Knack vs. Quickbase: Why Users are Switching to Knack

So your prices are going up. That’s right, you’re a Quickbase user and you’re struggling with the fact that you have built a portal, directory for customers, vendors, and otherwise—and the pricing is going up. I wonder how we can help you out here. Well, there is an alternative to Quickbase that you may have heard of called Knack.

Reasons to Switch to Knack

In this video, we are going to highlight some of the main reasons why you’d switch to Knack instead of using Quickbase. Without further ado, let’s dive into the reasons in this video. First and foremost, we don’t charge for external users. That’s right.

There is no user-based pricing or licensing. Knack provides essentially a scalable system that accommodates businesses of all sizes and stages of growth. Unlike Quickbase, Knack never charges user license fees or limited user licenses. So the team is free to innovate, build, and problem-solve without ever thinking about how many users you need for the next quarter or next year.

Flexible Pricing Plans Explained

So you can see in the pricing section here, it is simply based on the amount of data that you store within the system—not the amount of people that are on your team. With Knack, you can start small and seamlessly scale as your needs evolve. Knack’s pricing plans are designed to be flexible and affordable, ensuring that you can unlock the full potential of the platform without breaking the bank. Whether you’re a small team or an enterprise-level organization, Knack offers pricing options that align with your budget and requirements.

Comparative Pricing Analysis

As you can see here, you’re a starter—$49 is very reasonable, Pro for $99, and Corporate for $219 per month. Billed monthly, and if you switch to yearly, it becomes even cheaper. And when you compare this to Quickbase, you know Quickbase isn’t really built for the modern web. Its business model does not allow users to scale to hundreds or thousands of external users.

It’s so prohibitive. I mean, when you look at the pricing here, you’ll see that it’s per user for these different prices. With four users on the Business tier, you’re over the maximum price that we have here at Knack. If you go to our platform, you’ll see that there are a variety of different solutions set up, and by going here to something like this portal and signing in with my account, we have a myriad of different templates for things like inventory management, which can be used in a lot of different use cases—and the app-building environment is just really simple.

Simplified Application Development

It’s got a user-friendly interface that sets it apart from the competition with its intuitive drag-and-drop tools and pre-built templates. Building custom applications is a breeze. Knack empowers users of all skill levels to make something like this in moments. And this allows you to deploy robust applications without the need for extensive coding knowledge or expertise.

Streamlined Form Building

The platform’s streamlined form builder and straightforward data structuring capabilities ensure a seamless application development experience. In Quickbase, you have to make CSS or JavaScript changes one page at a time, which can be too complex for a lot of people and much too time-consuming for many businesses. In Knack, builders can make universal changes to all the pages. Knack offers simple yet powerful user experience configurations, so it’s simpler to manipulate the CSS, change the color bars/buttons to fit your brand on the webpage, and builders have more power to code the things they need to customize it.

Granular Access Controls

There are also key features to secure the data for different users to view or take action on in a workflow—and there are granular access controls. Knack provides robust access control features, allowing you to define fine-grained permissions for different types of users. In any instance, you’ll see that there are different user roles on the side here, and you’re able to make specific adjustments to a myriad of different opportunities like validating them, any conditional rules, preventing them from seeing things, or being able to see things inside the system—whether it be fields, records, or tasks.

Robust User Permissions

The user access here is so robust, and you can control so much of what people can view, edit, and manage—specific data-wise—ensuring that sensitive information is only accessible to authorized individuals. And there’s also field-level settings as well, where you can go inside of any specific field and make the adjustments here. So there are user- and role-based adjustments that you can make. These access permissions ensure that each user and each individual field is only shown to the relative parties needed.

Enhanced Security Features

Now, Knack does also incorporate secure user authentication mechanisms, including options for password protection, multi-factor authentication, and OAuth integration. These features enhance the overall security of user accounts and access to the portal. Now, the design of the database and live app web pages make it simple to set up in comparison to the competitors—and that mixed with the security we have is something you simply can’t beat.

All-in-One System Advantages

Now, something else that’s amazing about Knack is that it’s an all-in-one system. It’s built for the web. It’s a database in the back with a front-end UX. Knack offers the best of both worlds with a combination of a strong back-end, no-code database builder with a simple yet powerful pre-built yet configurable front-end user experience.

