Quickbase vs. Salesforce.com

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.

Incentivized

Salesforce is so customizable that I can't think of situations where you couldn't configure the tool to do what you need. If Salesforce hasn't developed the capability itself, there is a marketplace where anyone else can develop and upload their solution for others to use as well. Also, due to Salesforce's success and size, almost every other app/software that you can think of has or is working on an integration with Salesforce. So if you need to use a different tool for a certain function, you can more likely than not still integrate it with Salesforce to enhance value.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
• Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
• Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The Knowledge module can be improved. It is still limited compared to regular CMS. Still not possible to have a filter view per data categories
• Using the Community portal also comes with a limited Community reply function that doesn´t allow text formatting. Very difficult to move staff away from emailing customers when this text box is very poor
• Rigidity when you work in a big organization with same template. It needs to be a one fits all instance and the local needs are deprioritized because SF doesn´t allow customization

Incentivized

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.

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

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

I'm a Millenial and more tech savvy, so learning this tool is more intuitive and I don't mind learning the ins and outs of the product. It can be cumbersome when permissions or new rules by our admins get enacted, that can cause disruptions in our workflows and annoyances. Overall, the usability is fine, and helps in my day to day more than causes disruptions

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

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

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

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.

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

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.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

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 have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

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.

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

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

Incentivized

I've used Act CRM by Xperience previously. Salesforce is way more robust and intuitive and meets the needs of an enterprise company with enterprise clients way more effectively. I don't think there is another CRM in the market with the overall functionality and usability that can complete with the Salesforce platform for someone in my role.

Incentivized

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

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.

Incentivized

I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.

Incentivized

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• Improved Customer Satisfaction by reducing time to market that too with a product with a great user experience.
• Huge Cost Saving by FTEs reduction and Improved productivity
• Added efficiencies
• The client asking for QuickBase but having a huge user base, due to licensing cost we have to offer another alternative solution.

• It requires a lot of time to manage but does a good job keeping everything in one place
• Managers! Quit having sales professionals create spreadsheets and reports ad hoc. The information is in SFDC. Build a report so you can get it yourself.
• If used properly and not restricted and overmanaged, SFDC will provide huge ROI

Incentivized