Quickbase, a flexible, scalable and maintainable solution for so many business requirements
Updated June 15, 2023

Quickbase, a flexible, scalable and maintainable solution for so many business requirements

Ming Hon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Quickbase

QB is used departmentally and across organizations. We have used QB for: Project Management Outcomes management Supply chain management Volunteer management Capital budgeting Reporting Incident reporting Program management

Pros

  • Quickbase generally plays well with other systems in an organization's application ecosystem. This is important as many organizations have multiple applications in their ecosystem and information sharing and cross application reporting is a common requirement. For example, we have used dimensions from CAD software, merged with information from take offs to produce good, better best estimates for a roofing construction client. In another instance we use QB to merge information between a production management system and CRM to track performance. Having a great api and an active user community is extremely important in this regard.
  • We find that QB users love the ability to produce self-serve reports. This is efficient in 2 ways. Users get the exact reports they need in a timely manner because they don't have to ask a QB developer to make the report for them. QB developers can focus on developing great software instead of writing reports.
  • Organizations are ever changing entities and systems requirements evolve along with those changes. In QB it is relatively simple to make changes to a system. The sandbox is a particularly great tool that allows developers to test changes before implementing them in a production environment. Also being able to change labels in fields without penalty of having to manually cascade changes across the system is an incredible time saver.
  • One recent improvement that has made a great difference to many clients is the ability to specify the drill down report associated with a report such as a chart. This is an example of Quickbase' ability to let users customize their experience with the system which has made a great difference in its usability.

Cons

  • It would be great to be able to change column labels in summary reports the same way users are able to do so in table reports.
  • It's great to have calculated columns in reports. It would be even better if you can add more than one calculated column per report.
  • It would be great if calculated columns in summary reports could be based on the summarized data instead of underlying data.
  • Having support for different languages would be great. For example in North America, French and Spanish are important in addition to English.
  • I like the way Code Pages work, I wish there was a way to hook into events on forms to make the form more interactive like React or Vue.
  • Reduce staffing requirements
  • Saved over $100k in development costs
1. Salesforce - SF is very popular on but is painful to create true custom apps on. QB has less functionality out of the box but is way easier to customize. 2. Traditional Web stack (Ruby on Rails, PHP, Bootstrap, Javascript, MySQL, Postgres, etc) The traditional web stack has come a long way in our ability to create applications quickly. However, having a platform like QB take care of the underlying infrastructure, provide role based security, robust reporting that is easily user customizable and a quick and simple development environment is so great that it makes up for a lot of the sacrificed flexibility. One major drawback with QB however is the lack of internationalization.

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

Not for profit organizations can especially benefit from QB. Most not for profit management solutions are expensive and is generalized for a limited number of types of organizations. Often this leads to having to create work arounds or change the way users have to work or multiple systems have to be used. QB can easily be customized to handle the specific requirements of each organization. For example, donor management is common across not for profits, but programs can be vastly different across organizations. One organization can have simple programs where only program and client management is needed, but in another organization the requirements could be quite complex including loans, housing, client programs and specific cross organization linkages. Being able to use in house terminology, develop systems to adapt to specific processes and integrate easily with other systems make QB ideal in so many NFP organizations.

Using Quickbase

100 - I create QB applications for many clients. User counts range from 20 to 200. Functions include:
  • Project managers
  • Volunteer coordinators
  • Program staff
  • Executive director
  • General manager
  • Field staff
1 - QB likes to promote the idea of the citizen developer, but in my experience, people who have skills in database design and application development make better applications in QB. A basic understanding of UI/UX and database principles definitely helps with usability.
  • Project Management
  • Volunteer Management
  • Building Condition Assessment
  • Integrating QB to work with CAD software to produce take offs for quotation purposes
  • Donor management
  • Event management
QB is an integral part of my organization and client organizations. It is a flexible tool that is a work horse in so many use cases. The more applications you create, the more value you get from your subscription. The pricing is reasonable for the value. Users generally love using QB.

Evaluating Quickbase and Competitors

Yes - QB replaced Filemaker database for one of my clients. We chose QB for the following reasons:
  • Ease of development
  • Ease of maintenance and ongoing feature enhancement . You never have to worry about software and security updates.
  • Granular role based security and functionality
  • Reduced administration costs
  • Scalability
  • Ability to enhance workflows
  • Easy to add and remove users
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
When we deployed QB with one of our clients with over 150 users we provided training exactly once (over 10 years ago). Why? The application required as much skill as making a purchase from Amazon so there was no need for further training. Having a cloud solution meant that staff can work from anywhere and there was no software to install, update and maintain.
Evaluation and selection criterial changes with every new project and reflect their unique requirements and budgets. QB has been a great fit for many projects but have not been selected where:
  • Many users external to the organization requires access to the application's core functionality
  • User interface requirements are extremely stringent and controlled.
  • Limited functionality is required
  • User count is less than 5

Using Quickbase

When I first started using QB over 10 years ago I never had to look at any documentation or take any tutorials. The UI is very intuitive. There are certainly more complexed features and you would definitely benefit from training, but most of the functionality makes sense. That said, I come from a full stack development background so I am more of a technical user who is not afraid to try things.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Building Tables
  • Building Reports
  • Making Dashboards
  • Managing Users
  • Custom interactions requiring access to form events on input forms
  • Internationalization - it really only works in English
Yes, but I don't use it

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