Planview ChangePoint vs. Quickbase vs. Salesforce Agentforce 360 for Nonprofits

Changepoint is well-suited for consulting firms and other companies that charge clients for their time and have a need for significant project-management capabilities along with reporting and invoicing. It is not well-suited for companies that want a more basic solution to time reporting and expense reimbursement. The key questions to ask during the selection process revolve around this basic question: how are you going to use this software? Though it has a lot of functionality, the learning curve is steep and basic functionality is not as easy as one would expect.

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

Salesforce is great for experienced users, especially if the system is already customized and structured. It is important to have a policies and procedures manual as well. If an organization is new to Salesforce CMS, they should be prepared to spend money on training and possibly an outside consultant to help customize the system to their preference. This can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Incentivized

• There are lots of reporting options. Once you figure out how to work the parameters of a report, the system is able to provide detailed and accurate compilations of data. There are also many custom reports than can be setup, as well. In my experience, we have told Changepoint PSA administrators what kind of report we were needed and they set it up for us, available in a 'custom reports' folder.
• You can have several things open at once -- 'portals'. These are up at the top of the screen, much like how Google Chrome has tabs at the top. This is useful.

• 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

• NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
• There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
• There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
• Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.

Incentivized

• The site could become slow with high volumes of traffic. This may have been due to the way that our infrastructure was setup.
• Analytic reporting was not available in the version that we used. We created external reports to slice and dice the data and view it as the business demanded.

• 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.

• Not an easy lift right out of the box unless you completely rule out customization
• Not "free to own" even if the grant is free because you'll need about 0.25 FTE to maintain it
• Constantly being updated which is cool but many items are "forced" and you must respond
• Lots and lots of customization are required to equal many canned solutions available for any one particular feature set (but none of them can cover the breadth and flexibility of SF)

Incentivized

Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.

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

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

Incentivized

It could be more intuitive and user friendly.

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

Salesforce CMS is very intuitive and easy to use. I have not found where it glitches or crashes out. You can tell where data is "supposed to live" and it you aren't sure, there is an easy search function. Support is made readily available.

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.

I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.

Incentivized

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.

The system predates me as I was not working for the company when the solution was chosen - I understand this may have been an 'overpromise, underdeliver' scenario. However, we are now moving towards replacing it with Supportworks - and having seen Supportworks in action I genuinely cannot wait to switch from Changepoint and move on...

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

I’ve evaluated and used Raiser’s Edge NXT by Blackbaud, and in comparison, Salesforce is definitely getting there. It’s more advanced and more secure than Blackbaud, but Blackbaud still does certain things really well — they’ve been around for decades, so they’re kind of the OG. That said, from a technology standpoint, they’re still catching up to what Salesforce can do.

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

• Our ability to maintain a global IS Scorecard helped us to maintain a focus on completing projects on time and within budget.
• Having a single instance of Changepoint with projects aligned to specific portfolios helps senior management to maintain a focus on the investment of IS resources. It is foundational to our governance processes.

• 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

• Positive in terms of reputation and trust due to being able to demonstrate control and the safe handling of information with our funders.
• Negative in terms of financial ROI but this is mostly down to the impact of COVID-19 and the inability to hit the growth targets we expected when using the product over the contract term.
• Positive in terms of demonstrating the value of a true partnership between a non-profit and a commercial entity (salesforce.org) and seen as an exemplar of this.

Incentivized