Item: Quickbase
Rating: 9
Author: MOHIT CHAWLA

Overall Satisfaction with Quickbase

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Faster time to value
Quick prototyping capability that helps end users see the process/application flow real-time
FTE savings by reducing mundane tasks
Not very effective with high volume, high touch front-desk applications.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power Automate

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.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Quickbase go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Quickbase again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Appian

Likelihood to Recommend

QuickBase is well suited for any back operation automation. Transforming/automating an existing Excel operation is ideal using QuickBase. When you've need to create a lot of charts, metrics, and analytics, I would recommend using QuickBase. You can also use the platform for creating a fleet of connected enterprise applications. QuickBase works really well with connected/integrated QuickBase applications. I however, will not recommend using QuickBase when you need to perform a front end operation such as a need for an HR portal or case management front ends. At present, QuickBase doesn't allow the creation of jazzy UI with its out of box features while the jQuery, scripting custom pages often suffer with performance issues when large data sets are involved.