QuickBase: Fast, Easy, Simple, but a little pricey.
Updated April 28, 2017

QuickBase: Fast, Easy, Simple, but a little pricey.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase

We are currently using Quickbase as a lightweight student information system for one business division, a student attendance tracker for another, and a contract management tool for another. It is typically used by a single business division, but multiple departments use and access it (i.e. corporate finance, IT, etc.). It basically gives us a tool for field operators to enter data centrally that can be later used for billing, reporting, etc.
  • Easy to create and deploy applications.
  • Grid edits and imports make bulk inserts very simple and painless.
  • API is available for automation and integration with other systems.
  • Cost is a major prohibitor of expanding beyond our current number of users.
  • Creating complex joins between tables can be very tricky.
  • User management is siloed, making it hard to manage users across applications.
We have benefited from the fact that Quickbase is very easy to build and deploy business applications. In some cases we have been able to get applications built and deployed within a day. We have also been able to use Quickbase for temporary solutions when data needed to be collected immediately.
MS Dynamics CRM was a lot more cumbersome to develop and maintain than Quickbase. The API was also not as easy to use. Dynamics did have more robust workflows than Quickbase, but it really was not worth the effort to develop on compared to the needs we were trying to meet.
Quickbase is relatively easy for non-technical users to develop their own applications. Anyone with a good idea of the data structures they are trying to create and easily create fields and tables. IT would probably need to help building cascading drop down menus and joining tables together, but an average user who is used to manipulating data sets would find it relatively easy to build and deploy their own solutions.
  • Building and deploying business applications faster
  • Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
  • Improving collaboration across one or more teams
I would say the big benefit of using Quickbase is the quickness and ease of setting up and deploying applications. As long as you only need a simple data collection system, Quickbase is probably one of the best solutions to choose. However, scaling out to large numbers of users can be quite expensive and has actually deterred us from expanding company wide.
Each year, we tweak our contract application and it usually only takes a few hours to add new fields or remove old ones. The biggest challenge is recreating links to other applications that we may need to reference.
Quickbase is very well suited to replace typical single spreadsheet data collection processes. It allows users to work collaboratively to enter and share data via the web. It is relatively simple for non-technical users to use. Quickbase is not very well suited to create complex web applications. These would be better built using a typical web framework.

QuickBase Support

I have been extremely satisfied with the quality and timeliness of the responses to my tickets. Quickbase support has always responded quickly. Sometimes they need more information and examples to fully solve my problems, but they do so in a professional and expedited manner.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - The core IT team is very knowledgeable of the Quickbase system and never needed to purchase additional support. Through the standard knowledge-bases, we have been able to develop applications to meet our requirements without additional support.
Yes - Yes, it took about a week and a half for the fix to be pushed to production, but given a typical software update cycle, I felt that this was satisfactory. The tech who handled the ticket was extremely helpful and took the bug to his triage team immediately.
A while back, I had put in a ticket to add another company domain to our account. I believe the request was completed in less than 30 minutes. Excellent turnaround.