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QuickBase - The swiss army knife of database apps
March 28, 2017

QuickBase - The swiss army knife of database apps

Kirk DesRosier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base

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.
  • Flexible and fast database setup.
  • Quick report development and distribution.
  • Easty to adjust and reconfigure databases and tables as needs change/arise.
  • 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?
Our unit is very small. 7 people. When I started here I could see there were needs for quickbase that would never have been considered or addressed by IT so we have benefited but the organization on the whole has not. Quickbase has made it easy for our team to prototype and deploy apps and make iterative improvements without huge process, consultants and (ugh.) requirements based development methods.
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.
Unfortunately it is difficult for non technical people to get much out of quickbase. I have introduced the platform to other units in my org and checked on thier apps after a few years and they really have evolved. It seems like younger people today lack the skills to make somehting like QB work or have skills to develop something way beyond QB.
  • Building and deploying business applications faster
  • Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
  • Solving a specific business challenge
  • Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
Yes, I feel that in our small unit we have achieved this and it was pretty painless. We have used it creatively to prototype several apps, some of which we threw away others carried on. We can drive insights from the data but our unit is not necessarily data focused so there have been limited gains. Some business challenges were easy to solve with quickbase while others, involving mailing list management mailing external people, deploying forms to collect data externally have been more challenging.
We update on a regular basis. Given we do not have many users and the changes are not extremely large, it usually goes really well. I heard recently that there is a way to sandbox an app so I plan to make use of that in the future. I really like the idea of that feature.
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.