The Best Platform for Custom Business Apps
April 15, 2020

The Best Platform for Custom Business Apps

Brad Eisenberg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base

I create Quick Base applications for businesses to help them operate efficiently, measure how they're doing, and achieve transformation improvements to their business.

Use cases are varied including CRM, Project Management, Scheduling, Inventory Management and more. Many businesses come to Quick Base because they're struggling to run their business off of spreadsheets, off-the-shelf tools that don't work for their business, or across multiple unconnected systems.

For my small business clients, Quick Base is typically used across their entire organization. Larger companies tend to use Quick Base at a departmental level.
  • Can be completely customized to the needs of your business.
  • Can be implemented at a fraction of the time and cost of a custom coded solution.
  • Can easily scale with the changing needs of businesses.
  • Has limited "in-the-box" integration options.
  • Automated workflows aren't very comprehensive.
  • BUT will be rolling out a new tool called "Pipelines" to improve on automation & integration.
In both current and past roles, I've been involved with building business applications with Quick Base, with full-stack software development, and with other tools. Quick Base is by far the fastest and easiest platform I've used to build and maintain apps.

While the platform is powerful and easy to use, building fast does not mean building well. I've worked on a lot of "home-grown" apps that were built by business users the wrong way. For more complex apps, an underlying understanding of how to construct an application is more important that how easy the platform is to use.
While Salesforce has a much larger market share, I prefer Quick Base when it comes to custom app development. Even with Lighting, many of Salesforce's back-end tools needed to customize forms and processes are not actually low-code and require a pretty good understanding of Ajax and other coding languages. Salesforce is also more expensive per user than Quick Base for comparable plan levels.

Where Salesforce shines over Quick Base is that you can start with an "out of the box" solution like their Salescloud CRM that will work on day 1 and then tweak from there.
  • Building and deploying business applications faster
  • Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
  • Solving a specific business challenge
  • Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
I first discovered Quick Base looking for a CRM & Project Management solution that could meet the exact needs of my last business. After trying multiple alternatives including spreadsheets, Zoho, and hiring software developers, we landed on Quick Base. In a matter of months, I was able to build a custom app that outperformed the $300,000 custom app we were using for just 15% of the price.

From there, we continued to scale the app and were able to eliminate, replace, or integrate half of the other systems that we used. This was the foundation of an operational transformation that resulted in:
  • Over $250,000 in savings

  • Sped up cash cycles by 50%

  • Reduced error rates from 7% of jobs to less than 1%

  • Allowed investments in growth without increases in overhead

My very first Quick Base app was a simple CRM application. Over time, I continued to update it to add new features and integrate it with the other systems my business used. Some of the
  • I integrated our website forms and scheduling software with Quick Base to automate our lead capture and appointment setting.

  • I added project management and task tracking functionality.

  • I added invoicing and expense tracking into the app and integrated it with QuickBooks to cut out hours of manual bookkeeping time each week.

  • I integrated Quick Base with Gmail to send out automated, personalized marketing messages to our customers that didn’t get trapped in Spam filters.

  • And we finally had a centralized source of operating data that I used to measure our performance like never before, leading to data-driven decisions that saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Quick Base is great for companies struggling to run their business off of spreadsheets. It's also perfect for companies who operate in niche industries or have complex requirements that can't be met by an off the shelf solutions.

Most use cases are for business who intend to use the app internally to improve business processes. Creating applications that are intended to be used primarily by customers wouldn't be the best fit.

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