We build business software three ways: on Quickbase, on Caspio, and from scratch in custom code. I’ve been doing this since 2015, and after “what does it cost,” the question I’m asked most often on a first call is which of the three the caller should use. Sometimes someone asks about Microsoft’s Power Apps, and lately someone asked me about Base44, so I’ll cover those too, even though we don’t build on either one.
I’m not going to rank them. Each one is the right answer for somebody, and let me say up front that we earn our living on three of the five, so weigh my opinion of the other two accordingly. What I can do is tell you what each is actually good at, from having built on them or watched clients try to, and give you a question that settles most cases before you ever get to a feature list.
The question that settles most of it
Who is going to use this software, and who is going to own it after it’s built?
The first half of that question is about users. Are they your own staff, a limited number of people inside the organization managing an internal process? Or are they your customers, suppliers, members, or the public, logging in from outside in numbers you don’t control? That distinction matters more than any feature, because of how the platforms price differently. Quickbase and Power Apps are priced per user, so an application with 2,000 customer logins costs 2,000 seats. In the past, we have often seen Quickbase offer some reduction in price if many of those users only rarely or occasionally need to access the system, for limited purposes, but it’s generally safe to assume that you’ll be paying a standard per-seat license for every user. Caspio, by contrast, is not priced per user but based on the complexity of the app. Custom software has no license at all. So, if the main body of users is outside your walls, that alone rules a couple of these out.
The second half is about ownership. After we hand the application over, who changes it? Some clients want their own staff to add a field, build a report, or adjust a workflow without calling anyone. Some want a developer on call and nothing more. Some have an IT department that already administers a platform and wants everything on it. And somebody has to be responsible for the plumbing: backups, security patches, uptime. On Quickbase, Caspio, and Power Apps that somebody is the vendor. With custom software it’s you, or it’s us on your behalf.
Keep those two halves in mind and the rest of this article mostly sorts itself out.
Quickbase is best for
Quickbase is best for a given number of internal users managing internal processes, with reporting the users build themselves. You can have just a few users or many thousands, but the important point is that they will be individual named users who have an account created for them either by an administrator or through integration with an identity management system like Microsoft Entra or Okta.
With Quickbase, the reporting is the thing clients mention first. Any user can build a report on the fly out of whatever records and fields their role allows: filter it, group it, summarize it, chart it, save it, and put it on a dashboard. No ticket to IT, no waiting for a developer. In most other platforms a new report is a development task; in Quickbase it’s something a user does. This makes Quickbase a strong choice for use cases that can require a lot of analysis or ad hoc reporting on the fly.
The second strength is roles. You create a role for every kind of user, and each role gets its own dashboards, reports, and permissions, so the warehouse manager opens the app and sees open orders while the controller opens the same app and sees unpaid invoices, from the same data, with neither one seeing the other’s. Done right, the app looks purpose-built for every person who logs in.
The third is that security and maintenance are Quickbase’s problem. Backups and restoration, indexing, patching, uptime: none of it is yours. You’ll never get a call at 2 A.M. about a server.
The fourth is that Quickbase is the one platform on this list where an in-house builder, or someone eager to learn and get their hands dirty, can take over the app and extend it. We build the app the way Quickbase is meant to be built (relationships, lookup fields, summary fields, formulas, with pipelines and the API used sparingly), we hand it over, and you can do a lot of what comes next yourself. You can do it. Plenty of our clients do.
That also makes Quickbase the right choice when the scope isn’t exactly clear yet, or when the product vision is expansive and needs to be developed in stages. You build what you understand today, and the app grows with the organization. If you need a new table next quarter, you add it.
The one thing to be clear-eyed about is the per-user pricing. Quickbase is for the people inside. Those people can interact with the public through a form on your website, with other systems through pipelines and the API, and with QuickBooks or Salesforce through connected tables, and a lot of our Quickbase work is exactly that kind of integration. But the public doesn’t get a Quickbase login, and that’s by design.
Caspio is best for
In our opinion, Caspio is best for a public-facing web application: a portal where your customers, suppliers, or members log in, submit something, check the status of something, or look something up, in numbers you don’t want to pay for by the seat. We’ve been a Caspio Gold Partner since 2022, and nearly every Caspio application we’ve built has had that shape.
The second thing Caspio does well is live inside your own website or a portal built to mirror your company’s brand. A Caspio application is built as a set of pages (Caspio calls them DataPages) that you embed in your WordPress site, your web portal, or wherever your customers already go, so to the customer it’s just your website doing something useful. Quickbase can be integrated with a public website, but a Caspio app is built right in to the website.
The third fit is a defined set of reports. If your users will rely on the same five or ten reports month after month, Caspio is a very good place to build them. If your users need to invent new reports every week out of any records and fields they have access to, that’s Quickbase. Reports in Caspio are a development task, and that’s not a criticism; it’s the tradeoff for an application that lives in your website and serves the public.
Because a Caspio app lives in your website, there’s slightly more technical maintenance with Caspio than with Quickbase, though still nothing like running your own server. And Caspio projects tend to cost a little less to build than Quickbase projects, for reasons I laid out in the cost article.
