Quickbase

Quickbase has some flexibility, it can hold a good amount of data, you can set user controls for different users, and it can be customized to fit your company's needs. You can build apps from scratch or find apps others have developed and incorporate them into your system. You can do custom reports for your company reports or data collection, and save these reports in a spreadsheet format. You can filter your reports as well. It's based on laymen's programming language. They have pretty good customer service.

Quickbase is expensive, especially the more users you have. Some features require paying a higher price each month. Quickbase's biggest downfall is if you have the app(s) customized to do something in your organization, i.e. barcode scanning or advanced reservation capabilities, then that section of the app will have advanced programming language that you might not be able to edit. Our company doesn't have app programmers, so since our app was customized, to make significant changes we'd need to shell out big bucks to one of their third-party developers, or we'd need to have a staffer who could make changes. However, different companies have different workflows, so there have been instances where even Quickbase customer support couldn't make a change to what the third-party developer created, so your own company's programmer might even be at a loss. This was very frustrating for our company since we were led to believe we'd invest more money upfront and then just pay to maintain the software and have the support we needed so the app would grow with our company, not end up costing more if we needed changes. If you're a big corporation with lots of money, this is probably the way to go, but if you're a small company you might want to think carefully before investing in Quickbase for anything requiring customization.

Developing on Quickbase is incredibly easy. Most business operators with basic business software instincts can start building in Quickbase immediately, or they can choose an application on their exchange to start off with. Beyond the basics, where Quickbase really shines is how robust of a platform it is with incredible functionality including beautiful reporting, dynamic filtering, formula fields and form logic, integration ability, and more. There's always a new trick you can learn in Quickbase.

In terms of usability, that's really all in the app your choose to use or build. It can be really clunky or sleek. All depends on your ability to build a usable app. The design of the interface is basic, but they're in the process of rolling out a new UI called Mercury that looks great.

Quickbase does not provide a ton of customer support. They rely on an incredible community of users and developers as well as approved Quickbase Solutions Providers (QSPs) that customers can contract with for help with building their applications. But if you're looking to go at it on your own, you will have to dig if you need help with something. As savvy of as Quickbase user I am, it took me three years before I even learned that I had an account manager at Quickbase.

- Easy of use (Great UI/UX)
- Flexible Interface
- Scalable
- Supports a full API for integration to virtually any other application
- Allows for scaling to a multi-user application, allowing for complex workflows to match business process.
- It's a mature product, which means that you would hard pressed to ask a question that hasn't already been answered by one of the Quickbase geniuses in the community forums.
- The community support is fantastic, and their support is very quick and efficient.

- Reports are not easily formattable. So, if you want to send out reports to your clients, or internally within the company, you would have to resort to 3rd party tools to allow for such functionality.
I'm hoping that Quickbase will work on this particular aspect of their reporting in future releases.

-It is highly customizable! You can add and remove features relatively easily.
-Apps can be set to not be available to all employees -- which is useful for both security, as well as efficiency. I like not having to browse 99 tabs to find the one I need.
-Online usage, nice for both in office and out of office work.
-Data entry and updating are simple and straightforward, which makes training somewhat quick.
-Broadly applicable across numerous industries, I've found it extremely useful for many different information communicating and recording purposes.

-To really make the most of QuickBase, there needs to be someone with high technology literacy to set everything up and troubleshoot. It can be used simply, but only if your needs are simple, and Quickbase will probably be more than you need if you're just looking for sales tracking or similar.
-Though not difficult, adding new data points can be extremely time consuming. In a small workplace, it really does matter if someone needs to spend several days entering data into the same forms, hundreds of times, across different apps. Obviously, this will vary depending on what the needs are.
-It takes a lot of clicks to get somewhere. A minor issue really, but I find it irritating to have to 10 things to get what I want because the search function isn't particularly sensitive.