Softr vs Shareables vs BlockBuilder: Which No-Code Block Tool Is Right for Your Online Business?

If you run an online business and use Airtable (or Google Sheets) to organize your data, you’ve probably hit the same wall I did: you want to display that data beautifully — on your website, inside your courses, on a sales page — without hiring a developer or spending your entire weekend copy-pasting things manually, especially when you’re dealing with a LOT of rapidly changing info, like when you’re hosting a summit, bundle, or some other collaborative event.

That’s where tools like Softr, Shareables, and BlockBuilder come in. All three let you pull live data from Airtable or Google Sheets (and many other sources, more on that below) and turn it into something your audience can actually see and interact with – clickable, filterable, searchable, and best of all: self-updating. But they do it in very different ways, at very different price points.

I’ve been using Softr in my business since 2023. It absolutely saved my life when I ran a ~$70k grossing digital product bundle with a lot of offers and moving pieces. Since then, I’ve found lots of other ways to use Softr in my business. See 8 unique ways here on my other blog. I recently grabbed Shareables on AppSumo (Tier 3), and I also just picked up BlockBuilder — a newer tool that does something none of the others can: embed live data blocks directly into emails. Both are lifetime deals; purchase once, use forever, and benefit from all the improvements to the app to come. Softr is on a subscription basis and plans start at $49/mo, so you can see the major appeal of the lifetime deals. 

Let me break down what each tool does, who it’s best for, and help you figure out which one (or combination!) makes the most sense for your business.

Softr: The Powerful, Mature Option

Softr is the OG in this space for no-code course creators and online business owners. It connects natively to Airtable and lets you build everything from simple embeddable blocks to full no-code web apps and webites, like think member portals, bundle dashboards, searchable FAQ libraries, and resource hubs. I’ve used it in eight different ways in my own business, and I’m still finding new use cases.

I love it so much I even created Softr templates and included them inside my product, Product + Affiliate Hub  for Airtable. If you want to see exactly how I set things up and a real-life, lucrative example with step-by-step tutorials, that’s a great place to start.

What I Love About Softr

• Stability and maturity. Softr has healthy MRR (that means they have a real, paying user base and therefore can afford live customer support agents and constant improvements and new feature development – its a super good thing) and a real user base. That means consistent updates, reliable customer support, a pretty lively user community forum, and a platform that’s not going anywhere.
• Build complex, powerful apps. Need a member portal with login-protected content that pulls dynamically from Airtable, Google Sheet, Notion, SmartSuite and elsewhere? Multi-page websites with multiple widgets on a single page? That’s Softr’s sweet spot. No other tool in this comparison can touch it for complexity and power.
• Strong page builder. Unlike the other two apps I’m reviewing in this post, Softr is the only one that really does let you build a whole website, with prebuilt blocks for heros, headers, footers, galleries, featured grids, pricing comparisons, CTAs, blank html blocks and more. You really can build a whole website with it, and Shareables and BlockBuilder can’t come close.
• Customizable subdomains and custom domains. You can specify your own subdomain (like yourname.softr.app) and connect a custom domain per app, so you can build genuinely branded experiences. Sometimes buying a domain and setting up a custom domain is just too much hassle, I love being able to set a custom subdomain in like… 7 seconds.
• Deep integrations. Webhooks, built-in form builders, automations/workflows, secure user accounts with login-gated content, and tons of third-party integrations make Softr incredibly versatile.
• Embeds beautifully inside courses. I use it for FAQs, template libraries, slide deck embeds, Q&A replays, and more — all embedded right inside my course platforms or on landing pages. Want to see an example? Check out my Airtable Resources page and scroll to the bottom. You’ll see all the Airtable offers I have, and every time I add a new one, it’ll magically appear there.
• Button and design customization. You can control button width, alignment, add icons, and have more granular control over fonts and sizing than Shareables offers. I know that sounds like small beans, but if you’re design obsessed like me, it matters.
• Excellent customer support. I love love love when an app or tool I pay for has a real live agent chat support feature. Not AI, not a bot, not a form, REAL humans who know and love the software and are down to roll up their sleeves with you. Softr excels here!

