Item: Quickbase
Rating: 9
Author: MOHIT CHAWLA

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

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.

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.

Quickbase Benefits

Because of the platforms workflow capabilities, we can allow multiple parties/roles to contribute to the application which helps us bring greater value to the overall process. Sending notifications, alerts, generating reports, workflows, integrating with 3rd party applications to allow exchange of information makes the collaboration more stronger and worthy.

Dynamic/Hybrid Work

QB is a cloud-based PaaS platform that helps turn around applications faster. We can build application while discussing requirements with a customer, make changes as per amendments, as well as build a framework of dashboards, access and permissions, reports, workflows around these changes to help an end-user see the value coming to life in real-time. Receiving notifications, alerts, reminders all add up to the dynamic requirements and fastens the response time.

Usage for Project Management

One of our recent projects has the following volumetric:
45000 users,
1.2 million transactions per month,
500+ concurrent users,
3 time zone coverage,
Real-time Tableau reporting etc.

The sheer volume and requirements make the application complex.

We're using the multi-application architecture to segregate between daily transaction based features and reporting capabilities to divide the concurrent usage and traffic on one application. We've taken multiple measures to keep a high performance of the applications along with guidance and support from QB team as well.

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

Goals with Quickbase

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

Ease of Building Custom Applications

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.

Citizen Developers Using Quickbase

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.

Ease of Updating Applications

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.

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.