Airtable vs. Nintex vs. Quickbase

Airtable is an ideal platform for small and growing businesses to keep track of just about EVERYTHING they need to keep things running smoothly. It's a great way to keep tasks organized, and keep everyone on the same page with progress on all things. Our company finds the kanban particularly useful, as products go through a lifecycle from ideation to retirement, it's good to keep a database of what is in production, what's working, and what we've tried before. I can see the platform being challenging with much larger businesses, but for the small to medium businesses I've used the platform with, it is ideal.

Incentivized

We use Nintex to automate fundraising outreach at scale. It helps us send personalized emails to a large contact list, and we’d also like to automate follow-ups when there’s no reply.
If you need highly customized solutions or clean, fully controllable code, I wouldn’t recommend Nintex. It has many features, but it’s not the same as building your own system from scratch. That said, it can save a lot of time for standard automation workflows.

Incentivized

I no longer think that Quickbase is the way of the future. They do not fix major bugs in a timely manner, and are releasing basic functionality behind a paywall. I believe that Enterprise Level Tier should be given certain things, like SLAs on Support and up-time. However, as a low-code no-code platform the majority of the accounts, "builders", and users are not going to be able to justify the cost of an Enterprise Tier Plan, and won't be able to use the features that Quickbase continues to advertise.

Incentivized

• I can create tables, create and customize fields
• Airtable has capabilities commonly found in spreadsheet applications, but also has some of the features found in databases.
• The ability to filter fields. I set up a filter on the status field, so when a project is marked, complete, on hold, or canceled, that record is hidden from my current projects table view. If it is marked complete, the record is moved to the completed projects table view. In this way I can easily access a record of past projects
• Being able to duplicate tables and create alternate views
• Collapse and expand records. When I collapse the rows, I can easily scan current projects, next steps, project status, and due dates. When I expand the row, or field, I can see more detailed information about that field or record very easily. I can also expand or open the entire record. This is is helpful, when I am entering a lot of information to multiple fields in that record.

Incentivized

• Integrations with other services using various secure authentication methods, along with the seamless integration with SharePoint, are the icing on the cake. This makes it superior to other BPM tools available in the market.
• Flexibility in application development - The diverse configurable properties offer multiple ways to utilise the controls and events, affording the flexibility to expand your scope and enabling the creation and use of processes in a myriad of ways.
• The streamlined and efficient deployment process significantly accelerates release management, allowing for faster and smoother implementation of updates and new features.
• The user interface of the pages offers a more refined and appealing look and feel compared to most other BPM tools.

Incentivized

• Rapidly bring new ideas to life
• Great authentication and authorization system out of the box
• Connects with many major third-party services (via Pipelines)
• Reporting and Dashboards are awesome
• Excellent emails notification system to keep us in the loop when data changes
• Intuitive UI for building forms and reports
• Nice playground to test new ideas

Incentivized

• When records are deleted, there could be more options for what happens to associated records in other tables.
• Multi-select fields should be sortable.
• The per-user pricing model can be cumbersome when you need to share bases with third parties but can't use a publicly accessible URL.

Incentivized

• If you are creating a process with parallel subprocesses, there's no way to see, in a single view in Nintex, all the steps for the subprocesses. You have to view each sub-process in its own view, so it's hard to see what's going on at a high level.
• There isn't an easy way to filter the processes by another user (not yourself) in Nintex. There is a report that shows processes and objects by user, but that's not as convenient. This is something that I've seen in other tools (OpenPages by IBM) so I am surprised that it is missing.
• Nintex doesn't really have a way to capture iterative processes (which we have a lot of). It's designed for linear processes.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see a link on email notices that take you directly into said notice. On an app that only has 1 or 2 email notices firing, there's no issue. However, we have some tools that are so complex that they have about 20 email notices firing at any given time based on the action users take. In this case, if we have to go in to modify a notice, we have to guess or scroll down the long list of notices to see which one we need to customize. It would be great if Quickbase had the URL of said notice somewhere at the footer of that notice so when Administrators click on it, it takes them into the exact notice they need to update.
• When filling out or reviewing a lengthy form, I'd like to see the Save & close button, as well as a Save & next option at the bottom of the form rather than having to scroll back up to the top of those forms just to click on those choices.

