map any fields.

Pros and cons of two-way syncing

All up, I am really impressed with Whalesync and I think it shows how two-way syncing can be valuable. The big pros that stand out for me are:

  • Super easy to set up if you are a complete beginner
  • Near instant syncing of data between platforms
  • Great logging and issue tracking.

The only downside I see with two-way syncing is:

  • You can only do two way syncing with Airtable if you are not using views. This might be problematic if you don’t want specific Airtable records to sync.
  • You can connect your syncing workflows to any other tools like Memberstack that you might also need to update when changes are made. There are likely workarounds for this using webhooks, but if you are going to down that path you may as well just use a tool like make.com or Zapier.

In conclusion, I would say that Whalesync is a great tool. It will serve a lot of great use cases and think that if you don’t want to mess around with complex workflow set ups, this is the tool for you.