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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Quickbase
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Quickbase helps users tackle any project, no matter how complex. Quickbase helps customers see, connect and control complex projects. Whether it’s raising a skyscraper or coordinating vaccine rollouts, the no-code software platform allows business users to custom fit solutions to the way they work – using information from across the systems they already have.
$600
per month
Pricing
Google App Maker (discontinued)
Quickbase
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Enterprise
Full Customizable
per month/billed annually
Business
Starting at $2,000
per month
Team
Started at $600
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google App Maker (discontinued)
Quickbase
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Quickbase offers three key plans, with feature distinction, simple and consistent entitlements, and a flexible licensing model, giving users the option of either user based or usage based licensing across all 3 plans.
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.
Quickbase is very useful for data sorting and viewing, would be good in sales and product development applications. However, in terms of lead generation and marketing funnels, it does not have the same functions as most Marketing online CRM options.
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.
The granular permissions and roles that Quickbase offers are great in ensuring that the right people have access to the right information at the right time, which is crucial for maintaining the security and integrity of our organization's data.
It's no-code app development allows our teams to easily manage complex projects without the need for traditional development, maintenance, and deployment costs.
Automated workflows and continuous deployment capabilities make it easy to connect existing data and avoid duplicating efforts
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.
One of the areas that Quickbase could be better is on connectivity to other products. Quickbase is building out an integration platform called Pipelines, and does have an Open API, so the ability is there. It covers the major hitters, like Salesforce integration, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. But, the world is full of apps and there's people using thousands of different tools in their business. QuickBase can actually take some of those tools and build out the solution within its own platform, making some of those other apps obsolete. But as a business, I might have 10 different tools that my client or staff is using, and changing isn't in scope right now. Quickbase doesn't have a plug and play solution to integrate everything a client might be using. So being able to connect to more of the tools that everyday businesses are using would be an area of opportunity. But the list of capabilities IS growing every year.
With Salesforce being such a presence in business operations, we've had to "fend off" being asked to replace our QB apps with in-house/out of the box apps from Salesforce. With the cost of Quick Base and having to justify keeping it instead of Salesforce, it's been a challenge we've been fighting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The help and documentation are top notch and available 24/7. The community also provides an additional layer of assistance and creativity in problem solving. For bugs and support the QuickBase team themselves are second to none. Immediate response with a case number and personalized support. They do not quit until they've solved your issue - even if your issue is that you're confused about how something works and misinterpreted or couldn't find the documentation. They'll helpfully and knowledgeably walk you through any problem from the syntax of a difficult formula to enterprise level governance and data management issues.
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.
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.
I've looked at some other ones. I believe Amazon has one that I looked into, but it looked a lot more complicated than what Quickbase offers. There was another one that was suggested for me to look into. I think it was a Microsoft version of once again looked into it, I was like, you still need to have some technical knowledge behind it in order to make it function.Whereas Quickbase, you don't need that. It's set out pretty plain language for anybody to pick up and start using
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.
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.
