I am looking to create a search tool on Webflow, that allows a user to enter some information and it return information from an external database. The information will just need to be retrieved and displayed in the HTML baed on the user input into the search form.
I am currently looking at Xano as the backend database, but also was considering Airtable to play the role of the database. Happy to be open minded on this and listen to your thoughts also.
Depends on the data you’re storing, how you’re querying it, and what you need to download and display.
Airtable is good for basic tabular data structures but it is not designed for production hosting live data on a website. Might work but it will break or block you if traffic exceeds its threshold.
Probably look at Xano or Supabase for your data storage, they’re pretty flexible and should provide decent options for client-side querying ( CORS-compatible APIs ).
If not you’ll need to build your own, probably using serverless functions on something like Netlify.
If you have a lot of data coming back, take a look at Finsweet CMS Load. Alex the CTO did some tutorials on how to load and paginate data from an external data source.