Incentivized

We will 10/10 renew the use of Airtable because it has brought great value to our team. Not only is Airtable affordable, but it's also user-friendly and helps our team be efficient. We no longer need to rely on Excel spreadsheets being passed from person to person via email. Furthermore, we aren't dealing with corrupt Excel spreadsheets and the need to salvage data when a file is accidentally altered.

We are currently investigating which collaboration platform best suits our needs. Chances are that we move to SharePoint Online and then we're going to also consider the microsoft power platform (power automate and power apps) to develop forms and workflows. Aspecially the pricing model for the cloud is currently a blocking factor to go for the Nintex solution in the Cloud.

Incentivized

For our use-case of QuickBase, there really aren't any other products out there that can offer us the same out-of-the-box solutions they provide to us. We're also so integrated with it in our daily processes that to move away from it abruptly would cause mass chaos, so it's going to be renewed for at least the next several years.

Incentivized

IMO the usability of this product is its greatest asset. The UI is clean and the menus are intuitive to the point where I'd feel confident having a non-spreadsheety colleague take on building an Airtable for the first time with next to no training. I can't say that about every table-like software product that I've used such as Notion.

Incentivized

Based on the on-prem experience with this tool, I believe that they have a lot of potential to help the online version catch up to where the on-prem left off. Nintex developed their online version and it is not as fully formed or capable compared to the on-prem version, and the licensing model scales back what we would have liked to be an expansion or at least continuous improvement of existing flows. It is also not near as user friendly specifically to non-developers and has an uncanny similarity to Microsoft Flow in the online instance. Consistent with my reviews of the tool - I believe they have some good approaches to design thinking that, if translated well from on-prem to online, could make this a clear winner again.

Incentivized

Quick Base has done everything we have asked it to do and then some. Our original goal was to have one system for CRM that encompassed both the sales process and the customer management. We have gone w-a-y beyond that with analytics, project management, system bug logging, and historical effort reporting.

Incentivized

I have rarely experience downtime, compared to other tools, and given how much time we spend on the tool. Even if there were to be, their updates on it are very timely, and our support team are able to provide any questions regarding

Incentivized

The Nintex Process Platform has never crashed or had any availability issues during my usage. However there was an issue that was of my own making that caused a slowdown of the system. I had set up a process to run once a day and check for employees on a list that had certain parameters selected, and for some reason that I had to troubleshoot, the process instead ran constantly, which filled the cache quickly. I ended up having to dismantle that process so the system didn't crash.

Incentivized

Once we did get Quick Base configured and customized it was reliably available when we needed it. We may have had one or two occasions when the product was inaccessible but those were few. The greatest challenge with its availability was its difficulty with integrating with our systems.

Incentivized

I never had any issues with load time, even with the integrations that we use today (google sheets) However, I'm curious if adding additional layers of integrations would slow down performance. We do carry quite a bit of data in Airtable, but, again, no impact on overall performance

Incentivized

Unlike any other process automation product out there. Not only is it a low-code, easy to use tool for building processes in environments like SharePoint or Salesforce, they have really started to expand their tool-set by offering tools to manage other things like process mapping, RPA, mobile,etc.

Incentivized

Some of our tables that hold over a million records are starting to perform poorly, with some summaries taking over 20 seconds to load. This may be an indication that it is best to archive old data when reaching large volumes like this.

Incentivized

Airtable has great support. They have a variety of support features to answer any questions. They have great self teaching instructions for templates and product tours. They also have support for teams and project management. They also have a fantastic customer help line. They are able and willing to answer customer questions and never have customers waiting long

Incentivized

The support team works as fast as they can and they are usually fast to solver the issues. Sometimes they need more time to solve one of them because our workflows and so on are more complex than usual clients.

Incentivized

If you utilize the community, the support is amazing. Unfortunately, I find their actual support system a bit underwhelming. They don't seem to have a great process for interacting directly with an issue and often sweep significant issues under the rug by categorizing them as "Enhancement" ideas or legacy items.

This training was done in-house, but the Airtable team provided resources and how to guides to ensure that we covered all components of the system

Incentivized

The trainer addressed the smallest queries in a friendly and timely manner; He walked us through all the necessary products we were using

Incentivized

It is very easy to get training from their University portal and still if we don't know their, then we can ask their support too.

