Bubble PPM vs. Quickbase

No stage gate or portfolio reporting solution can overcome poor input data. The organization has to be willing to commit to consistent and rigorous updates of the information, or the reporting becomes useless. From what I've seen of competitive systems, Bubble Innovator is the easiest to use in this regard, so the excuse of not having good data because it's painful to upload or cumbersome to retrieve goes away. And the ease with which you can produce customized reports allows you to immediately find the gaps and weak points in your data, and take action to address them. That's not to say that every report and function in Bubble Innovator is perfect. But the close collaboration and responsiveness of the Bubble Innovation team has made it relatively easy to triage, prioritize, and implement improvements along the way.

Quickbase has proven that if it's in a spreadsheet, it really should be in Quickbase. One of my more recent achievements with the program was redesigning our current process for notifying management of something irregular. The old process had all the notification infrastructure built behind the scenes with only a handful of people knowing and understanding the process. The new process was able to clean up the behind-the-scenes and also provide an increased level of intuitiveness by allowing complete visibility and customization of notification recipients. This allows the initial notification to reach a select number of management individuals who can then decide whether or not it needs to be escalated, all while allowing the operations personnel to get back to work immediately. The biggest issue I've found with the program is the limitation of the user - I find that the biggest roadblock in my way is myself, as I am confident the program has the ability to accomplish what I need, but am I skilled enough to create it? This has helped me become very proficient in only one year of use and become more active in community engagement surrounding the program.

Incentivized

• The Bubble team is outstanding at providing technical support, query response times are often within an hour and resolutions (depending on the level of complexity of the query) follow very quickly after this. They provide a professional, reliable service.
• The software design is simple, intuitive and more accessible than many of the alternatives on the market. It does not require licenses, installations, internal servers, extensive training programs. It doesn't interface directly with 'business management' software which provides flexibility and development opportunities.
• The Bubble team have a depth of knowledge for new product development processes and relevant industries, and provide much more than just the software. The teams are actively involved in process design beyond the software, and their recommendations have been invaluable when establishing a new stage-gate process across our organisation.

• Rapidly bring new ideas to life
• Great authentication and authorization system out of the box
• Connects with many major third-party services (via Pipelines)
• Reporting and Dashboards are awesome
• Excellent emails notification system to keep us in the loop when data changes
• Intuitive UI for building forms and reports
• Nice playground to test new ideas

Incentivized

• Only thing I can think of is almost piddly, that is having to scroll on a screen within the web browser - so that you have to scroll the screen then scroll the browser screen to get to the bottom of a chart.

• Pipelines - being able to share them or have permissions based viewing capabilities
• Table size limits are small for really large apps. While I agree that there needs to be a cap on the size, it would be nice to adjust it up when needed.

The business has been extremely satisfied with Bubble Innovator and is in support of rolling this tool out to our other businesses within the overall franchise.

We are growing our user base and getting more out of this system. Quick Base will continue to grow with our company as more of our users become super users and are capable of developing new features and solutions. We're getting more and more interested from departments that are hearing of our successes.

Incentivized

The user interface is highly visual and simple. Literally within 10-15 minutes of my introduction to the software, I was up and running. Of course, deeper capabilities become apparent after additional use, but the basic functionality is very simple to grasp. Where there are consistent challenges reported by multiple users, the Bubble Innovation team is quick to connect and put plans in place to address the challenges.

Quick Base has done everything we have asked it to do and then some. Our original goal was to have one system for CRM that encompassed both the sales process and the customer management. We have gone w-a-y beyond that with analytics, project management, system bug logging, and historical effort reporting.

Incentivized

I gave it a 10, but it should be a 9.99. They do a nice job of keeping the application running. The application can drag a bit when you have thousands of users accessing the application concurrently. We experienced this with large scale implementations.

Some of our tables that hold over a million records are starting to perform poorly, with some summaries taking over 20 seconds to load. This may be an indication that it is best to archive old data when reaching large volumes like this.

Incentivized

Outstanding response times, and solutions to issues requiring support are quickly implemented. For bigger issues or longer term developments, Bubble happily takes the time to meet in person and discuss requirements to drive detailed solutions.

If you utilize the community, the support is amazing. Unfortunately, I find their actual support system a bit underwhelming. They don't seem to have a great process for interacting directly with an issue and often sweep significant issues under the rug by categorizing them as "Enhancement" ideas or legacy items.

It is very easy to get training from their University portal and still if we don't know their, then we can ask their support too.

Quick Base already is having a separate portal of providing training to customers and it is very easy to use and updates as per the new features added in to the application

The number of variables made this extremely challenging (org changes, stage gate harmonization, pipeline prioritization, and new governance model). I think the implementation was handled very well in spite of this, and managed to deliver on time and on budget.

I was not directly involved with the initial account implementation, only a bystander. For the app I directly implemented for my department only, I wish I had know to create an app diagram first. I don't remember if that was suggested. I think that would be a great help tip tool when a new app is created, to have a page with a check list of what is needed or how to get started. If you are a regular app builder, then you can bypass it or have the ability to turn it off in the app settings.

Prior to Bubble PPM we attempted use of many of the well-known project management tools to manage our product development work. Those other project management tools were met with frustration in attempts to implement them because they are more focused with the timing and scheduling of individual projects rather than capturing the full portfolio of possible candidate projects and selecting the most strategic and valuable projects to move forward. Bubble PPM was the first system we found that was purpose-built for managing product development work, and its implementation was very successful from the beginning with the personal help given by the team at Bubble.

I picked Quickbase before investigating the low-code no-code market because I was so impressed. I did a pricing exercise a couple years ago because Quickbase was drastically increasing the cost and decreasing our allotments/features. We could have saved a lot of money by going with another comparable solution. However, those companies didn't have the longevity and all of the features and functions that Quickbase had.

Incentivized

While the purpose of this product is to provide flexibility and scalability to and organization, it is not as easy to roll out on the enterprise level. The support from Quick Base is not on a level that it makes the process easy and fluid. Be prepared to spend more time on this product than you might want to.

Incentivized

• Bubble Innovator helped us drive new product on time deliveries to 80% on-time product launches.
• Our corporate target was new product making up 20% of our annual revenues. Bubble Innovator helped us manage our resources to plan and exceed that goal.
• Bubble innovator allowed us to redeploy a full time team member that was managing spreadsheets of information for monthly updates. It also saved our project managers significant amounts of time that they could dedicate back to their projects.

• Quickbase has saved us so much time by reducing the clicks you need to get from one place to another. It takes the average colleague 5 or 6 clicks to get to another tool they need to do their job whereas it takes me 1 or 2 clicks to get to that same tool by using a personal Quickbase dashboard that has all the tools I need all on one page. This is a huge timesaver, especially when desk sharing where you have to get quickly to the info you want to share.
• Quickbase has helped us streamline workflows and close gaps by having to ask for info only 1 time. Since users can't save a form until they've provided all the info you need on your end to complete a task, it saves a tremendous amount of time for everyone. No more replying to emails 2 or 3 times until you get the info you need.

Incentivized