Item: Quickbase
Rating: 8
Author: Mark Lind

Overall Satisfaction with Quickbase

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company uses QuickBase across the majority of our company/organization. It's been able to assist with better managing where our fleet equipment is, to assisting operations teams with better, more comprehensive tracking of work sites in real-time. Ultimately, it has helped move us away from using old, outdated Excel spreadsheets to track daily business operations, while being able to improve the end users' experiences. Previously, the spreadsheets would have to be checked out by each person who was working in that project, whereas now they can all access the project from wherever they are, and it also reduced the number of copies that were being saved locally back in the Excel days.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Their support team has a good record of listening to feature enhancements by their customers.
Their Empower gatherings provide great opportunities to hear from fellow customers, as well as hear about new product plans before they are published electronically.
They roll out feature enhancements in a timely fashion and allow early adopters to opt-in for these features to get familiar with them, as well as provide constructive criticism or praise accordingly.
Their lunch webinars are always very useful at showcasing upcoming releases as well as a way to easily interact with their product teams to get questions answered.

Cons

The inability to further customize the end users' ability to request app creation as an account administrator. The only way to currently turn this ability off is to remove a very useful portion of the product.
Sometimes, but not always, when a bug is noticed and brought to their attention, the communication of when the fix is deployed gets lost.
As an account admin/realm administrator, I've noticed that sometimes the navigation experience between the various areas of the product seems to function slightly different depending on which page you are on.

Return on Investment

QuickBase has offered us time savings by allowing multiple users to access the system vs. having it locked by an Excel spreadsheet.
It's also given our largest business unit a significant cost savings by allowing citizen developers to build and customize applications as the business needs change. It's also cut down the total amount of time the entire team used to spend compiling individual reports to share at the management teams' weekly meetings.

Alternatives Considered

Since implementing our instance of QuickBase back in 2014, we haven't needed to look into other products. At this point, we're not entirely certain another single product solution could provide us with the benefits we've seen using QuickBase. As long as they continue to roll out new and exciting features with little to no bugs present, then we'll continue to use their services for our needs.

Key Insights

Do you think Quickbase delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Quickbase's feature set?

Yes

Did Quickbase live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Quickbase go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Quickbase again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, HubSpot CRM, Microsoft 365 Business Premium

Likelihood to Recommend

QuickBase is a great platform to use if you have multiple business units that operate similarly to each other. As long as the end users have Internet access, they'll be able to access the app within QB. It also provides for better versioning control, since users are able to save a copy locally, something that Excel falls short with. The rapid application development available within QuickBase is also one of its very strong points since the app builder can usually make form and report changes on-the-fly to accommodate the app owner's request. If you need a way to easily interface with workers running inventory within a warehouse or out in the field, then QB is certainly capable of answering that call.

Using Quickbase

Users and Roles

1300 - The vast majority of those users consist of production employees. They use QuickBase to help track projects and help ensure they remain on-track as well as ensure the client's hotter items get handled quickly.

Support Headcount Required

20 - These consist of business systems analysts, application specialists, and a small group of DBA members. The skillsets range from understanding SQL, JavaScript, Python, Jinja, and an understanding of standard functions.

Business Processes Supported

Project Management
Reporting
Cloud-based Solutioning

Innovative Uses

We've had a couple business units create CRM apps to keep a closer eye on customer relations.

Future Planned Uses

I honestly don't know what else we could use it for, since we're already using it in many diverse ways.

Likelihood to Renew

For our use-case of QuickBase, there really aren't any other products out there that can offer us the same out-of-the-box solutions they provide to us. We're also so integrated with it in our daily processes that to move away from it abruptly would cause mass chaos, so it's going to be renewed for at least the next several years.

Evaluating Quickbase and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - We were previously using a massive Excel spreadsheet to track who was working on what throughout the week, so as one would imagine, that was an absolute nightmare to both update and ensure all users entered data in correctly. QuickBase's ability to be cloud-based and offer multiple users to view the same record at the same time was a hands-down winner for our decision-making team back then.

Key Differentiators

Cloud Solutions
Scalability
Integration with Other Systems
Ease of Use
Other

Not having to store it locally was our largest determining factor, followed closely by its ability to be much more scalable than our Excel spreadsheets it replaced could ever dream to be.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I wasn't involved with the purchasing process, only with ensuring it was a success when it was deployed to the masses.

Quickbase Support

Support Rating

Their support teams are usually quick to respond to any issues that present themselves, their employees are receptive within the user voice and Quickbase communities, and they are always friendly in their responses and make it easier to know you can reach out to them whenever you need some additional guidance.

Quickbase Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution 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

Premium Support

I wasn't involved within the latest go around for purchasing Quickbase, but I believe we have an elevated level of support purchased to ensure our issues don't go unanswered for too long. Having that extra security of knowing we have access to higher tier support is a nicety, even though it comes at a higher cost.

Bug Resolution

Yes - The last bug I brought to their attention was fixed within an acceptable amount of time. Thankfully, it's been quite a while since I had to submit anything that was directly related to a bug with their product. I do know a few others from our company have submitted tickets to address bug issues that still seem to be open several months later, so I'd say they're about midrange when it comes to addressing bugs within their product.

Exceptional Examples of Quickbase Support

I recall having a pressing issue with a user who couldn't sign into their system because of an authentication discrepancy between our active directory and what QB had for their account. It got handled within 30-35 minutes from when I submitted the ticket and marked its urgency rather higher, since that employee/user couldn't record their work or view what they were supposed to complete next.

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Quick Base - The Future of Rapid Application Development!