Quickbase

We use our citizen developers for almost all of our applications and they are able to handle 80% - 90% of all requirements without involving IT. None of our citizen developers have a formal IT background and are usually able to deliver an app or new feature set to production in 4 to 6 weeks.

Anyone, no really, ANYONE, can create a working database on QuickBase. I started with no prior knowledge of databases as a whole and was able to quickly learn how best to create and manage QuickBase applications.
However if you're wanting to really customize your apps you'll want to learn or find someone that knows JavaScript. Again, I didn't have this knowledge when first using QuickBase, though as we were wanting to customize our apps more I found myself constantly reading the community forums to learn different tips and tricks.

I do not have a programming background or education and I can develop in Quick Base. We have a team of people that can help with integrations, table structure and code pages when needed. Some apps do not require any of this to be complete and implemented. If I can develop an app many others can too! That is one of the many reasons we are working to expand our Citizen Developers, they know their data and they are the best people to determine more things they need done with their data! Our apps are very diverse and some take a short time to develop a couple of weeks and others take longer to implement due to integrations etc.

Building out QuickBase doesn't always require an IT developer background or skills. As long as you have some basic database knowledge or receive the fundamental training from QuickBase, it can easily help you learn the first app within a couple of weeks.

Well - If you are good at planning a software/tool you are trying to build. It's possible to build without much technical knowledge. If you get stuck, the support team is always available to help you.

If you have HTML skills it's a plus.

QuickBase requires anyone customising the application to have a basic understanding of databases, it is essentially an online database. With this know how, elegant applications can be quickly created.

Building applications in QuickBase can be a little challenging but I have found that building the application is much easier than building the reports and charts from the data inputted. The biggest thing that will assist a user in creating an application is having a basic idea of what the application should be capturing. Scratching out ahead of time the categories and the types of data that will be continued within each category is the best tip to ensure the build is smooth.

QuickBase apps can be developed and/or customized pretty easily by non-technical users, especially if they make use of apps submitted by other users. Someone with Microsoft Excel and/or Access experience can work up more complex apps, and a true programmer with JAVA and SQL experience could probably make some pretty involved apps. A customization can be done in minutes if an app selected from the pool of submitted apps is already pretty close to what you want. A few hours will suffice to create a more involved app from scratch if the requirements don't go beyond the inherent capabilities of QuickBase. If you get into other app integrations or a lot of interfacing then the development time could be pretty high, but you still get so much function in the basic engine that its comparable development time is less.

Basic forms are easy but anything advanced takes a professional ... especially joining tables and formulas. Citizen developers get lost and the help (tutorials, examples) are weak at best.

I created 3 QuickBase applications with no previous knowledge of the platform. The technical aspects are very user-friendly and easy to learn. I required no assistance from IT. The sample applications are great teaching tools.

Help is very limited. There are no complete guide books with examples.

I have not created any apps myself, however, my personnel tell me that basic apps are pretty easy for the novice who has a strong interest in the end result. More complex apps require either some IT involvement, past coding experience or an outside contractor. We have created some basic apps in house and hired a contractor to assist us when we needed more horsepower.

Simple QuickBade applications can be created by anyone who can create a spreadsheet or other database. However, if you need to tap advanced features of QuickBase, some level of relational database knowledge would help.

Personally I have found Quickbase to be very user friendly. Some knowledge and a comfort level in using any application to navigate and explore features is desirable. During my early use of Quickbase (13 years ago) I was hesitant that I could easily transfer a large MS Exel database; however to my surprise it was extremely easy. The ease of creating reports and customizing forms was added bonus in making data much more manageable.

As discussed before, I have never developed an applications (that I know of) and that is because it is a little bit daunting. I feel like if there were some easy tutorials that showed you how to create basic applications, it would be nice. If these things do exist, then they may need to be put a bit more prominent so people are aware of them.

I didn't develop it and I'm not technical. It's a bit confusing when I go in to try and make changes so I usually have to ask my developer for help.

In my case, I am able to easily copy an application to create an application for the next deployment. I am able to figure out how to set up the tables mostly without assistance. I do have some technical background which may help.

We did not require our IT department at all. Once we learned the database functionality, we were able to do a lot of the development ourselves. Quickbase was very helpful when we needed guidance. We started with an existing application (Train-Pro-Central), so we did not work from scratch. That was helpful.

In our organisation the application is owned by our shared service IT team. The took the time and used online support in order to become fully knowledgeable about QuickBase such that they can support both simple user queries and application development tasks. From my perspective, they find it easy to work with and we are able to improve our application with ease.

Quickbase is relatively easy for non-technical users to develop their own applications. Anyone with a good idea of the data structures they are trying to create and easily create fields and tables. IT would probably need to help building cascading drop down menus and joining tables together, but an average user who is used to manipulating data sets would find it relatively easy to build and deploy their own solutions.

Not the easiest for non-technical folks to build databases, we've built ours with people that are very familiar with the data and have a technical background.

I personally don't think QuickBase apps are too difficult to build but I think that's because I am familiar with databases, tables, conditional logic, data relationships, etc. Where I do find I struggle a bit is on the syntax of custom formulas. I do wish there was a more down to earth, layman's guide on formulas for QuickBase. I think anyone can build an app but they might hit a wall getting it to do what they want if they can't figure out how to write the correct formula when needed.

It has been difficult to use QuickBase over the years because it is not supported by our IT department therefore we do not have proper support internally. Our specific group within the organization has built it to function by trial and error. QuickBase cannot be "self-taught" unless you are already an engineer.

You do not need to be 'technical' to be successful with QuickBase, though you do need to possess a logical mind and strong process development skills.
Unless you were to use API's for communication between QuickBase and another application, you probably would not need much, if any, help from IT personnel.
I find that maintenance does not take much time, unless there are a lot of process changes that must be implemented.

Not applicable. However, please see my previous note re: help tickets being required to undo/revert certain mistakes on the user's end.