Item: Quickbase
Rating: 8
Author: Kirk DesRosier

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used by two units within the organization. The high-level business problem it solves is information sharing and data management. For our unit, the business problem is managing registration and attendance to workshops, and various other back office needs such as volunteer recognition, publishing workflow and copyright tracking and management.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Flexible and fast database setup.
Quick report development and distribution.
Easty to adjust and reconfigure databases and tables as needs change/arise.

Cons

It would be nice to have a more comprehensive API wth tools for front end developers. Guidance on easy security modules etc.There are some third parties that have created middle layers between QuickBase and Javascript but it would be nice if there was an official, easy to use with explanations API.
The community is good, but it takes a lot of time to decipher advice and apply examples to my situation. I can also see that a few people that are very active in the community are Quickbase customizers. I appreciate the need to have specialized customizers and integrators but if the nature of quickbase is to make things easy perhaps quickbase can provide better features for people that want to get more advanced with integrating with other apps or front end development outside QB. The complexity is at a level now where I am looking at MySQL and Mongo as options to pursue for database needs but really wish it were just easier to stick with QB without needing to go that route.
It would be interesting to have more tools for data visualization. Could Quickbase ever compete with something like Tableau?

Alternatives Considered

MySQL and MongoDB

They are much more complicated to work with. I don't have time to learn SQL or NoSQL. Quickbase takes the pain out of developing databases, optimizing, refactoring, creating elements, sizing etc... Quickbase has a much nicer user interface than what is available for the back end of the other products I mention.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it is well suited if a team has a geek that really wants to take on learning QuickBase. Or an organization is willing to accept QuickBase as a tool that could meet the needs of a number of user groups and is able to do the work to integrate properly with authentication systems and other data that is germane to the organization and can't go to quickbase for security concerns. The inverse of the two statements above are where it is more difficult in my opinion. I have brought quickbase to two organizations now that both have had IT departments that are completely unwilling to fully embrace what Quickbase could be used for. Part of that is the cost. Once you get a lot of users, they see it as costing a lot, taking away their resources... who knows. Current organization is in bed with Oracle and the last one was as well so it's very hard to go too far with QuickBase.

Comments

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