Quickbase

As for myself, I am part of the non-technical citizen developers, and it has been challenging in the beginning. Now, after 5 years I can say that it is a tool easy to use, that requires experience and study of the courses delivered by Quickbase. Anytime an issue appeared, the help team is ready to solve and assist.

Quickbase is no code or low code application. With the help of Quickbase non-technical person also can create the application and use that application on daily basis. So here the nontechnical citizen can create the application without any code. We can easily set up the Quikbase application and are ready to go.

Citizen developers, or as Quickbase calls them Business Users / Business Builders, are the heart of Quickbase. I truly believe that anyone who wants to build applications in Quickbase can. The platform on its own is very intuitive, but even better Quickbase has a plethora of free accessible resources.
-Quickbase University is invaluable for video and practice-along courses to get builders up and running in no time.
-Community discussion boards contain answers and ideas for every challenge I've ever encountered.
-Quickbase's help guides are thorough.
-The customer service is prompt and helpful.
-Outside videos like Quickbase Junkie provide additional support.

It is really easy to build, but not that easy to build it right. For a large organization, functional and powerful applications require cross department design collaboration.

Was able to build a highly complex project management system with automations with zero experience in roughly a week that has become the cornerstone of all of our workflows. Handles project tracking, workload assignment, database collections, reporting out and more. Limited programming experience prior on software just a good understanding of process flows.

I am not into developing side of it.

This is fairly simple and only requires learning formulas in order to write them.

Quick Base is a low-code application, so it is easy to use for the nontechnical people. But sometimes, using the API there can be difficult.

I think most people are able to create apps without much IT help.

One can easily create a simple application faster and it required no code for developing the application just with the help of the drag and drop feature we can easily create it. So I think for non-technical "citizen developers" it will be easy to create the application easy and fast.

It is best to have some amount of database experience, but [it] can be done without that knowledge. Setting up reports is something that all users should learn to use to be able to be independent in putting together their needed reports.

We often had to train new users on how to build reports using the data they wanted. Many users would want to pull reports from multiple tables but lacked the understanding of how to determine which tables or columns were required. Once training was provided we left the users to their own tinkering and rarely had to have follow-up training.

Honestly, you don't need to be technical to build applications on Quickbase. Any time that I've had any questions, [I can look either to] the help center or the Quichbase community where you can post [inquiries]. Both [these] options have [come to the] rescue quickly. I began my Quickbase journey as a low-level IT employee which quickly morphed into Quickbase admin. The Quickbase community has been my biggest asset, and I love to answer questions [so] I can help others.

[It's] hard for people to wrap their mind around table relationships. Which is the main barrier. It takes a decent chunk of time to maintain applications if the builder has left the organization and it isn't documented well which it usually isn't.

In my experience, Quickbase is not an intuitive application which makes it difficult to use sometimes, if you get an approach at first sight and for simple managing task the app responds really well but once you dive into some feature for customization Quickbase becomes a hard tool to use.

We only allow citizen development for reporting. Reporting is easy to drag and drop. We need to control development because many of the data points are integrated for a variety of other processes and in the past, we have found that it can easily become the wild west if everything was opened up.

It is quite easy to build in Quickbase. All database concepts are translated into layman's terms within the Quickbase application. You certainly need to have a basic knowledge of how databases work, but at a very basic level. What is the most important is to know what is your end goal, and what you want to get out of your Quickbase application.

It is very useful to read some documentation first, and attend some of the Quickbase University classes, as it is important to design the application correctly. This is something that will be pretty hard to change if no planning was done prior to beginning the development.

Of course as your experience grows, you'll always find better ways to create applications. The only time you need a specific skill set in Quick Base is when you need to use Javascript or other languages to accomplish a task. Otherwise, Quick Base can accomplish most tasks natively. I always search for a native way before engaging a more experienced programmer.

Quickbase is very easy to learn if you leverage their internal education resources, Quickbase University. Working with an account executive or consultant while starting with Quickbase is also a very valuable way to get up to speed quickly. It's definitely achievable for "citizen developers," but app builders with prior coding experience will flourish as well.

I was the builder of our application. I consider myself tech-savvy, but definitely not an IT professional or a coder. I do not possess Java, CSS, or any other programming knowledge and was able to build a fully functional app that less tech-savvy people have successfully used for months.

Building apps, tables, and forms have been easy. I have been able to train people on building that have no experience. I have not had to have help from IT and as long as you take the time to map out what your doing it is easy to build out.

I don't know much about that. Sorry.

Really the only thing needed to create fabulous applications is some database design knowledge and how relationships between fields/tables work. Other than that, Quickbase has a very nice library of webinars and support areas to quickly learn the basics of the system. The QuickBase University is an excellent resource for beginners. Like anything it takes time and one just needs to invest a little bit of time to learn the fundamentals and you're off building apps.

It can be difficult for non-technical developers to navigate through the creation of applications, however, with that being said, QuickBase help is very efficient and accessible when trying to build something from scratch. Their customer support is top notch and responds quickly to every inquiry for assistance that I have made so far.

QuickBase would like to think or have customers think that this is a citizen developers' tool. But I beg to disagree with that because, one needs to have knowledge of relational databases, the concepts of normalization, the need to normalize, how relationships work, how the summary fields, lookup fields work, etc to be able to develop a meaningful and useful application that can be maintained in the future.
I have first-hand experience developing applications for some DC Govt agencies where they had "citizen developers" such as administrative assistants, finance managers, and human resource managers develop applications only to have me come in and redo them "correctly." As an example, when you had to modify the name of a person, the systems developed by the citizen developers were such that one would have to modify the name of the person in 8 different tables, all in the same application! But I designed the systems so they can change the name in just one Employees table and the lookup fields would take care of effecting the change across the applications.
Thus, I would strongly recommend that businesses should consider having experienced professional programmers who have experience and education in developing applications do the job.