It bends, but doesn't break.
March 17, 2017
It bends, but doesn't break.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
Across the whole organization. Our company uses QuickBase internally to track and manage projects, as well as advises customers on the potential value and use cases that QuickBase accommodates, without being an explicit QSP. In general, for our customers, Quickbase addresses all of the major business problems involved in: project management, schedule management, fleet tracking, inventory tracking, and executive reporting, alongside custom integration to myriad ancillary CRM, ERP, Storage, and PM databases.
- QuickBase allows for the non-developer user to structure and configure their business data in an incredibly easy fashion. This is primarily a UX strength of QuickBase, as initial database and configuration management in other tools is historically a barrier to entry.
- QuickBase provides a comprehensive suite of report generation as one of its primary strengths. Every business relies on a mechanism to query their business data, and there are very few platforms available that reliably eschew the need for cumbersome schedulers and reporting modules, as Quickbase does.
- Time to market for customers. Given the product's 'out of the box' nature, it is not unreasonable for a competent quickbase team to be able to analyze the needs of a business, design, and implement the product faster than any other major saas products available.
- At scale, the platform can suffer performance setbacks. The tool continues to develop, but could potentially benefit from a micro-services centered architecture capable of asynchronous, multiple threads available to callback to the production servers.
- The API continues to be developed, and will benefit from continued work.
- Visibility and continued feature development within the Quickbase sync tool would be greatly appreciated, especially as pertains to syncing 2 native quickbase tables (failure notification, increased visibility to processing)
Absolutely. We achieve this everyday by scoping out the requirements for particular business units within our (and our customer's) organization(s) and developing applications data models and workflows that meet those needs, while remaining mindful of the data structures used in the larger business systems any customer uses.
For ease of configuration, time to market, flexibility in face of fluctuating business needs, and intuitive UI, Quickbase always wins. For stringent IT teams who are concerned with maintaining an ironclad hold on application development processes and feature customization, Quickbase often falls short of meeting their full suite of needs.
The non-citizen developer will thrive in this environment if they are willing to learn the following basics: data model/structure types (tables, fields, relationships), the basics of report querying/building & formula syntax, a general grasp of relational implications (inheritance, parentage, lookups, summarization). Any custom integration, or exploration of the QB API will require more expertise and/or IT intervention, however, Webhooks and continued product development help close this gap.
- 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
Absolutely. Our company has helped billion-dollar companies drive systems solutions within Quickbase at business-critical junctions when the businesses were in such states of disarray, disorganization, and confusion, that no other tool could have materialized solutions that were both as fast and as flexible as the organization would end up needing. The tool helps drive growth and value in times of immediate need and helps to solidify a foundation of data-driven standards in organizations that sorely lack such structures.
I don't have any experience updating a pre-existing, Quickbase-developed app, but have benefitted greatly from interesting examples and workarounds found within the app marketplace, created by veteran developers.