QB Actions vs. Pipelines vs. Automations

ACTIONs have limited functionality. They do what they do and there will be no more enhancements.

Automations have more functionality in that they have up to 50 Actions (that is just a coincidence that the steps in an Automation are also called Actions).  I have not seen any enhancements come through in many months or maybe years.
 
Pipelines are the future where, as you may have noticed, almost every release has enhancements.  They can interface with Quickbase to Quickbase, but also from non Quickbase systems to Quickbase and vice versa.  They are a little more daunting to set up, but generally more powerful than Automations in terms of their ability to have conditional logic, for example and "for each" looping.




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Mark Shnier (YQC)
Quick Base Solution Provider
Your Quick Base Coach
http://QuickBaseCoach.com
mark.shnier@gmail.com
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My two cents in addition to everything Mark has already mentioned:

Automations:
Pros: Much faster than pipelines. Stable, user friendly. Much easier for a table import.
Huge Pro: Action can be 'if modified OR added'. Pipeline you need to build 2 pipelines.

Cons: Cannot handle complex automations (often times where I would need 2 or 3 automations, Pipelines can do it in one).

Pipelines:
Pros: Much more flexibility, more capabilities for complex automations. Can connect to external apps. Great potential.
Cons: Buggy and frustrating. I've had to rebuild a number of pipelines because of bugs. You can't rearrange order of steps properly, it will have weird lagging out problems and not save your work, etc. Also, runs very very slow, as compared to automations.

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Mike Tamoush
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Great question Megan and good discussion! At the high-level, Actions, Automations and Pipelines have a lot of similarities, but they were built in different eras. Actions capability was one of our first entry points into the workflow automation space. While it was powerful and strong innovation at the time, we quickly realized that a new approach is necessary to empower our builders to continue automating their workflows. As a result, we designed and built Quick Base Automations capability, which has a similar tech stack as Actions capability, but is certainly a lot more powerful and has a better UX. As we continued our innovation journey in this space, through your and other customers' feedback we learned Automation is great but it's also limited in terms of scale as well in terms of capabilities around data transformation and integration. As a result, we delivered a completely new Platform - Quickbase Pipelines - for addressing all workflow automation and Integrations requirements you have. The reason I'm sharing this is that it's an important context to have. As you make technology decisions, it's important to know that the future of Quickbase in terms of workflow automation and integration is Pipelines and all our strategic investments are focused on improving the capability and build next-generation no-code workflow automation and integration platform. Hope this context helps!

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Gevorg Hovsepyan
Senior Product Manager
Quick Base, Inc.
Cambridge MA
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