Google AppMaker was a low-code development environment. App Maker is included with G Suite Business and Enterprise editions, as well as with G Suite for Education. It was discontinued in early 2021.
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Pipefy
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Pipefy headquartered in San Francisco offers their process management and workflow software providing processes for customer success, service desk, sales operations, and other processes.
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.
Pipefy is very well suited if you have a team doing any sort of process... for real! It simplified everything from our sales and marketing objectives/processes, to our onboarding and accounting side of things. Since you can share different pipes with others, it's easy to see where others are at in the process and move the card along while keeping others informed. It makes sure you don't miss any information or steps along the way, which is great if your process is detail-oriented. It is a little less appropriate for marketing efforts, but we still try to use it to keep track of things in a central space. Definitely best suited for sales, technical things, and accounting.
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.
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.
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.
Pipefy support is pretty good. There were a few instances where the agent didn't really understand what I was trying to get help with, but that was only once. Every other time it has been pretty fast and efficient. They are also very kind and understanding. I don't think they need much help in that dept
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.
We started using software we already had (such as Slack and Sheets) but this software is not actually ideal to manage processes, which led to errors, miscommunication, and execution problems. Trello is good for managing demand but offers no process customization or approval and Jira is too focused on development for our needs, and also hard to customize.
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.
Our processes are more organized and we are not missing any steps.
We are able to touch base with customers easier since we have all potential/missed clients in one pipe, with automated alerts (i.e. it has been 60 days since contact with this customer).
We are able to keep track of customer billing changes easier.
