QuickBase-Great Program, Lots of Power. Can become quite expensive and you need an Expert.
October 28, 2016
QuickBase-Great Program, Lots of Power. Can become quite expensive and you need an Expert.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
Quickbase is utilized specifically within our business group. We gather information from users across North America about upcoming and ongoing projects. We use that information track projects through their lifecycle from sale to order entry. This helps identify spikes and valleys for manufacturing to flex workers and provides us a means of forecasting our queue.
- There is tremendous power within the tool to not only capture but report the information
- Depending on how it is built it can be very user friendly
- Programming Quickbase to do what would be simple tasks in Excel seems way too arcane
- We have a strong internet connection but users still feel it is slow when switching from screen to screen.
- Search has become significantly slower since updating to the newer version
That statement we have found to be very untrue. It is not easy, fast or inexpensive to customize. We created our custom application around 10 years ago but as we lost the individuals familiar with Quickbase it has stagnated and our attempts at improving it came back too costly. In fact we are actively looking back to in house alternatives that would better suit our needs as well as reduce cost.
- Access
We used to track projects in an Access database but it became difficult to share outside of our location. The decision was made to develop a custom QuickBase application as it was a web based app all our members across North America, and some outside, would have access to. This was the main selling point of quickbase
On a scale of 1-10 I would say that the difficulty level for non-technical "citizen developers" would be at an 8. There are some things I myself learned to do but those are minor in comparison to building the app itself. Our IT department does not support the tool so we have to rely on third parties to make larger more complicated updates and changes which can be quite expensive.
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Solving a specific business challenge
I had to learn some of the underpinning language of the program to update it and make the changes needed. I would say that it depends on the change or update you need to make. Some changes and updates are relatively straightforward and the Quickbase application helps/leads the user through them. Others require significantly deeper knowledge of the language that Quickbase is built upon to achieve the result. I have added, changed, deleted rules, tables, automated exports and email updates and added some formulas to help keep track and forecast. However, we were looking to bolster the tool with more project management features and that is where we ran into issues with understanding the language and our internal capabilities. We also began to run up against the amount of storage QuickBase gave us. We could have bought more but the pricing, in my opinion, was akin to price gouging for the amount of storage they offered. There is 25 times more storage available from Google, Microsoft and others for free and paying thousands more a year for an extra gigabyte was not attractive.