GeneXus vs. Google App Maker (discontinued)

Develop a large and complex product, integrated with multiple tourism service providers, reservation systems, and e-commerce sites, with constant needs to adapt to changes and innovation in business and technology, with a small development team that must have a lot of business knowledge

App Maker is exceptionally strong when you need things to just get done, but your internal development team has a full queue. Or maybe you don't even have an internal development team! If you need a check-in system, an applicant tracking system, an office cleaning checklist with notifications and reports, etc. you can use App Maker to throw something together and make sure your team can use it. You can also collaborate on it, so teams can make this part of their process improvement goals.

Incentivized

• It allows to focus on the solution instead of seeing technical or implementation limitations as it is multiplatform.
• Development times are shorter due to its easy implementation and on the same platform manage the database, services and front.
• Being multiplatform allows us to implement the solution in different technologies.

• Minimal coding experience required. Javascript is a must-have, but the documentation is excellent, and once you're past the learning curve, it's great!
• Great WYSIWYG editor. It's easy to see the layout and still have deep control over what you're putting together.
• Excellent integrations with G Suite. There are methods built-in that allow you to easily authenticate and work with the G Suite APIs.

Incentivized

• Some errors at building time that are difficult to figure out. In the deployment and executions, sometimes you get errors not easy to figure out.
• Now it's fast, but when you create a large solution, it slows down.

• Definitely not for beginners. App Maker certainly isn't usable by "everybody," but it's excellent for those who are willing to learn and get their hands dirty!
• Experienced developers will have issues. The target user is someone who doesn't want to (or know how to) use something like App Engine or Kubernetes. People with more experience will certainly see limitations and find it difficult to use to the fullest extent.
• Data sources can be iffy to manage. It used to be that App Maker would use a sheet or "Drive table" as a data source, but it now requires a GCP data source like CloudSQL.

Incentivized

Usability of the tool by a developer who is well trained in the use of GeneXus and with good judgment is excellent. It allows them to know good practices in the generation of code for the database as well as for the backend and the frontend. It allows us to achieve better standardization within the development team and to present solutions and solve complex problems in a very simple way.

Sometimes the support takes a little while, but in the end they always have good answers and the people who answer you are very prepared even for questions outside of GeneXus.

Incentivized

App Maker is a very "do it yourself" platform. There is a huge amount of documentation and plenty of examples to begin learning, plus a vast community support through StackOverflow that can assist anywhere that you're stuck, but the great thing is that it's all up to you. If there are specific features that don't work, Google is always there to help troubleshoot.

Incentivized

GeneXus has a wider approach in terms of the platform it supports. It has been in the market evolving with technology changes for more than 30 years. It has a better business model for the users, instead of charging for the amount of developments we make or the amount of users we have, it only charges per developer station.

App Maker is really kind of new in its own space. We haven't seen the level of functionality, nor the deep integrations, with anything else. It can replace a lot of products, and we've seen it in place in many applications across our organization, so it's been able to reduce our spend on products that offer specific functionality and still need to be customized.

Incentivized

• Being able to work with a multidisciplinary but small team of professionals with a lot of focus on the needs of the business
• GeneXus to take care especially the permanent evolution of the technology

• We have seen a reduction in time spent on manual processes by being able to automate functions in Google Sheets, take input with special functionality, and have App Maker do the work for us.
• We have seen the internal development queue decrease, which allows us to focus on larger projects that couldn't be handled by App Maker.
• We have seen ownership and process improvements increase in certain departments, as they are able to get to work themselves.

Incentivized