Item: Quickbase
Rating: 8
Author: Christopher Verhulst

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Quick Base is for us a low cost and easy way to quickly organise, expose and structure data and processes. During the years a lot of company data spreads out over different systems like spreadsheets, docs, wiki's, and other systems. Quite a bit of data gets duplicated because if you start using different systems (eg. CRM, asset management, HR database), data is often necessary in multiple systems. This results in:

effort to keep data in sync in all systems
the risk that people no longer know where data is stored
having to look in different places to find data you need

We use Quick Base to bring all back-office data (asset management, GDPR registers, meeting data, CRM, etc.) together and link it in a structure way. This helps us in creating one source of truth. Also back-office processes become more structured and it helps in getting things done in a uniform way.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Quick and easy development of apps that help in structuring data.
User friendly way of introducing automation in simple processes.
Accessible way to learn the system.
Providing good support.

Cons

Creating multilingual applications.
Still improvement possible in user friendliness, some features are not always well discoverable.

Alternatives Considered

PowerApps

Although also a nice competitor, it is still very linked to the Microsoft ecosystem which we do not use that extensively. Also building apps and linking their data was more straight forward in Quick Base.

Likelihood to Recommend

Quick Base is very good for those areas in a company where expensive software development is not realistic (for example because not revenue generating) but where structuring data and processes could really increase efficiency of the administrative work. Also for smaller companies that want to prepare themselves for growth, but don't have the funds for large investments in software development, Quick Base can be a very decent start.

I would hesitate however to build my core processes in Quick Base, because you are really limited by its boundaries. You might start using hacks to work around them but at the end that will bite you back. So there I would be careful in selecting Quick Base and evaluate very well upfront what flexibility you expect to need in the future. On the other hand if you only have limited funds you can start with Quick Base, at least your data - when set up correctly - is already available for migration to other more custom solutions.

Quickbase Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great tool to build business apps, but the quality, usability and maintainability of the apps are still the result of who designed them.