Google App Maker (discontinued) vs. SAP Extension Suite (discontinued)

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

The adoption of SAP Extension Suite is growing significantly and it has become a strategic platform for our company. SAP Extension Suite will most likely meet the requirements of most companies to get beyond small workgroup apps and tackle more strategic requirements. The most important thing that SAP Extension delivers is a single UI for development effort for web and mobile deployment.

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

• Reduces the length and cost of system development and integration
• Empowers developers to acquire a new skill to deliver applications and other services efficiently
• Enabled the innovation team to transform the way services are accessed and delivered
• Ensures scalability of apps used simultaneously by thousands of customers

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

• It was a bit of a hassle to configure at first but once setup it's easy and fast.
• At a certain time they removed key items used in pipelines to force upgrades.
• The new UI though works well feels less intuitive than the previous one.

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

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

We have been able to work in a much more agile way with SAP Extension Suite, and there is a lot of excitement that developing with this platform is significantly faster. SAP Extension Suite is the perfect fit to build great-looking applications that work on any form factor, be it [a] smartphone, laptop, or tablet, and within budget.

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

• Faster development cycle due to native integration with SAP products
• Negative short-term ROI due to the lack of training material and significant differences with the previous version of the same tool (SAP Web IDE)
• Tighter integration with corporate programming guidelines since SAP Extension Suite offers great integration with DevOps pipeline solutions

Incentivized