QuickBase is the best platform I've found for developing custom applications for running a small business
July 06, 2018
QuickBase is the best platform I've found for developing custom applications for running a small business
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base
We are an Internet marketing and website development company, founded in 2001. We use QuickBase across our entire company. We have about 45 employees in Golden, CO and another 25 technical developers in India. We use it to manage all of our processes and relationships. The main applications are CRM, project/task management, billing, time tracking and actuals-vs-budgets analysis, client lead generation tracking & analysis, employee role and team management, attendance, and a million other details (like client login accounts and information) that we need to manage our business.
- project management and creation of new projects from templates
- very flexible and adaptable database setup of tables, fields, formulas and relationships
- low overhead scripting with Javascript, but usually not necessary because point-and-click setup features are so rich and adaptable
- investment in the continued development of the platform has added many goods and used features since we started with QuickBase in 2015
- I hate needing to go outside the QuickBase platform to do things in PHP and cron, but right now cron-based automations and actions are still weak
- Performance can be a bit slow for bulk updates of 20k records or more
- integrations with Google Apps are hard and require developer assistance
- formula functions are good overall but several are very wonky and hard to implement, and overall functions would be much easier to use if they emulated industry standard platforms like Microsoft Access & Excel
- I really miss the level of ease and functionality for setting up add/change/delete log tracking of records and fields that came built-in with Salesforce. From what I hear this is in the near future development pipeline for QuickBase.
- there are ways to get around this limitation with a bunch of development work, but I really wish that QuickBase would implement real database integrity so that when a parent record is deleted, all of the children get deleted as well (obviously with confirming prompts and such)
- Validation rules need to get broken out from forms and stand on their own within the database platform architecture. The big problem is that updates that are made through grid edit and through the API will not know about or adhere to validation rules. This is a terrible thing that can cause problems, and as far as I'm concerned, it is the single biggest loophole that QuickBase developers need to plug. At first, when we started with QuickBase, I almost felt like it was a deal-breaker, but overall we have lived with this limitation reasonably well. What I have to do is run through a long list of monthly integrity checking reports to find anomalies in the database that have crept in through this loophole.
- Having a hard limit of 500 MB for a single table 's maximum size is rather harsh, and I have two tables in particular that I have to constantly beat back through various maintenance techniques to keep from running out of space. This is a big waste of my time, and we have to archive or purge a lot of data that our CEO would otherwise like to retain online!
Yes! This is the single biggest reason why I chose QuickBase, and it was one of the best choices I have made in my career. Nothing I have used previously comes close to leveraging my rapid application development time like QuickBase.
Microsoft Access, Salesforce. QuickBase leverages my time much better than these older, well-used, reasonably-loved, trusted platforms.
- 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
Yes. Our whole company lives in QuickBase all day every day. We have a totally custom application that we created in-house, and it works the way we work. Development costs were much less than they would have been on any other platform. I researched over 220 other cloud-based platform choices before I settled on QuickBase.
I think this area is very over-hyped by QuickBase marketing. I have 40 years of custom application development experience for small businesses. It takes a fair amount of knowledge, experience and aptitude to do custom application architecting and development where the app is done right the first time, and will work well in the long-term as future application additions and changes are thrown into the mix. Anyone can get anything working in a Google Sheet, but that doesn't mean it will be a good app that is able to be supported and extended going forward. Same thing with QuickBase. There is a little bit of investment of time that is required to be a good administrator, system architect and developer, even on QuickBase. Even with the depth of my experience, I still used a 3rd party QuickBase development partner for 3 to 6 months to learn the ropes quickly and get up to speed so that I wasn't creating a crap application. It really helps to understand how to think and develop in QuickBase before you start. It's different from Access, Excel, Salesforce, etc. Once you know how to think in QuickBase and some of the good tricks, everything flows very nicely. But there is a learning curve for anything as complex and sophisticated as the QuickBase platform.
I do this almost every day. It goes very smoothly. I am constantly building out new functionality as our business logic changes.
Using Quick Base
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