Knack

Kommentare: Fantastic. We had worked to solve problems for no less than 24 months prior to our introduction to knack. From the time we started with knack we had a minimum viable internal product within 90 days and a customer facing web-portal (providing sales, project, and invoice detail) in 180 days. With knack we have have saved an immeasurable amount of time and resource.

Vorteile: Very simple to solve for Secure, HIPPA, PCI compliant user logins. Ability to pivot large data-set with simplified permission based views - no incremental expense for additional users / views / roles.

Nachteile: Support. Our reliance on knack is significant in pre-sale functions and as a result, when it breaks we have always defined the solution (or created the work-around) several days before a knack tech gets around to responding to our requests.

Kommentare: 8 / 10 is right where I'm at. They filled a huge need for us, and for that, I'm extremely grateful. One more point can easily be gained by paying attention to the community, which are the fans of their business. The other point can be gained by adding better standard features and design features. It should be noted that I have passed Knack's name to MANY others in my industry, and I really do highly recommend them.

Vorteile: When I found this software, I nearly jumped for joy. I had been researching no-code database apps for a long time, and this really seemed to fit what we needed it to do. Hats off to Knack for an original-concept. What's great:
- App building on the backend AND front end. You create your data modules, decide your schema, then decide how it shows up to the users. Set your logins, set the access levels, etc. It's amazing.
- It's extremely easy. Once you get the hang of it, you can make nice looking apps in little time.
- The API is very easy to use and powerful. We us it to build special CMS apps that allow our customers to update content on large interactive touch screens. The data is always reliable.
- The app is responsive, so users can can access public or their private data from mobile devices. It opens up many possibilities for businesses to use this as a CRM, CMS, Accounting, or even a field-service database.
- The in-app support through the chat is great. Staff members are responsive and helpful.

Nachteile: Take this with a grain of salt. When your whole business runs online like ours, you get used to the idea that no software is ever perfect. There is always something that will grind your gears. Here's some things about Knack that need improvement:
- Community support - my major gripe about Knack is the responsiveness to the community. There are many active users who contribute a lot of great content, ideas, and issues that need solving. Response from Knack in the community is practically non-existent. Even just to say "Good idea, we'll add that to our list"...just let people know they've been heard! Also, in my opinion, there's some very standard features that I can't believe aren't built yet. Sometimes it seems they work on features for a very small niche audience, rather than things that all users can benefit from. (Like drag and drop sorting of records)
- Minimal design freedom on the front end - You can make an app that is extremely functional, but there's not a lot of ways to customize the look and feel of that data for the users. So you may solve some great business issues with Knack, but chances are it won't look super pretty.

Kommentare: I found Knack when I was searching for a tool that would help me to build a simple cloud based lead tracking application for my small law firm (two lawyers) to use. I have a dabbler's technical background in the sense that I have fooled around with Microsoft Access and Visual Basic for Applications - not a particularly high level mind you - barely beyond Hello World stuff. Well, maybe a little beyond that. I was looking for a tool that would allow me to develop something in the cloud and boy did I find it with Knack. I didn't know that Knack existed, but it was exactly what I wanted to exist and I was blown away when I actually discovered that it in fact existed. I was familiar enough with relational databases through my limited experience with Access that I was able to pretty much immediately start using Knack. I had a rough version of the application I wanted to develop put together in a couple days really. (Not a huge feat, really since what I wanted was really pretty simple). But we used it every day and came to really rely on it. It has become absolutely a part of the business. The ability to have this cloud based application, available on our phones or wherever we have computer access has been incredible and the platform itself works like magic. I spent hours wrestling with Access in setting up subforms and reports and such and developing queries and all of that. Knack takes care of that sort of heavy lifting behind the scenes. From my experience with Access, I know that it really is heavy lifting too, which is why I appreciate it so much. I used to design my websites in Dreamweaver, but as the technical expertise required to build sites well started to increase well beyond my ability to use Dreamweaver, I discovered Squarespace. Squarespace for me was the answer to my prayers, because it gave me the freedom to create sites that were technically pretty sophisticated and modern but in a way that shielded me from the need to have the technical expertise to execute it well. Knack is like Squarespace in this way. In fact, since many people who design sites might have use for cloud based applications that Knack can provide, I would think that Knack and Squarespace ought to be able to find ways to work with each other. They both occupy the same sort of space - providing people without the increasingly sophisticated skills required to build nice things (websites or custom database applications) the ability to build those nice things.

Vorteile: I love the way it shields me from what I know to be complex and tricky issues involved in putting together an application built around a relational database. I know the agony of wrestling with figuring out how to do things with relational databases and it just makes me so happy to be able to create a wonderfully stable application that works in the cloud - without the torture of having to figure out why my SQL query isn't working as I thought it would, etc. It just works, and I am shielded from the coding. I don't have to know what a SQL query is. To me this is just plain magic.

Nachteile: Hard to come up with something I am not really happy about with it. I guess everything could be improved with more features and options and such, but I see that as mostly window dressing. The guts of this thing are amazing. I'm sure the future will see more features and more ways to style the applications and such, but the magic is built in now.

Vorteile: - Lives up to the "no code" billing many other platforms tout, but with Knack you can actually build a feature-rich app without coding.
- Zapier integration recently improved, greatly expanding the capabilities of the app
- Out of 10-15 database apps I tried, the learning curve was shorter and support documentation was more useful with Knack
- Easy to implement and strong user security/user roles implementation
- Unlike many business-focused app builders, Knack is designed for many users in structure and in pricing model, so it's the best for customer-facing applications (including ecommerce websites)
- Basic subscription plan includes all the features most will need, unlike many apps that pull 1-2 critical features into their mid-tier and enterprise plans.

Nachteile: - Pricing plan options are slim, and the base plan is a bit more expensive than others in the similar tier.
- Very difficult to style the app in an attractive manner without a fair amount of CSS and/or Javascript understanding (though the standard design is fine and mobile friendly). Limited options for customization in the dashboard.
- Main troubling issue is with how pages and views get created with every menu and link you add..causing a quickly overwhelming page structure and sitemap. Biggest related caution is that when simply deleting a menu item, you could also be deleting an entire page or detail view without clearly being told that (and no way to recover it).

Kommentare: I use Knack to build my main business application. The interface and functionality is excellent and I have looked at all the alternatives at length. If you are not an IT person, then this really is the business. The tutorials are also good. The support team are responsive in the chat interface. During the two years I have been using the product there have been continuous upgrades which have been excellent.

Vorteile: Great intuitive interface, great software, fair pricing. Now that EU servers are available this makes it a great product for users like me who hold client data and need to comply with EU data privacy laws. I am already delighted with the product, but have seen a beta version of the new builder which in my view takes the produt from excellent to perfect. As a non-technical user (I am no more than a competent excel user) I had never thought I could build my own functioning application. With Knack, I can.

Nachteile: The standard support hours are based on the US working day so that means we in Europe have to wait. Having said that, if there is an emergency there is 24 hour response there. This is a minor niggle and I guess when Knack grows to dominate the world they will put more support on.