Real Experienced Insights of Quickbase !!
Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base
We use Quick Base to offer effective solutions to our client for their processes implementation and automation to add efficiencies to the business to improve productivity. Also, we use it for our in-house implementation to give solutions/tools to operations and other groups.
- Analytics and Dashboard- it’s one of the must have areas which takes good enough time and effort but with Quick Base, it’s absolutely amazing to have it quickly by some configurations.
- Workflow- setting up role-based workflow is a major need for most of processes automation and QB is simply awesome to make it happen.
- Notifications, reminders, and subscriptions- it’s a great feature which QB offers with great simplicity.
- For an application with low/medium user base (count of users) QB is cost-effective solution reducing time to market by its RAD capabilities.
- Quick Base licensing model - Per user license cost of QB is fine but for clients having bug user base overall licensing cost is too high. Quick Base should reduce the licensing cost for such needs. Quick Base should also think about offering a flexible licensing model where per user license cost of low usage or occasional users should be extremely low. As all application users are always user application that frequently and need to access occasionally e.g. once a month etc. I know based on total users on instance QB offering little better per user license cost but that discount is quite minor. This way we can bring the attention of customers need an application for the big user base.
- EVOI with SSO exception - Quick Base provides an option to add everyone on internet access for any application which makes it open for everyone having URL of application to access the application on internet without chewing licences for each user. It's good but many time we have a need of an exception on EVOI to allow everyone but authorized users of an organization getting authenticated by SSO. This feature can help QB to bring the attention of multiple clients who need to use it for their employee as EVOI.
- Notifications/reminders on an Adhoc schedule - QB offer great features of notification/reminders but as of now it's either trigger based on some event or with the schedule its dependent on the value of the application data field parameter value. But any time we have a need to send email on the frequency of daily (with/without weekend), weekly, monthly or on a particular date/time etc. That is something missing from QB.
- Themes & Animation for improved UI - Although QB offers a standardized UI and it's quite good. But if we need to change the entire look and feel with quick options like themes etc. it's not possible. Also providing animated controls like a carousel, shutter up/down out of the box within an application will improve the user experience. I know it can be done on an HTML code page but I think making it available like standard out of box component will add to RAD capabilities improving the user experience.
I agree Quick Base is a perfect solution for building, deploying, and maintaining custom business applications faster and easier. My organization realized huge benefits in terms of FTEs reduction, cost/time saving, improving productivity and adding efficiencies. Also, we have offered Quick Base to customers where the time ask was to achieve above-mentioned criteria and our proposal and actual implementation did complete justice to gain customer satisfaction.
I have worked on MS SharePoint server 2013, Office 365/SharePoint online, Service Now, JIRA and also evaluated KiSSFLOW.
It's fairly easy for non-technical citizen developers to build an application. We have seen team members without any development experience, doing wonders with Quick Base. It needs an understanding of QB configurations for which training/videos are available with Quick Base university. Using its API in code pages need little experience of handling it and can make better by introducing intellisense for users assistance.
- Building and deploying business applications faster
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Solving a specific business challenge
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
Almost all of the mentioned checklist items we have to achieve except 2nd point which is the ability to drive insight from our data. I know in terms of reports, analytics and other workflow capabilities it's there. But I am specific about the demanding trend of Artificial intelligence with that we can do useful predictions/forecasting and can also provide bots to the application users. e.g a chatbot as an inquiry desk. I know and I have built it on other platforms like MS QnAMaker and added it to Quick Base too but making something available natively will make Quick Base rock in the area of AI too.
Yes, it's absolutely easy. Many times I've worked on enhancing the existing Quick Base application to another level and doing that was really interesting as Quick Base offers most of it out of the box to manage this task.
Using Quick Base
It's for multiple areas e.g. operations, scheduling, learning, automation and many more.
200 - Most of applications implementation happen with Out of box features. For Miscellaneous customizations, it's good to have people with Html and Javascript/JQuery knowledge
- Talent Acquisition, Development, Learning/Scheduling
- Processes Implementation and automation
- Support and Case Management
- We build Quickbase Integration with outside solution without any 3rd party vendor. e.g. Getting feed from outside system to an sFTP and syncing it with Quickbase on schedule basis thru APIs and .Net. And taking the updates back from QB to outside system with the same way.
- Added a chatbot on Quickbase responding to users query. Also made the bot available outside responding to users who don't have QB access.
- Auto creating a case in QB based on email received in Outlook without any configuration or vendor. It's done through an integration build using .Net and APIs
- Adding Artificial Intelligence with QuickBase to bring valuable insights forecasting/predictions
- Adding Chatbot capability within QuickBase as out of the box feature
- Making QB solutions available to huge count of users or at enterprise level, if licensing cost reduces.
- 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.
Evaluating Quick Base and Competitors
Yes - For many of our organization needs where we were implementing applications by using SharePoint Online, we opted Quick Base. Also, we found offering Quick Base as a better solution to our clients as compared to SharePoint, .Net, Service now etc. depending on application need and users count.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Vendor Reputation
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
I think Product features are the most important factor of course in addition to cost and usability. Quickbase offers diverse features suitable to user need with excellent user experience. And it's a best platform for an application with low user base/application.
I found GDPR is an important criterion in terms of security and by this time we have all required details from QB in terms of data privacy. And during evaluation, I would like to put this as an important parameter with thorough analysis.
Quick Base Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - Being part of a big organization supporting big clients, I think having premium support is always good. Especially in terms of data storage, back up and recovery services difference as compare to normal support which many times is an urgent need.
Yes - I have some times seen post release upgrade; there was some issue which I had reported and was taken care of well.
We were having an ESO upgrade and we came to know about the impact of it on Quickbase quite late and raised a request to QB for support. Just next day to that request and that was weekend, we have some of QB support executive in a meeting with the team doing ESO upgrade. We verified QB and found an issue which was resolved in few hours with the help of support agent and helped to handle this issue in a short turn around requiring on-demand assistance during the weekend on a short notice.
Using Quick Base
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | None |
- Reporting and Analytics
- Home Pages/Dashboard Setup
- Roles/Permission based workflow setup
- Notifications, Reminders, and Subscription
- Integrations without using paid 3rd party vendors e.g. Building integrations with.Net to communicate between QB and outside the system
- The relationship, Proxy Field. Impact of removing existing relation is an area where a new user has major confusion.
- Custom API code should have Intellisense where ever applicable
- Web Hooks Count limit is a problem/challenge
Yes - Most of the QB pages fit well with mobile. Pages having visual reports/charts can be improved. I know with high charts we can do this but it should be available natively within Quick Base.