Google App Maker (discontinued) vs. Kintone

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

Kintone is great if you want a software that will help you in managing your data, and keep track of which tasks are assigned to whom. It also helps to streamline communication and information in one central place. However, it is not for you if you are looking for something complex that has to manage a lot of data.

Incentivized

• 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

• Flexibility. You can build apps (without coding) to serve a wide range of processes and projects.
• Ease of use. The interface is intuitive.
• Training. There are resources readily available to train new users. Even starting from scratch, I felt like I was up to speed in just a few hours.

Incentivized

• 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

• I feel that Kintone is not well enough known yet. This means that other apps/APIs are not necessarily easy to connect with Kintone. Yes, you can use Zapier though for interfacing with other apps.
• It would be great if it could give more customized options to change the look and format of certain things. You can make price quote apps, for example, but have to rely on 3rd party apps or programming skills to customize the look and fields.
• If you make a table as an input field, it cannot connect to other internal Kintone apps for lookups and such.
• I think there is more potential to make more customized data graphs.

Incentivized

I still think that there's a room for Kintone's future, and high expectations for them in additional features and innovative tools and supports. Truly hope that they will support email features, and standardized supports for various plug-ins with the 3rd party software and apps. In the meantime, we will have to consider our ways of doing our work in all aspects

Incentivized

Kintone is agile app and most of the time we can easily come up with new apps. However, there should be more feature-based drag and drop and or a visual-based usability, as we all want to minimize the number of clicks and dropdown menu selections as much as possible. Thanks.

Incentivized

Never had an issue with this.

Incentivized

No issues.

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

The support from Kintone has been excellent. On numerous occasions, customer service representatives have proactively reached out to us to see if we needed help with anything. They also scheduled Zoom calls one month after we went live to go over any questions we had. Additionally, they assigned a local account representative to check in on us periodically to provide any necessary help.

Incentivized

Everyone has their own tastes of things and way they want to work. Asking them to adapt to the changes with the new tools or apps is always difficult. We would want to start with a very small but best example within the organization, which in our case was that the employees will not be bothered by the bosses by being asked to find the documents, status of the progresses, or major things/requests/projects.

Incentivized

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

Kintone is the easiest product to create from and the cost is the lowest I believe. In addition, reconfigurability and extendability are great. If you look for a low code tool, you can try Kintone. But as same as another low code tool, don't expect too much.

Incentivized

I could see this work for all departments if implemented correctly.

Incentivized

• 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

• It used to take us 15-20 minutes to create a quote for a client. It now takes less than 3.
• It allows a few of our employees to work remotely, which was essentially impossible prior.
• We can see raw data for success/failure rates, which we actively use in our employee review process.

Incentivized