Where Softr Falls Short

• It’s expensive. $49/month is just the starting point. If you need more published apps, more users, or embedding features, the price climbs fast.
• Clunky design editing. Adjusting fonts, colors, and spacing feels more painful than it should for a no-code tool. 
• No live preview. You have to publish to test click and hover interactions — you can’t test them right in the dashboard like you can with Shareables.
• No email embeds. You can embed Softr blocks on webpages, but not inside emails.
• Analytics are limited or not available at all. When you’re building an app, embed or tool for your audience or team, it’s super helpful to see how they interacting with it and other analytics. Softr gates this in a higher price tier and I found what is provided to be sorta limited.

Shareables: The Smart AppSumo Deal for Course Creators and Marketers

Shareables is a newer tool currently available on AppSumo at a lifetime price — and it’s a genuinely solid deal. It takes your Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, Smartsuite, Stackby, or Excel data and turns it into interactive, embeddable widgets you can drop onto any website. I picked up Tier 3 (personally I found Tier 1 too limiting and Tier 2 was good, but not quite enough for a power user like me who is already obsessed with and heavily using this type of tool). I have been testing it thoroughly — here’s my honest take: I like it. This is a very good value, and getting better all the time. You honestly should get Shareables before it’s gone from Appsumo and you’re stuck paying for it monthly. I got the Tier 3, but I think a Tier 2 plan would work for most folks. Tier 1 is too limited in my opinion; I think you’ll use up those 10 included widgets (embeds, apps, etc) pretty quickly.

The AppSumo deal won’t last forever, so if you’ve been on the fence, this is worth paying attention to.

What I Like About Shareables

• Easy to get started with a good template library. Onboarding is smooth and the templates give you a solid starting point fast.
• Live, clickable dashboard preview. Unlike Softr, where you have to hit publish to test click and hover interactions, Shareables gives you a fully working live preview right inside the dashboard. You can click to test things, but also hover and click the Settings cog and immediately edit that element in the sidebar. I love this feature of the UI – it’s a big time-saver because sometimes its confusing on the other two apps to understand where to click to edit that specific element.
• Detail pages are fast and user-friendly to create. Easier and more intuitive than Softr for spinning up detail views.
• Excellent data source support. Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, Smartsuite, Stackby, and Excel — more flexibility than Softr or BlockBuilder for now.
• Solid built-in analytics. Track unique visitors, page loads, impressions, engagements, and payments across four time filters (last 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, last year). I wish you could export them or drill into them with custom dates/periods, but for now, you can’t.
• Password protection. A nice feature for gating content — just note the caveat below about placement.
• Payment integrations. You can gate content or take payments via PayPal or Stripe.
• One-time price on AppSumo. Way better than paying $49+/month forever. Yes, even Tier 2 or 3, suuuuuper worth it.

Where Shareables Has Limits

• Auto-generated subdomains with no customization. Published pages get a random subdomain like delightful-rapids-1.shareables.ai — you can’t customize the subdomain the way you can in Softr (where you choose yourname.softr.app). Connecting a true custom domain is possible but requires backend work.
• Limited font and button customization. Font sizing is limited to small, medium, and large — no pixel-level control. You also can’t change button width, alignment, or add icons to buttons the way you can in Softr.
• Not a true page or website builder. Each widget (card, list, or table) is a single page. To show multiple widgets together, you need to generate them separately and then embed them all on a page in your website or page builder. Softr lets you stack as many blocks as you want on one page. Published Shareables pages can have a heading and subheading, but no additional content — no text sections, no footer, no privacy policy or T&Cs. Not suitable for building a full app or site. Softr can do a LOT more.
• No user accounts or login-gated content. Softr supports user accounts so you can gate content to logged-in members. Shareables doesn’t — making it less suited for membership-style use cases.
• Only pulls visible Airtable fields. Shareables can only see fields (columns) that are shown in your linked Airtable view. If you’ve hidden columns to keep your views tidy, you’ll need to unhide them — or better yet, create a dedicated Shareables view in your Airtable base with only the fields you want to display. That way you don’t have to mess with your existing views. The data is there, but if you’ve hidden it in Airtable, it’s not accessible to you in Shareables.
• No form builder. Softr and BlockBuilder both let you build forms that push data back to Airtable. Shareables doesn’t (yet, anyway).
• Uncontrollable image gallery display. If a record has multiple images, Shareables will show all of them once published, but you can’t control how they’re displayed. Not a dealbreaker but not ideal for image-heavy content. And no dedicated Gallery feature, you’re sorta stuck with it showing all of them with a carousel.
• Add-ons are tricky. The three available add-ons (password protection, payment, item comparison) work, but getting them set up isn’t very intuitive.
• Password box placement can’t be specified. Sometimes it renders below the fold, meaning visitors may not realize content is gated without scrolling. This feature needs work and I’ll hold off on using it for the time being.
• Analytics are display-only. No CSV export and no custom date ranges — you’re limited to the four preset time filters. Wish you could set a custom period to measure engagement during a specific launch or event, even after the fact.
• Blog template has limited SEO utility. The blog template is interesting, but I wouldn’t host SEO-critical content inside a widget. It’s better suited for swipe copy, SOPs, or internal resources. Text-heavy content works okay, but image-heavy content (like graphics-alongside-swipe-copy) runs into the gallery limitation above.
• Embed load time is noticeable but acceptable. There’s a slight delay when widgets load on an external page. Not a dealbreaker, but worth knowing.
• No webhooks or workflows. Shareables doesn’t offer workflows or automation building like Softr does. You’ll need to use Airtable for that or rely on third party automation tools like Zapier or Make.

