Hello fellow builders,
I'm writing this post in hopes someone can help provide insight or personal experience into a pending decision my company is wanting to make. For context, I'm a certified builder and have been for about 5 years now and I'm not against moving away from Quickbase.
My company wants to move away from Quickbase and into Microsoft PowerApps. Their main reasoning is, no surprise, money. They say, "Power Apps can do everything Quickbase can do." And that the cost is already included in our license with Microsoft and is far cheaper. From my understanding though, it is regarding a version that is far from the capabilities of Quickbase and that if we wanted more funcitionality that rivals Quickbase it would end up costing us the same (if not more) in the long run.
Our Quickbase license is on a transaction-based model. We use about 3 million reads a year and support about 3,000 users. Mind you, a decent amount are not consistently using the platform, but there a few enterprise-wide applications we use that they need access to.
From what I've seen of Microsoft Power Apps, it's not that impressive. To be fair, there is probably a lot to it I haven't seen. But I think it is reflective of a company (Microsoft) who has many different platforms/applications they support and profit off of; compared to Quickbase whose sole focus is their low/no-code platform.
Here is where I see it from a pros/cons standpoint regarding moving from Quickbase to PowerApps:
Pros:
- Easier integrations with SharePoint and other Microsoft tools. Currently integrations are not possible for our company due to multi-factor authentication (MFA) issues.
- In at least the short-term, it would save us a decent amount of money.
- It is one less license cost we need to negotiate around.
- Consolidates the end-user experience to another Microsoft product (i.e. Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive), irrespective of how I feel about those products.
Cons:
- From how I anticipate Microsoft to adjust their pricing, I believe the short-term savings to be negligible when you factor in the internal resources required to move our 100+ apps to PowerApps in the next 3 years.
- Quickbase a far superior training platform and avaible education resources to support our builders through the company, enabling more nimble solutioning.
- Quickbase has a far more established/robust community of support when problems are encountered. My opinion on this is because their platform has been around for 20+ years where as PowerApps is relatively new.
- Our company does not have a good change management track record, so I'm sketpical of a successful transition to a new system for both our builders and our end-users. The impact would add to the additional hidden costs associated with such a transition.
- We currently have no reliable 3rd party vendors for PowerApps, whereas we have a couple for Quickbase.
- We currently have <5 PowerApps builders in the company compared to 20-30 Quickbase builders.
- While we have integration issues with Microsoft, Quickbase does allow us to establish a service account (i.e. a department inbox) as a user, whereas Microsoft does not allow this.
- Puts more control into IT's hands, versus our builders; which has a record of slowing down solution/enhancement implementation.
Thank you to those who took/take the time to read this and respond. I'm hopeful to hear your thoughts and maybe this post will help someone else down the road facing a similar dilemma.
------------------------------
Thank you!
Curtis
------------------------------
