QuickBase Rules
November 03, 2016

QuickBase Rules

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase

It is being used by more than 500 users here, and I don't know how many different applications. I started with a Marketing Analytics group and migrated their CRM to QuickBase. Then I moved on to a research consulting organization here at the medical school and began to use it for managing projects, managing contacts in multi-site research projects, tracking hours worked, and to reconcile data queries for a clinical research project. I have consulted with other organizations that use it for tracking sponsors and billing, or as a place to coordinate conferences, maintain records of consultations or requests for information, and other purposes. It addresses the projects that fall through the cracks, those that are important enough to accomplish, with the need for multiple simultaneous users, but for projects that aren't at the level where an enterprise system would be in the budget.

Pros

  • QuickBase makes it very easy to set up a user-friendly relational database and add users. Because it is in the cloud, we don't have to worry about making sure that external users get authorized in our internal systems.
  • QuickBase makes it easy to import data or to connect applications to other systems through the API. We often connect it to external webforms for input.
  • QuickBase makes it easy to manage the user experience. Role-based security is very important for most of the applications we create.
  • QuickBase's notifications and alerts make it very easy to get information to people even when they don't log in every day.

Cons

  • It would be very handy to have some sort of native logging of changes made to data. We often use such features as append-only fields when this is very important, but having logs that cannot be tampered with (even by administrators) would be very helpful.
  • I think that with platforms like QuickBase, where so many users learn by doing and building, the help and forum sections are very important. I think that it would be great if somebody could go through the online help and knowledge base and even the forum carefully to make sure that answers don't assume so much knowledge on the part of the user. QuickBase does better at this than most of the support I find for other applications online, but it is particularly critical to get this right for an online application, especially since some of its features and functions have changed since the original help documentation was written.
  • QuickBase should also probably comb through the forum and build how-to guides out of what some of the third-party people are adding there. There are some great things being done by consultants, but these same consultants aren't always the best at documention, and their interest is sometimes tilted towards showing potential clients how smart they are, rather than helping the average user.
QuickBase is well-suited for businesses that not too big and complicated and are growing and changing quickly. It is incredibly flexible, so it can be modified to grow and adapt to changing business processes and practices. The beauty of it is that it can adapt to changing processes. Unfortunately, it can also accommodate ill-advised changes in business practices. Sometimes the best thing a company can do to facilitate growth is to bring in some software platform that will force them to rationalize their chaotic business process. Finally, to work properly, QuickBase needs someone who can work well with others and who understands the needs of their organization, but who also understands how, at a reasonably basic level, how databases work, and who is interested in learning more than just the basics (scripting, html, etc.)

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