Bottom line on Shareables: It’s billed as a no-code builder for dynamic content, and it delivers on that — but it’s not nearly as powerful as Softr and is best suited for embeds and simple single-widget pages shared internally or publicly, as long as you don’t need a footer, legal pages like your privacy policy or terms and conditions, or user accounts. They’re adding new features all the time and I really like the long term outlook for this tool. Still a solid buy at the AppSumo price, especially at Tier 3. Get it here before it’s gone.

BlockBuilder: The Bonus Tool Worth Grabbing Now

BlockBuilder is a new tool, and I want to be upfront about that — it’s early in development, which means there are bugs being worked out and features being added regularly. But it does something neither Softr nor Shareables can: embed blocks directly into your emails.

In a pinch, BlockBuilder can do a lot of what Softr and Shareables can do in terms of being able to take data in Airtable or Google Sheets and turn them into embeddable blocks like a grid, list or table. But. The email use case in particular is what makes BlockBuilder worth talking about for me and why I didn’t hesitate to grab this deal. Think about it — instead of manually updating a resources or links roundup at the bottom of every newsletter, you could create a block that pulls your latest affiliate deals, testimonials, or FAQs straight from Airtable or Sheets. 

The use cases for BlockBuilder are pretty compelling: grid layouts, testimonial walls, self-updating FAQ accordions (no other tool in this comparison can put content into an accordion block — I like this a lot bc folks LOVE to poke around accordions), forms that push responses directly into Airtable, and polls and questions that can be embedded in emails.

Speaking of emails — if you’re already using a strategy like my Four by For Footers to monetize your email newsletter footer, BlockBuilder is a natural complement. Imagine your footer automatically showing your latest affiliate picks or a live testimonial — pulled from Airtable, updated without touching your email template. That’s the kind of passive, set-it-and-forget-it power that makes email marketing worth the effort.

BlockBuilder is currently available at a founding member price of $99 (normally $297) for the first 100 users. Given how many cool use cases I can already think of plus what the founder Steph is constantly sharing — especially on the email embed side — I’d grab it now before that price increases.

→ Grab BlockBuilder at the founding member price

BlockBuilder Works Best For

• Simple grid and card layouts, with action buttons and optional detail pages
• Testimonial walls that auto-update
• Self-updating FAQ accordions (only BlockBuilder does this right now)
• Forms that push data directly into Airtable or Google Sheets
• Polls and questions embeddable in emails – actually, ANY of these elements are embeddable in emails

BlockBuilder’s limitations to keep in mind

• It’s brand new — expect some bugs and a support team that’s actively building
• Embed-only — you need an existing website, page builder, or email platform
• No payment processing or user accounts
• Only integrates with Airtable and Google Sheets for now

Compatible Email Service Providers for BlockBuilder

In order for you to drop a BlockBuilder embed in an email, your email service provider needs to allow HTML blocks. Popular choices that are compatible with BlockBuilder are:

Drip (my personal fave and what I use), Kit, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, MailChimp, Encharge
Some email service providers don’t allow you to drop an html block in, so you might not be able to use BlockBuilder. A popular email service provider is FloDesk; unfortunately as of March 2026, you can’t drop an html block into a FloDesk email, so you won’t be able to use BlockBuilder with it.

