The essentials in 30 seconds
- Excel is unbeatable at low volume, and it breaks at around five enquiries a month: no alerts, no history, no link to your cost plans.
- Notion and Airtable can model everything, but everything has to be built and maintained by you, and the re-typing into your production tools remains.
- HubSpot and generic CRMs speak leads and deals: powerful, but designed for sales teams, not for a studio that sells projects.
- The deciding criterion isn't price: it's what happens the day the prospect says yes. Re-typing or continuity?
- A trade tool earns its place when the prospect file becomes the project, the cost plan and the client portal with no re-typing.
First, a studio's real requirements
Before comparing logos, let's define what "tracking your clients" means in an interior design studio. We detailed it in our CRM guide for interior designers, and it comes down to five functions: a single front door for enquiries, a file that speaks construction (property type, floor area, works budget, timeline), a pipeline that reflects the real journey (first meeting, concept, proposal, agreement), the switch from prospect to project with no re-typing, and the memory of your business: where clients come from, how many convert.
It's against these five functions that the four families of tools should be judged, not on the length of their feature list.
The spreadsheet: unbeatable to start, fragile from ten projects
Excel or Google Sheets is the default solution, and it's more defensible than people admit. Zero cost, instant to pick up, free structure: for a studio receiving two or three enquiries a month, a well-kept "prospects" tab does the job.
The cracks appear with volume. The spreadsheet never warns you: no alert when a prospect has been waiting five days for a reply, no follow-up reminder. The history of your exchanges lives in your inbox, disconnected from the sheet. The file exists on one computer only, or splits into contradictory versions. And above all, it leads nowhere: the day the prospect signs, everything gets copied by hand into the cost plan and then into project tracking.
Notion, Airtable: flexibility, at the price of building everything
Notion and Airtable have a genuine proposition: relational databases, kanban views, forms, all of it shapeable at will. A studio comfortable with these tools can build itself a respectable CRM: a prospect base, a project base, views by status.
The cost sits elsewhere. First in build time: the trade fields, the views, the templates, the automations, everything has to be created, then maintained as your practice evolves. Then in discipline: a Notion base doesn't fill itself in, and its value collapses at the first week of neglected entry. Finally, the fundamental limit is the same as the spreadsheet's: Notion will never produce your cost plan or your client portal. The re-typing into production tools remains intact. An excellent second brain, but not a production tool.
HubSpot, Pipedrive: powerful, but designed for someone else
Generic CRMs are excellent products, built for a profession that isn't yours. Their world: leads to score, email sequences, deals to close, sales teams to manage. For a one-to-three-person studio, that translates into three frictions: fields to bend into shape ("company", "annual revenue" where you need floor area, works budget, property type), a configuration that becomes a recurring non-billable chore, and a pipeline that stops precisely where your profession begins, the moment the project starts.
Then there's the question of cost: the free versions are entry products, and the useful functions (automations, reports) arrive with per-user paid tiers designed for sales teams. You pay for an engine and only ever use one cylinder.
The trade tool: continuity as the argument
A trade tool for interior designers takes the problem from the other end: it doesn't try to be the world's best CRM, it makes sure the prospect file, the cost plan, the project and the client portal are the same object, at different stages. The file speaks construction natively. The pipeline ends with an agreement that opens a project. And the day of the yes, nothing gets copied: the file becomes the folder.
There is a trade-off: less flexibility than a Notion, less marketing depth than a HubSpot. If your business runs on sophisticated email campaigns, a trade tool won't handle them. Its bet is different: in a studio, the value isn't in marketing automation, it's in the non-billable hours removed between the incoming enquiry and the delivered project.
The comparison, criterion by criterion
| Criterion | Spreadsheet | Notion / Airtable | Generic CRM | Trade tool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry cost | Zero | Low | Free then per-user tiers | Monthly subscription |
| Setup time | Immediate | High (everything to build) | Medium to high (configuration) | Low (native trade structure) |
| Construction client file | Free-form columns | To model yourself | Custom fields to create | Native |
| Profession-fit pipeline | None | Kanban to build | Generic, sales-oriented | Native, ends with the client's agreement |
| Cost plan / project link | None | None | None | The file becomes the project |
| Client portal | None | Shared pages, static | None (third-party module) | Native, under your brand |
| Alerts and follow-ups | None | To automate yourself | Yes, to configure | Native |
| Breaks from | ~5 enquiries/month | First week without discipline | Never, but diminishing ROI | Advanced marketing needs |
How to choose: three questions
- How many enquiries are you losing? If the answer is "none, I'm on top of it", stay on your current tool. If you can't answer, that's already an answer.
- What happens the day of the yes? Count the re-entries between the client's agreement and the actual project kick-off. Each one is a recurring cost and a chance for error.
- Who maintains the tool? A well-built Notion is worth exactly what the person maintaining it is worth. In a one-to-three-person studio, that person usually has better things to do.
So, what about Nodal?
Nodal is a trade tool in the strict sense of this comparison: enquiries land in a single list, the prospect file speaks construction, and when the client says yes, the same file becomes the project, the cost plan and the client portal under your brand, without a single re-entry. The activity report answers the origin and conversion questions on one screen. The best way to judge whether that continuity delivers is still to see it on a real case from your studio.