Item: Quickbase
Rating: 8
Author: Paul Agnew, CSM

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

QuickBase is used across the company for departmental process automation requirements. Moving from spreadsheets to database.

Pros and Cons

Can spin up basic grid and forms
Database creation and creating relationships are fairly simple
User profile management, security, roles

No reporting tool worth a darn. Charting is rudimentary.
Need to dip into HTML code way too much. Hacking is required too often and will bite us at some point.
Automations can be hard to create and follow. Pipelines may help.
Sandboxing is rudimentary.
Form designer is not very flexible, requiring compromises in user experience.

Ease of Building Custom Applications

Yes and no. As long as requirements-gathering and scoping are still done, then simple apps can be spun up fast. More complex requirements require coding and UI/UX tricks to make it down the maturity path. A lot of promise in QuickBase but it feels like they stopped engineering better core features at some point in its evolution.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)

Could not find Forms.com. Simpler to build and deploy. Better forms designer. Handles more common business scenarios.

Salesforce is too rigid and inflexible. It requires too much technical knowledge for citizen builders.

Goals with Quickbase

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

With a lot of heavy lifting and coding custom apps were built and are serving the users well. Partner help with good back-end design and using best practices with front-end development.

Ease of Updating Applications

It was challenging tracing down all the pieces and how they interrelated and interacted with each other. Resorted to mapping it all on paper and create a wiki to keep it all straight.

Likelihood to Recommend

If replacing a spreadsheet with simple business rules, roles, and permissions, then QuickBase is fine. For more complex requirements be sure you have a good partner and are prepared to do a lot of coding and hire someone to help build and maintain apps.

Quick Base can be quick to build but requires coding and hacking to get the desired UI/UX

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base