Oracle Application Express (APEX) Oracle APEX is a free feature of Oracle Database. It's an online low-code application builder that allows users to quickly develop a database-drive application, customize the application's UI, and then give their users access to the application via URL. Oracle APEX includes a suite of pre-built productivity applications and examples, such as a Survey Builder, Bug Tracking, P-Track project management, etc
$0.32
OCPU per hour
Quickbase
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
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.
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.
It is appropriate for database application development supporting data driven processes, online transaction processing, BI/reports/analytics ... for addressing about any business data processing need I can think of. Oracle Application Express is fantastic for creating beautiful rich user interfaces with support for all major browsers rendering well on a range of devices. It is less appropriate for applications requiring native low level access to device peripherals and is less appropriate for applications that must execute offline without network/internet connection to supporting application and database servers.
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.
One of the things we rely on is that it's really easy to go from concept to developed solution. You can build solutions collaboratively with the customers. That's one thing we're doing.
And I think as far as, uh, giving you the insight as far as visuals and graphics, we're leveraging a lot of ours, the dashboards that they've created.
And lastly, the automation with pipelines. That has been tremendous with automating a lot of repetitive tasks.
Perhaps is our problem, since we haven’t explored it deeply, but I think that a better portability to mobile devices would help the adoption of APEX.
Applications weren’t as light as we thought, and we had to move the APEX server to the same data center where our data base was running, due to performance issues. When we started, we supposed that that situation would not be an issue.
At least in Argentina and Brazil, you can not find as many programmers with experience in APEX as you can find with other technologies.
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.
I felt very comfortable using Oracle Application Express from the start. I designed my data model and quickly developed the basic CRUD pages for master tables. Then I designed the main functionality and was able to test and deploy it in a couple of days work. I will probably share the app with other members of the team and continue adding some features in the short term.
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.
its easy to use as a developer and applications designed using apex are easy and intuitive to use as an end user. Even non-coders can build good applications, the more code you can write the more you can enhance the application but you can get up and running quickly with almost no technical know how.
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.
Very active and knowledgeable community support includes quick and helpful responses from the Oracle employees on the product development team. I've never had to raise an official support request - everything is dealt with via forums and user groups - or via direct emails. The supposrt commuinty is one of the great things about Apex.
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
Using it on the cloud is really simple, the entire process of configuring and provisioning an Oracle Database takes only a few minutes (less than 10) and then Oracle APEX is already deployed on the database, so you just have to start using it. I would strongly recommend using APEX on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.
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.
Obviously Oracle Application Express cannot replace WebLogic in terms of creating domains but it is not designed to do that. We can use this tool to prototype and later develop a product using the Oracle WebLogic platform. We selected Oracle Application Express due to the ease of learning, and not having to buy licenses to use it.
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.
In the mid-size organization, we had a BI tool that had a significant license cost involved. With Oracle back-end we were able to switch to APEX and move all reporting at literally zero cost.
For Oracle PL/SQL users the learning curve is very quick and easy, there are ready templates that you can start with and eventually create complex reports.
You can track authorization and authentication on data editing and usage. High performance as it is native oracle sql codes.
Centralized data capturing, makes your datawarehouse writable for lookup tables or reference tables.
