Artavolo vs Excel
An Excel alternative, hosted in Europe
Excel: The spreadsheet most shared trackers start in, from Excel 2.0 to Microsoft 365. Artavolo is where your team and your AI agents work on the same tables, with no record limit, in our cloud in Germany or on your own server. Here is how they compare, with sources, and where Excel is ahead.
| Artavolo | Excel | |
|---|---|---|
| Records | No limit, on every plan, the free one included | 1,048,576 rows per sheet, but sharing slows down long before |
| Working together | Everyone in the same base at once, changes shown live | Co-authoring in Microsoft 365; files copied by e-mail otherwise |
| Who sees which rows | Rules per table, such as only their own records, held by the server | Whoever has the file sees all of it |
| Links between sheets | Link fields, lookups and rollups between tables | VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP formulas |
| Forms, kanban, calendar | Forms, kanban, calendar, gallery, timeline and dashboards | Not in the file |
| AI agents | Each with its own access; their changes can wait for a person to accept them, and everything one did can be undone | See Excel’s own AI features |
| Where Excel is ahead | The most flexible grid there is, for analysis and one-off calculations. | |
| Everyone already knows it. |
Why teams look elsewhere
What people moving from Excel tell us about
- Copies by e-mail, and nobody knows which one is current.
- Anyone with the file sees every row.
- No history of who changed what.
What Artavolo adds
Tables for people and AI agents
- No record limit on any plan, and the same price in our cloud in Germany or on your own server.
- Grid, kanban, calendar, gallery, timeline, forms and dashboards, and interfaces for people who should see one page and nothing else.
- AI chat that changes records as the person asking, and AI agents whose changes wait for review.
- An append-only audit log of every change, a 30-day trash, and an export of any table at any time.
- Airtable’s API at the same paths, Zapier, Make and n8n apps, and webhooks.
Moving
From Excel in an afternoon
Export from Excel (The workbook itself: .xlsx, .xls of any version (Excel 2.0 on), .xlsm, .xlsb, or CSV), and bring the files in: what comes over is shown before anything is made, and a report says what came over and what to rebuild.
- Every sheet, a table each, with the header row found under any title rows
- Formulas repeated down a column, as formula fields checked record by record against Excel
- A column naming another sheet's rows as a link, and a VLOOKUP through it as a lookup
- Currency, percent and dates in the workbook's style; merged cells filled down; a totals row left out
Questions
Asked by teams on Excel
Yes: every Excel since 2.0, including .xls files from Excel 95 and 97-2003, and .xlsb. It is read in your browser.
A formula written the same way down a column (=B2*C2) becomes a formula field, {Price} * {Qty}, and the report checks its results against Excel's, record by record. Formulas that reach other rows come over as their values, said in the report.
A VLOOKUP into another sheet becomes a link to that sheet's record and a lookup of the value, so it follows the record when it changes.
Compare