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
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
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
- 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.
- 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
The use of customizable dashboards, widgets and report pages help users organize and focus on tasks as well as keep key performance indicators front of mind. Kanban boards is another great way to help teams keep a project moving and show where bottlenecks are. Pipelines help reduce and automate repetitive tasks that can often be a source of error. Systems can also use them to interact with other systems in the organization ecosystem further reducing rework and source of human error.
Quickbase's ease of use and flexibility makes it relatively easy to modify existing applications. Adding and testing new functionality through the sandbox environment is very straight forward and gives stakeholders tangible artifacts to base decisions upon. By its nature Quickbase is great for hybrid work environments because it has the most basic of requirements: a browser and an internet connection.
Scope creep often adds complexity to projects already underway. Quickbase allows us to add many kinds of meta data to keep track of all the changes and see their impact on resources, time tables and costs. This has allowed us to more clearly and concisely communicate impacts to internal as well as external stakeholders.
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
- Building and deploying business applications faster
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Solving a specific business challenge
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
Faster Deployment: Quickbase is by far the most robust, feature rich low code platform I have ever come across. It is deceptively easy to learn and use and allows me to make apps in minutes and hours instead of weeks and months.
Insights from Data: QB's extensive set reporting and analytical tools makes ad hoc querying and regular reporting a breeze to produce and looking good right out of the box. Not as feature rich and flexible as Power BI, but it can integrate with Power BI.
Collaboration: QB has great features for collaboration including role based functionality, dashboards, widgets, notifications, Kanban and subscriptions. I would love to see Slack like messaging interface options for display though.
Solving Specific Business Challenges + Deploying Application: QB's flexibility is only limited by your imagination.
Insights from Data: QB's extensive set reporting and analytical tools makes ad hoc querying and regular reporting a breeze to produce and looking good right out of the box. Not as feature rich and flexible as Power BI, but it can integrate with Power BI.
Collaboration: QB has great features for collaboration including role based functionality, dashboards, widgets, notifications, Kanban and subscriptions. I would love to see Slack like messaging interface options for display though.
Solving Specific Business Challenges + Deploying Application: QB's flexibility is only limited by your imagination.
We have created custom applications for many organizations. In the past we have spent much time and resources in creating detailed requirements and production schedules. Using QB we are able to spend less time on requirements gathering and use that time for prototyping instead. Customers love this because users can see tangible results of requirements in a short amount of time. The development process then becomes way more collaborative with is a great win for everyone.
It is very easy for non-technical users to quickly produce simple applications. However, to design and implement scalable, manageable mission critical applications require the skills of IT professionals especially if any system integration is required. For example, most lay users understand database development from the point of view of a spreadsheet. Normalization and the benefits of relational data is not well understood in this group. User ergonomics is also not normally a strength of many lay users. Creating forms and workflows that are usable by many users in different roles requires some understanding of standard practices and visual norms.
We recently updated a supply chain management tool that was developed 2 years ago. Using the Sandbox tool we were able to test changes to the schema, additional functionality and reporting requirements without affecting production. After testing the Sandbox app, we were able to deploy the application with a few simple clicks. It was great that we were able to focus on the changes to the system rather than having to worry about how to cascade those changes into the production environment.
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
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
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
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