DronaHQ vs. Google App Maker (discontinued)

If you enjoy being ripped off and ignored, I would highly recommend DronaHQ. If you are unable to configure the app yourself, they will connect you to a contractor. You will be charged by the hour, so its within their interest to drag the project out as long as possible. Once the project is delivered, you may find that the app is super slow e.g. 1-2 minutes for a page to load. When you complain, they will blacklist your email.

App Maker is exceptionally strong when you need things to just get done, but your internal development team has a full queue. Or maybe you don't even have an internal development team! If you need a check-in system, an applicant tracking system, an office cleaning checklist with notifications and reports, etc. you can use App Maker to throw something together and make sure your team can use it. You can also collaborate on it, so teams can make this part of their process improvement goals.

Incentivized

• charge by the hour
• over promise
• super slow loading time

• Minimal coding experience required. Javascript is a must-have, but the documentation is excellent, and once you're past the learning curve, it's great!
• Great WYSIWYG editor. It's easy to see the layout and still have deep control over what you're putting together.
• Excellent integrations with G Suite. There are methods built-in that allow you to easily authenticate and work with the G Suite APIs.

Incentivized

• Not ripping people off
• providing pages that load
• respond to emails

• Definitely not for beginners. App Maker certainly isn't usable by "everybody," but it's excellent for those who are willing to learn and get their hands dirty!
• Experienced developers will have issues. The target user is someone who doesn't want to (or know how to) use something like App Engine or Kubernetes. People with more experience will certainly see limitations and find it difficult to use to the fullest extent.
• Data sources can be iffy to manage. It used to be that App Maker would use a sheet or "Drive table" as a data source, but it now requires a GCP data source like CloudSQL.

Incentivized

App Maker is a very "do it yourself" platform. There is a huge amount of documentation and plenty of examples to begin learning, plus a vast community support through StackOverflow that can assist anywhere that you're stuck, but the great thing is that it's all up to you. If there are specific features that don't work, Google is always there to help troubleshoot.

Incentivized

I was charged approx. $10k by DronaHQ to build an app over 6 months with page loading speed of 1-2minutes. Bubble.io took 2 weeks and $1000 to build a far superior app with page loading speed within 2 seconds.

App Maker is really kind of new in its own space. We haven't seen the level of functionality, nor the deep integrations, with anything else. It can replace a lot of products, and we've seen it in place in many applications across our organization, so it's been able to reduce our spend on products that offer specific functionality and still need to be customized.

Incentivized

• ROI is negative 100%

• We have seen a reduction in time spent on manual processes by being able to automate functions in Google Sheets, take input with special functionality, and have App Maker do the work for us.
• We have seen the internal development queue decrease, which allows us to focus on larger projects that couldn't be handled by App Maker.
• We have seen ownership and process improvements increase in certain departments, as they are able to get to work themselves.

Incentivized