Recorded trainings were provided by the Airtable team. Great as an evergreen resources to new team members and for anyone that wants to refresh their Airtable knowledge

Incentivized

I used the Nintex training software, it was easy to watch and follow along. It didn't go too fast and was descriptive enough to understand what the steps needed were in order to produce efficient workflows and user friendly forms.

Incentivized

Quick Base already is having a separate portal of providing training to customers and it is very easy to use and updates as per the new features added in to the application

Training all users was an important part of the implementation, which did take considerable time and effort. At first glance without training, the content calendar can be overwhelming because of the amount of data. The features within Airtable seem to be endless but our team was able to identify the most important to be successful.

1.Start with Simple Workflows: Begin with basic workflows to gain user confidence before tackling complex processes.
2.Involve Stakeholders Early: Engage business users and IT early to align workflows with real business needs.
3.Comprehensive Training: Invest in user training to ensure smooth adoption and reduce resistance.
4.Leverage Prebuilt Templates: Use Nintex’s templates to speed up implementation and maintain consistency.
5.Iterate and Optimize: Continuously improve workflows based on user feedback and performance metrics.

Incentivized

I was not directly involved with the initial account implementation, only a bystander. For the app I directly implemented for my department only, I wish I had know to create an app diagram first. I don't remember if that was suggested. I think that would be a great help tip tool when a new app is created, to have a page with a check list of what is needed or how to get started. If you are a regular app builder, then you can bypass it or have the ability to turn it off in the app settings.

Airtable was a really good fit for this specific use case as it provided a huge number of collaboration features in an intuitive and pleasant-to-use interface. The free tier worked initially with our work, and the upgrade pathway was fair and made sense for us.

Incentivized

Microsoft environment does not have the scalability of Nintex; it is perfect for small and medium-sized companies, especially in environments where Microsoft environment is almost entirely used. Although Microsoft offers options to connect to other applications, its platform lacks the development and robustness that Nintex provides. Nintex not only covers Microsoft environments but also Google and other important platforms.

Incentivized

Well, there's a plethora of low-code tools out on the marketplace and, you know, there's a reason that we've decided to partner with QuickBase because it has all the right balance of the ability to integrate with the ability for a citizen developer to create apps successfully. So if you look at something like Zo Ho's low-code offering, for example, yes, there are some similarities there, but they're really dependent on all of their other licensed products to get you where you want to be, where with QuickBase you have the ability to truly create something custom.

Incentivized

I did not help purchase the product, but Airtable's per user pricing structure is inconvenient when some users only need occasional or read-only use.

Incentivized

There are TONS of opportunity to scale, but I think it's a matter if you have the time and resources to do so because the initial setup can be fairly time consuming and prioritized dedication

Incentivized

The scalability is really bottlenecked by the imagination of the user. I was able to make processes for my own personal usage, making my daily tasks easier. I was also able to make processes that affected hundreds of employees, making large standardization and efficiency gains. So either way, the system is used the same way, and I was the limiting factor.

Incentivized

It has evolved really well with our company, but there is a hard limit to the table size that has begun to affect us and not let us grow. The table size limit is set at 500 MB and we have had to jump through quite a few hoops to be able to get by.

Incentivized

For clients we use Qucik base to develop application

Incentivized

• It gives us a real-time experience of working.
• Through this platform, I always have the idea bout which of my team member is working on which particular part of the project, I can easily track their progress, and also I can easily correct them where it is required by adding sticky notes, by sending the attachments and URLs.
• Quality services.

Incentivized

• People have woken up to the amount of overlap after mapping their processes.
• People can be resistant to process changes. You need to have the support from above or support from the 'business' that you are process changing to be able to see the positive impacts.
• Numbers talk. if you can get a general salary figure from your HR dept to show savings for 'employee bands', then when you present reports, they will be all the richer in data.

Incentivized

• ROI is HUGE. Our company saved over 3.5 million in one year alone based on developments that year in Quickbase that saved time for many teams
• Less user error - implementing automations and standardized workflows has led to less user error as was previously seen by maintaining spreadsheets or Smartsheets