Flowdock vs. Quickbase

Flowdock is well suited for small teams and to environments that doesn't need too much reliability. I think it has some management problems that can make your life difficult if you have to manage a big amount of users. If you want just a tool communication with basic features (without using any integration or robust features) it can be suitable for you. You should try Flowdock using its free version for a small team and compare with others similar products. Flowdock delivers team chat and collaboration features, but is not necessarily the best product. Maybe some usability problems that disturb me won't be so relevant to you.

Incentivized

Quickbase has proven that if it's in a spreadsheet, it really should be in Quickbase. One of my more recent achievements with the program was redesigning our current process for notifying management of something irregular. The old process had all the notification infrastructure built behind the scenes with only a handful of people knowing and understanding the process. The new process was able to clean up the behind-the-scenes and also provide an increased level of intuitiveness by allowing complete visibility and customization of notification recipients. This allows the initial notification to reach a select number of management individuals who can then decide whether or not it needs to be escalated, all while allowing the operations personnel to get back to work immediately. The biggest issue I've found with the program is the limitation of the user - I find that the biggest roadblock in my way is myself, as I am confident the program has the ability to accomplish what I need, but am I skilled enough to create it? This has helped me become very proficient in only one year of use and become more active in community engagement surrounding the program.

Incentivized

• Possibility to integrate with external services such as e-mail (send messages to a flow inbox from your e-mail), twitter, github, confluence, jira, single sign-on, etc. Using those integrations you can easily improve your team productivity by centralizing all useful information in just one point.
• Very easy to configure. You can get it running for your company or team in a few minutes. Furthermore, almost all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android) have an app to install and there is a web version that can also be used.
• Powerful communication tool. You can separate differents subjects in to separated "flows" or channels. In addition, you can invite people to join just one channel increasing privacy for others members.
• Free version up to 5 users. If you are a non-profit organization or have a student project, they say that is possible to work with that too. In other case, you have to pay per user/month.

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

• One thing a little bit annoying is that a lot of links to others Flowdock sections (preferences, external services, etc) will open a new window/tab. Each click may take you to a new window and you can get lost easily.
• There isn't a quick access list to members of your organization to start a private chat. I took a while to find how to do that. The interface and usability could be better.
• There isn't an app for Windows Phone.
• Sometimes you try to load some conversation and it doesn't show anything. It is not frequently but happens sometimes.

Incentivized

• Pipelines - being able to share them or have permissions based viewing capabilities
• Table size limits are small for really large apps. While I agree that there needs to be a cap on the size, it would be nice to adjust it up when needed.

I go with the flow because I'm a newer employee and Flowdock works as advertised. If it were my decision to choose a team communciator for the organization, I'd recommend we go with Slack for its robust features and ever-changing/evolving software integrations. Slack is the outright innovator in the space and will continue to hold that role for some time.

We are growing our user base and getting more out of this system. Quick Base will continue to grow with our company as more of our users become super users and are capable of developing new features and solutions. We're getting more and more interested from departments that are hearing of our successes.

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 gave it a 10, but it should be a 9.99. They do a nice job of keeping the application running. The application can drag a bit when you have thousands of users accessing the application concurrently. We experienced this with large scale implementations.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Slack is a similar software.

Private chat or channels are well implemented in both softwares and both are also very easy to setup.

Besides of some usability problemas I think Flowdock is still better than Slack in this user experience and design.

The second point is the price. Flowdock is half price of Slack ($3/month). If you are a student or a non-profit organization, you are able to get some special license.

Incentivized

I picked Quickbase before investigating the low-code no-code market because I was so impressed. I did a pricing exercise a couple years ago because Quickbase was drastically increasing the cost and decreasing our allotments/features. We could have saved a lot of money by going with another comparable solution. However, those companies didn't have the longevity and all of the features and functions that Quickbase had.

Incentivized

While the purpose of this product is to provide flexibility and scalability to and organization, it is not as easy to roll out on the enterprise level. The support from Quick Base is not on a level that it makes the process easy and fluid. Be prepared to spend more time on this product than you might want to.

Incentivized

• Increasing productivity by reducing idleness, e-mail flooding, miscommunication and accidentally deleted files. We have increasead about 30% our productivity since whe start using Flowdock.

Incentivized

• Quickbase has saved us so much time by reducing the clicks you need to get from one place to another. It takes the average colleague 5 or 6 clicks to get to another tool they need to do their job whereas it takes me 1 or 2 clicks to get to that same tool by using a personal Quickbase dashboard that has all the tools I need all on one page. This is a huge timesaver, especially when desk sharing where you have to get quickly to the info you want to share.
• Quickbase has helped us streamline workflows and close gaps by having to ask for info only 1 time. Since users can't save a form until they've provided all the info you need on your end to complete a task, it saves a tremendous amount of time for everyone. No more replying to emails 2 or 3 times until you get the info you need.

Incentivized