Experience with QuickBase
March 07, 2017

Experience with QuickBase

Bryony Mackey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase

Currently Quickbase is being leveraged across multiple business lines and departments. Quickbase provided a robust and easy to implement solution to track everything from sales leads to corrective actions records. We have Quickbase integrated with multiple other systems using the API provided. We heavily rely on Quickbase relationships between applications and tables, as well.
  • The ability to search/filter by name or type through field lists is particularly helpful when searching a large application.
  • Using variables in formulas helps us keep char limits and processing time down on large formulas.
  • The new dashboards are easy to set up, slick and fast. They help our users find the information they're looking for faster.
  • We would love if QuickBase allowed us more storage. With larger applications, 500mb is a very small cap compared to other enterprise level solutions. We are forced to aggressively archive leads which could have been turned into clients if they could have been kept and worked.
  • Integrated deployment solutions would be beyond welcome. It's incredibly tedious to make our changes in a copy application, and then make them all again manually in the production environment. It's time-consuming and more prone to error.
  • Change the sandbox solution. Currently, if you create a sandbox, you cannot make any changes to production. We have different levels of changes and cannot afford to lock our production environment for weeks on end for a larger enhancement.
As mentioned, this is the very reason our founders chose QuickBase initially. Within a few days, they had a working infrastructure to process clients with. When we became large enough to support a full-time IT department, QuickBase was easy to learn for those users, which made it easy for them to begin supporting it.
I think there's an inherent danger with letting non-technical users create business critical applications, and we do not allow that. However, in the scenario that the application needed is not business critical I feel it's totally possible for a citizen developer to create a simple application for tracking...invoices for example. This can be done in a matter of hours, including some simple automations.
  • Building and deploying business applications faster
  • Solving a specific business challenge
  • Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
We absolutely have been able to achieve the goals we initially had when choosing it. Many of the reasons why we do not entirely rely on it for new needs was covered in the cons section earlier. Deployment of large enhancements is incredibly encumbered by the fact that it has to be done manually after being done manually in a copy application (if you are unable to 'lock' your production environment as we are.)
I update Quickbase applications almost daily. As mentioned before, the ease of finding fields makes updating formulas and other fields incredibly easy. The ability to sort based on field type is another feature that while it sounds small, is pretty huge when you're maintaining 900+ fields in a single table.
I think QuickBase is great for companies with little to no IT support (which is where we started). It allowed regular users to create and stand up applications within days which were fairly robust. It's incredibly easy to use and understand which leads to the rise of citizen developers. We currently do not allow those in our company due to the overhead we'd face in supporting applications we did not create ourselves.