Side-by-Side Comparison of Softr, Shareables, and BlockBuilder

Feature	Softr	Shareables	BlockBuilder
Pricing	$49–$149/mo	$59–$149 lifetime (AppSumo)	$99 lifetime (founding)
Data Sources	Airtable + more	Airtable, GSheets, Notion, Smartsuite, Stackby, Excel	Airtable, Google Sheets
Build Full Pages/Sites	✅	⚠️ Single-widget pages only	❌
Embeddable Blocks	Paid plans only	✅	✅
Email Block Embeds	❌	❌	✅
Form Builder	✅	❌	✅
Accordion / FAQ Block	❌	❌	✅
Custom Domain	✅	⚠️ Requires backend setup	N/A
Customizable Subdomain	✅	❌	N/A
Search & Filters	✅	✅	✅
Live Dashboard Preview	❌	✅	✅
Analytics	✅	⚠️ Display only, no export	✅
Payment Integration	✅	✅	❌
User Accounts / Login Gating	✅	❌	❌
Webhooks	✅	❌	❌
Built-in Automations	✅	❌	❌
Custom CSS/JS	✅	⚠️ Tier 3+ only	❌
Password Protection	✅	⚠️ Works but placement limited	❌
Maturity / Stability	Mature, established	Newer, growing fast	Brand new, promising
Best For	Complex apps, portals, member sites	Embeds, directories, resource pages	Live blocks on web + email

So… of Softr, Shareables, and BlockBuilder, Which One Should You Get?

Here’s my honest take, depending on where you’re at in your business:

Stick with (or start with) Softr if…

• You want to build full websites, pages, apps or member portals with login-protected content and plenty of design elements
• You rely on webhooks or built-in automations in your workflow
• You want multiple blocks on a single page, or need a full no-code website with a footer and legal pages
• You want customizable subdomains without backend work
• Complexity and long-term stability matter more than price
• You want done-for-you templates — check out my Product + Affiliate Hub which includes two Softr templates ready to go

Grab Shareables (AppSumo deal) if…

• You want Softr-style embed functionality without the monthly subscription
• You need simple, beautiful embeds for your website, courses, or resource pages or internal standalone pages that don’t need a footer on them with your legal links
• You’re using multiple data sources (especially Notion or Smartsuite)
• You want basic analytics and payment gating on your widgets
• You don’t need forms, user accounts, webhooks, or full website functionality
• Go for Tier 3 if you can — the lower tiers are too restrictive in my opinion on the number of embeds you get

Add BlockBuilder if…

• You send email newsletters and want to embed blocks inside them
• You use (or want to start using) a Four by For Footers-style email footer strategy
• You want FAQ accordions or forms that feed directly into Airtable
• You want to get in at founding member pricing before it increases
• You’re okay with being an early adopter on a tool that’s actively being improved

Can You Use More Than One?

Absolutely — and honestly, that’s where the real power is.

My current setup: Softr for complex, login-protected apps and member experiences. Shareables for public-facing embeds on my website and inside courses. And BlockBuilder for live data blocks in my email newsletters.

Each tool has its lane. If budget is a concern and you don’t need a powerhouse app/site builder, Shareables + BlockBuilder together are still a one-time investment that covers most use cases — and that’s a much better deal than Softr’s monthly fees alone.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a course creator, digital product seller, or online business owner who uses Airtable or Google Sheets, at least one of these tools belongs in your tech stack. The days of manually updating every page, every course resource list, every testimonial wall are over.

The Shareables AppSumo deal is the most versatile option at the best price right now — grab Tier 3 if you can. And if you want to put live data to work inside your emails too, BlockBuilder is worth picking up at the founding member price while it lasts.Already using Softr or curious how I use it in my business? I’ve written about it here, here, and here — or grab my Product + Affiliate Hub which includes two Softr templates ready to customize.