The World Runs on Quick Base
Updated January 05, 2021
The World Runs on Quick Base
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base
Quick Base started for us as a fairly standard way to meet our needs in the CRM and ITSM spaces. We added some knowledge generating functionality for our sales and marketing arms and things snowballed from there. Now we use it to track and manage a very wide range of functions across our operation. It's gone from being primarily used by our sales and support teams to capturing and managing core functionality for our primary service delivery vector.
- Spreadsheet killing. Can't stress enough how effective it is at replacing outdated, inefficient management techniques like Excel with streamlined, 100% customized workflows.
- Reporting is easy to develop and filters are easy to manage so you can show anybody anything at your own discretion.
- Many CRM-style implementations of business software like Quick Base rely on extremely high levels of buy-in because it's necessary to bend your users' workflows to the process in the software. Quick Base is the polar opposite - you can make the platform reflect the actual facts on the ground so precisely that your users will actually learn more about what they do by the process of mapping it into the software.
- Mobile integration. Would love to see a native mobile app; as it is the mobile experience is pretty good but there are weaknesses associated with being wholly browser-based. EDIT: This answer was written circa 2018 before there was a native app. There is now a native app and it works extremely well for some workflows! I've moved away from mobile usage (I'm actually at a different company, which also uses QuickBase, to the role I was in when I wrote the initial review) but based on my personal usage I'd say QuickBase mobile is still a work in progress - it's basically necessary to develop separate frontends for browser and mobile; when designing reports/workflows for browser they tend not to be very smooth when converted to mobile by default
- Flexible licensing model is a necessity. Right now my company can't necessarily accommodate paying user licenses for everyone we'd like to potentially be able to access parts of the system, but there are use cases we'd love to capture within the platform that do require that sort of ability to interact with our apps on a limited basis.
Our organization has achieved building, deploying and maintaining custom business applications quickly and easily through Quick Base. We are a small company, with an IT staff of 1.5 FTE. When we get a request from operations to capture a new workflow within our Quick Base app we can have a prototype up and running within a week and tweaked and customized to massively reduce their time-spent overhead within a month. There's no looking back.
- 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
We now have knowledge that answers questions we weren't even able to ask before Quick Base, for everything from QA in sales, support, and operations to employee attendance patterns and ITSM SLAs. We've eliminated dozens of spreadsheets and replaced them with faster, easier, more collaborative workflows that are able to communicate with all of our business systems.
Our citizen developers easily and quickly build their own reports and charts. Outside of that, our organization has one overarching single application because our industry and positioning require our Quick Base app to talk to many other systems to the extent that building out those connections to more than one app was not the direction we chose to go. Both our IT director and 'low-code' support specialist are able to accommodate any other development requests from users very easily. Ongoing maintenance is virtually zero.
We update our primary Quick Base application all the time. Everything from tweaking a dashboard or report to capturing an entirely new business workflow. For years our call center agents have been requesting a web dashboard to be able to view their performance management, attendance and QA performance, which never seemed at all realistic until we built our operations system into Quick Base. We rolled out an extremely robust, fully-featured agent dashboard the first of this year and it has had a real impact on our retention rate and thus bottom line.
Quickbase Feature Ratings
Integrations and Governance
- ServiceNow
- QuickBooks
- anything else we can imagine via API
Integration via the QuickBase API is super easy. I'm not a developer so I'm not sure I can speak to ease at that end but from my perspective as a power user/admin it's extremely smooth. Platforms like ServiceNow or QuickBooks that are designed to be able to fit into other systems make it very easy; we've also integrated with systems that do not have integrations readily available via scripts we've written to automatically get that data into QuickBase where we need it.
We have not yet used Pipelines.
I am not connected to this element of my company.
Quick Base Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - Absolutely! Their team are selfless and never react defensively. They'll work with you to understand and resolve your issue until you're fully satisfied.
This is actually related to my personal "Builder Account" - a free account that anyone can sign up for. I hadn't logged on in a while and there was an issue with my authentication. The afternoon before a holiday weekend, when I filed a support request I was on the phone with a QuickBase rep within minutes, who instantly knew the (kind of odd) problem I was having, explained it succinctly and had it solved right away. Furthermore, once I got logged in and creating the app I wanted to play around with, I had forgotten how to do something related to role management, since I am not a realm level admin at my company. I replied to the customer support email regarding my previous ticket to ask a couple of (really quite basic) questions, and the same rep - despite my actual support ticket having already been closed! - replied to my email to walk me through a few things that I could/should have worked out for myself in the documentation given 15-20 minutes of looking. I was flabbergasted. I've literally never experienced this level of support elsewhere in the world of SaaS. Never.