QuickBase - A Rapid Application Development Platform
March 06, 2017
QuickBase - A Rapid Application Development Platform
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Quickbase
QuickBase is being used as a rapid application development platform within our organization to automate a manual process or Excel spreadsheets requiring concurrent or workflow based usage. QuickBase is being used across multiple domains including hospitality, learning, HR, sales, project management etc. The biggest problems that we've been able to solve with QuickBase is to reduce time to market for our client's ever-changing requirements as well as reduce maintenance costs and effort especially the effort and cost to maintain servers.
- You can go on to develop an end to end interactive application without writing a single snippet of code. You can do this in quick turnaround (the baseline setup can be built in a few hours). This includes creating forms, fields, validations, user roles, role-based dashboards, notifications, reminders, SSO, as well as reports. QuickBase is extremely easy to learn and in most cases you don't even need the first lesson to get going on the platform and build something useful out of the system.
- QuickBase offers more than 800 different applications set up as vanilla apps which can be reused to our advantage.
- 1 user license can be used against [any] number of applications in the same instance. This has given us the power to develop a complete enterprise fleet for applications for ourselves and our clients using QuickBase.
- QuickBase lacks language support which has been a limiting factor for many of our applications/clients to use QuickBase. To be a global player, QuickBase needs to focus on this capability at the least.
- The UI of QuickBase many times limits the usage of the product as a front end tool. It is considered a back-end operations tool rather than something which is beyond any bars. The Mercury UX platform had been discussed for more than 2 years now but it is yet to see daylight. The UI lacks class and many times fails to impress the audiences.
We've definitely achieved faster turnaround in creating, building, maintaining custom applications with QuickBase however deploying is still quite crude and lengthy. I recommended them back in 2015 to adopt concepts of build sets or installers/schedulers however nothing much has happened in that space except having a sandbox environment for deployment but that too is not very helpful or successful. We need faster/smarter deployment mechanisms in QuickBase than what we have presently. I don't see their focus in this space.
QuickBase stood out in front of them in terms of time to market, maintenance cost, and expertise required to build applications. QuickBase was better in terms of our standard requirements meeting against these other products. It was also better in terms of flexibility of the application in meeting our requirements, brand recognition, and our security assessment of the products etc.
- Building and deploying business applications faster
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
A non-technical citizen developer can create simple to medium complexity applications with some knowledge of their tables, relationships, formulas, and rules. These basic skills can be attained with thousands of videos freely available on YouTube and other platforms. One could also take advantage of their app exchange which contains about 800+ applications so that you don't have to create something from scratch.
Many times, however, there are needs to go beyond formulas and rules, and in that case you need to delve into scripting. A citizen developer will struggle in that case. They need knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, jQuery to be able to make their way forward. They also need to be good with jQuery because QuickBase custom pages run into performance issues quite often if scripts are not optimized properly. You could opt to work with their sub-contractors/partners who could with their knowledge build such custom requirements at a low cost or learn the skill and achieve anything and everything with QuickBase.
Many times, however, there are needs to go beyond formulas and rules, and in that case you need to delve into scripting. A citizen developer will struggle in that case. They need knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, jQuery to be able to make their way forward. They also need to be good with jQuery because QuickBase custom pages run into performance issues quite often if scripts are not optimized properly. You could opt to work with their sub-contractors/partners who could with their knowledge build such custom requirements at a low cost or learn the skill and achieve anything and everything with QuickBase.
A QuickBase developed application is easy to maintain and update. Creating a new application from scratch is rather difficult and one doesn't understand where to start however extending an existing application is much more faster and easy. The only trouble that someone may face is when they customize a functionality/page which then they need to revisit from time to time to ensure their response times are optimum based on the growing data in the application.