Item: Quickbase
Rating: 10
Author: Katherine Valentine

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company uses Quick Base in our Electronics business group to manage data for medium to very large projects (i.e. months or years to finish, and a budget of over a million dollars for design). At a high level, this data includes scope, schedule, budget. We sometimes also use it to track details for parts of the project that have lots of things to keep track of, so it doesn't get lost in a mess of spreadsheets.

There are two main reasons we use Quick Base rather than another solution: 1) It is easy to give access to companies we are collaborating and still have peace of mind that all the data is secure, unlike a solution hosted internally and 2) The needs of our project rapidly change, and only Quick Base allows us to adapt to that change quickly enough.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Quick Base is easy to change, allowing us to adapt to our clients' changing needs. It's even so easy that sometimes project managers can make the changes themselves, rather than relying on a person dedicated to software development.
We don't have to worry about hosting and security. We can simply use it and share it with collaborators without going through all the red tape of exposing an internal server to outside parties.
The features of Quick Base allow us to do almost everything we need natively, so there's rarely a need to build custom solutions or hire third-party developers.

Cons

The biggest missing feature I run into is a lack of an ability to run a report across multiple tables, like you can with a SQL database. You can add lookup values to child tables, it's true, but that doesn't help you run a report that includes all records from both the parent and child tables, even if some parents have no children.
The second biggest feature I wish QB had is a way to intercept deletions and other actions of that sort. You can react to those actions (which is great!), but sometimes we want to prevent deleting records in specific cases, or would like to "archive" them instead of deleting outright.
It seems some formulas get cached and will have stale values, which makes it difficult to test if everything is working properly, especially if you're using formula fields to manage access.
It is a burden to manage access for a lot of users across many apps, especially if you are trying to balance giving access to those who need it and removing access from those who don't, so you can keep license fees down.

Alternatives Considered

We have not used any other products like Quick Base, only products that have different strengths and use cases (like ASP.NET).

Likelihood to Recommend

For us, Quick Base gets used when we want to collaborate across companies (or even distant offices internally), when we have a need for a database come up on very short notice, and/or when we expect the needs of the application to frequently change. Quick Base allows us to manage all of those things easily, and we have not found another solution that does so.

We don't use Quick Base if there are very complicated rules for data integrity, relationships, triggers, etc. We also don't use it to generate complex reports, although the data often resides in QB.

Comments

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Quick and easy to use, but can allow people with a bit of knowledge to be dangerous