Oracle APEX (or Oracle Application Express) is an online low-code application builder that allows users to develop a database-drive application, customize the application's UI, and then give their users access to the application via URL. Oracle APEX includes a suite of pre-built productivity applications and examples, such as a Survey Builder, Bug Tracking, P-Track project management, etc
$0.32
OCPU per hour
Pipefy
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Pipefy headquartered in San Francisco offers their process management and workflow software providing processes for customer success, service desk, sales operations, and other processes.
It is appropriate for database application development supporting data driven processes, online transaction processing, BI/reports/analytics ... for addressing about any business data processing need I can think of. Oracle Application Express is fantastic for creating beautiful rich user interfaces with support for all major browsers rendering well on a range of devices. It is less appropriate for applications requiring native low level access to device peripherals and is less appropriate for applications that must execute offline without network/internet connection to supporting application and database servers.
Pipefy is very well suited if you have a team doing any sort of process... for real! It simplified everything from our sales and marketing objectives/processes, to our onboarding and accounting side of things. Since you can share different pipes with others, it's easy to see where others are at in the process and move the card along while keeping others informed. It makes sure you don't miss any information or steps along the way, which is great if your process is detail-oriented. It is a little less appropriate for marketing efforts, but we still try to use it to keep track of things in a central space. Definitely best suited for sales, technical things, and accounting.
For complex APEX applications you need to be a pro expert in PL/SQL
Debugging in APEX can be complicated if there is a logical error. Syntax errors will end up shown as ORA errors
Lack of designer interface. Even though you are designing a form you need to do it by means of APEX interface using a series of steps, no UI for design
Oracle specific not applicable for other databases
I felt very comfortable using Oracle Application Express from the start. I designed my data model and quickly developed the basic CRUD pages for master tables. Then I designed the main functionality and was able to test and deploy it in a couple of days work. I will probably share the app with other members of the team and continue adding some features in the short term.
Because it's very easy to develop, fast, secure, has a lot of features. It's like a prototyping tool such as figma, but it can be used as a real product. Dynamic action, plugin, rest api, minimize a lot of coding, a lot of templates, PWA, really bring Oracle APEX functionality to be able to solve most common internal users pain points.
Very active and knowledgeable community support includes quick and helpful responses from the Oracle employees on the product development team. I've never had to raise an official support request - everything is dealt with via forums and user groups - or via direct emails. The supposrt commuinty is one of the great things about Apex.
Pipefy support is pretty good. There were a few instances where the agent didn't really understand what I was trying to get help with, but that was only once. Every other time it has been pretty fast and efficient. They are also very kind and understanding. I don't think they need much help in that dept
Using it on the cloud is really simple, the entire process of configuring and provisioning an Oracle Database takes only a few minutes (less than 10) and then Oracle APEX is already deployed on the database, so you just have to start using it. I would strongly recommend using APEX on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.
Oracle APEX and Oracle Visual Builder are both low-code development platforms within the Oracle ecosystem, but they serve different purposes. Oracle APEX is more suited for the people who are familiar with SQL, PLSQL. It provides rapid application development features based on data residing in Oracle database. It's a low code platform and best suited for web based applications/extensions based on Oracle DB that may use REST APIs and other web services. It also provides mobile application support. Oracle Visual Builder is best suited for web applications based on Oracle Cloud services. It utilizes javascript based drag-drop UI builder. It's very deeply integrated with Oracle Fusion Cloud platform.
We started using software we already had (such as Slack and Sheets) but this software is not actually ideal to manage processes, which led to errors, miscommunication, and execution problems. Trello is good for managing demand but offers no process customization or approval and Jira is too focused on development for our needs, and also hard to customize.
It has increased our development output over Forms greatly. For instance, when starting at my current company, I was able to replace our aging ASP Intranet site within 4 months when our IT manager had budgeted over a year for the task.
We've been able to standardize under one technology, incorporating previously unsupportable disparate systems under one roof.
It's free with an Oracle Database so the only investment was our time, something we now have more of thanks to Application Express.