In Quickbase, building different user views is time-consuming and complex, typically requiring a more dedicated team of Quickbase experts to build the front end to make simple changes.

Database Management Comparison

While Quickbase is strong as a back-end data collection and management engine, Knack offers the back end and front end together in a true all-in-one system. Now, Knack is better in this sense because the live app environment is how website builders want to build modern web applications. You have the power of the database but the ability to update the live app on the fly. Knack really does excel in database management, providing unmatched flexibility and control over your data.

Efficient Data Organization

With Knack, you can effortlessly create and manage databases, define data fields, and establish relationships between them. The platform’s hierarchical data organization allows for efficient data management and easy navigation. Knack also comes with powerful filtering—as you can see right here—as well as sorting and searching capabilities to ensure that your data is always accessible and organized exactly how you need it.

In Quickbase, you have to build tables as a report and then add fields separately onto a table, which is pretty odd to deal with.

Intuitive Data Structure Setup

And creating relationships between tables can be very confusing. In Knack, it is more straightforward and intuitive to set up your initial data structure and build tables. The simple step-by-step process lets a builder visually view the table that they’re building. Then they can add custom conditions, business logic, and more. Once you have the data structure built out, Knack’s dynamic page builder enables users to design and customize their portals with ease.

Affordable Pricing for External Users

The visual editor allows for the creation of responsive and visually appealing layouts without the need for advanced design skills. And last but not least, let’s just talk pricing one more time. Knack’s pricing model really does allow for unlimited external portal users—whether they’re customers, contractors, partners, patients, students, freelancers, whoever. If your portal has 50,000 or fewer database records, the portal is just $99 per month.

Cost-Effectiveness of Knack

And for 125,000 records, it’s $219 or less per month, depending on whether you pay yearly or monthly. Imagine the cost of that with a large number of people, right? It can start at up to $700 per month. Why should someone be paying $10,000 or $50,000 per year when they could be paying $2,000 or less with us here at Knack?

Scalability for Small Businesses

It is a very difficult business venture to get into when you know as you have more clients, it’s just going to cost more money—at an unreasonable amount. If you have built any of these types of portals in Quickbase, you should consider moving to Knack. You can rebuild and scale quickly at a low cost and high value for your small or medium business. Knack is a versatile platform that really does allow users to create a wide range of custom applications, including external portals tailored to specific needs.

Types of External Portals

Here are some top types of external portals that customers often build using Knack. One, customer portals. Organizations can use Knack to build customer portals that provide a centralized platform for customers to access their accounts, view transaction history, make purchases, and interact with customer support services.

Client Management Portals

Professional service firms, agencies, or consultants create portals for client management. These portals may include features for project collaboration, document sharing, and communications with clients as well. Another great example of this is vendor and supplier portals. Businesses use Knack to create portals for managing relationships with vendors and suppliers.

Vendor and Supplier Portals

These portals can streamline communication, facilitate order processing, and provide a centralized platform for collaboration. Knack also works really great for employee portals. Companies build employee portals for internal use, providing a hub for employees to access HR information, submit time-off requests, view company policies, and collaborate with team members.

Employee Portals for Internal Use

Organizations with membership-based models such as associations or clubs use Knack to build portals that manage member information, event registration, and communication. It also works really well for event management. If you’re looking to manage an event, track attendees, plan agendas, and handle logistical tasks—that’s a great thing you can do within Knack.

Industry-Specific Portal Applications

Educational institutions or businesses in the training sector leverage Knack to build portals for managing courses, student information, and assessments. These portals can also facilitate communication between educators and students, which is a really great option for portals in the learning management system.

Real estate is another industry, as well as healthcare, that people often utilize Knack for a portal system. Both of these industries have found that creating portals for management of scheduling—patient management for healthcare—allows for a wide variety of different use cases. It also meets the requirements of healthcare industry compliance standards, which is extremely important.

And last but not least, nonprofit organizations utilize Knack to create portals for donor management, fundraising campaigns, and event coordination. These portals help nonprofits streamline their operations and engage with supporters. And just another thought—you can use these for legal portals as well. You can see a lot of these different opportunities on the solutions page inside of our website here at Knack.

Conclusion and Call to Action

So if you liked this video and want to see more content on how to utilize Knack or why you should use Knack, make sure to check out the rest of our YouTube channel, hit that like button, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.