OpenAir PSA vs. Quickbase

I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.

Incentivized

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

• We had a specific process down pat with QuickArrow and wanted similar functionality. It gave us that and more.
• It has a lot more reporting functionality than QuickArrow. There are hundreds of options for layout, what is reported, etc. I haven’t played too much with those reports yet. We more or less just replicated reports I had in QuickArrow. We needed the professional services/transition team at NetSuite to help me. There are too many options at this point. I imagine we won’t use all of those reports. Quick Arrow had a lot less.
• Mobile Capabilities – There wasn’t a mobile concept for QuickArrow. OpenAir has been beneficial for iPhone users for time sheet submissions. There is no app for Droid users yet. There are not a lot of users out there, who really know how to use it yet. Managers are not using the app for dashboards/reporting, etc. The field has been pretty quiet but they do really like the mobile app feature. They like not having to go to laptop to enter their time. That’s all we require of them – just time entry. We ran into some glitches - some of the time sheets submitted via iPhone did not get to the tool itself. That happened in one instance. I made QA aware of it. I am not sure what the resolution turned out to be.

• 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

• The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
• I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
• Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?

Incentivized

• 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.

We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.

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

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

Incentivized

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

We have not had any outages.

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.

The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.

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

As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.

Incentivized

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.

Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.

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.

We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them

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

It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that

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.

It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).

Incentivized

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

Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.

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

• It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
• Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
• It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.

Incentivized

• 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