Custom software is best for
Custom software is best for lots of users, lots of integrations with other systems, or a highly complex process, and it has the lowest long-term total cost of the three.
Every platform has a ceiling. Below it, the platform is faster and cheaper than custom code, and that’s most projects. Above it, the comparison flips. A Quickbase app with dozens of tables, a web of pipelines, and integrations to three outside systems is harder to build and harder to maintain than the equivalent custom application, and at that point custom is both simpler and less expensive. The same goes for a process so particular to your organization that you’d spend the whole project working around the platform instead of with it.
The long-term cost is the other half of the argument. There’s no per-user subscription, so the application costs the same to build whether 10 people use it or 10,000, and the hosting bill for a small-business application on AWS is almost always lower than a Quickbase or Caspio subscription. You own the code outright. Nobody can raise the price on you. The catch is that custom software has to be hosted somewhere, and hosting comes with real maintenance: updates, backups, security patches, the occasional reboot. You can take that on yourself, or we can take responsibility for it on a maintenance plan. Custom also costs more up front than either platform, and the ranges are in the cost article.
If you’re not sure which side of the ceiling you’re on, that’s a normal thing not to know. We’ve built both, and we’ll tell you.
Where Power Apps fits
We don’t build on Power Apps, so I’m not going to pretend to have expert knowledge of it. But buyers compare it to Quickbase often enough that it deserves your consideration. Here’s where I think it fits.
Power Apps may well be the right choice when you’re a Microsoft shop and you intend to stay one. Your data already lives in SharePoint, Dataverse, or Dynamics; your IT department already administers Microsoft 365; your users already have Microsoft licenses; and you want the application to show up inside Teams next to everything else. For that organization, Power Apps is the path of least resistance, and I won’t try to talk you out of it.
In terms of how it works and what it can do, Power Apps is closest to Quickbase on this list: internal users, roles, forms, and workflows, priced per user. Two things make it a different experience in practice. First, the licensing is more complicated than Quickbase’s. My understanding is that the license you need depends on where the data lives and which connectors the app uses, and that Microsoft has been changing the plans; confirm the current rules with Microsoft or your reseller before you budget. Second, in my experience a non-programmer gets further, faster, on their own in Quickbase than in Power Apps. If the plan is for your own staff to build and extend the app, that matters. If the plan is for your IT department to build it, it doesn’t.
What about Base44?
A businesswoman I spoke with last week had spent a lot of money trying to get an application going on Base44, and she isn’t the first. So Base44 deserves a section, even though we don’t build on it.
Base44 is one of the new AI app builders. You describe the application you want in plain English, and the AI generates the whole thing: the screens, the database, user logins, hosting. You then refine it by typing more instructions, and you pay in credits for each message you send, whether or not the message got you what you wanted. (Base44 is now owned by Wix, if you’re wondering who’s behind it.)
I’m not against these tools. I use AI coding tools myself for personal projects, and for a prototype, a personal tool, or a way to show a developer what you mean, an AI builder is terrific. Where it goes wrong is the business application that other people depend on, and the way it goes wrong is predictable. Nobody knows how the application works, including you, because nobody designed it. Every new instruction is a roll of the dice: the fix to one screen breaks another, and the AI greets each of your bug reports as a great catch. And since you’re paying per attempt, the less you know about software, the more the application costs, which is exactly backwards from what the pitch promised. That’s the pattern I heard on the call, and it’s the pattern I encounter with everyone I talk to who is learning this stuff.
The main concern the person I spoke to raised was privacy. She had reservations about what would be done with the data she was putting into the app, and she couldn’t get a clear answer. I’m not going to tell you her concerns were justified, because I haven’t looked at Base44’s policies or commitments in the area of privacy. I will tell you that the question is a very important one, and that you should ask it of any AI builder before you put customer data into it: where is the data stored, who at the vendor can see it, is it used to train anybody’s models, and what happens to it if you stop paying? Read the privacy policy and the terms of service with those four questions in front of you. If you can’t answer them, don’t put the data in. With Quickbase I can answer all four, and have, many times; Quickbase publishes its security and compliance documentation, your data belongs to you, and the roles decide who sees what.
If you’ve built something on Base44 and gotten stuck, the money isn’t wasted. What you have is a specification, and a far better one than most clients bring us, because you’ve already discovered what you actually need by trying to build it. Bring it to us. We’ll tell you whether it’s a Quickbase app, a Caspio app, or a custom build, and what it will cost. More often than not, it’s a Quickbase app.
Bottom line is
(1) Internal users, custom reporting by your own staff, and someone in-house who’ll own the app: Quickbase. (2) Customers or the public logging in through your own website: Caspio. (3) Lots of users, lots of integrations, a highly complex process, or the lowest cost of ownership over the years: custom software. (4) A Microsoft shop with Microsoft administrators: Power Apps. (5) A prototype, a personal tool, or a way to show us what you mean: Base44 or a tool like it. And (6) sometimes none of the above. If an off-the-shelf product does what you need, or a well-organized spreadsheet does, we’ll say so.
What we can do
If you’d like a second opinion on which of these fits your project, a 30-minute fit call (opens in a new tab) is usually enough for me to tell you, and to give you a cost range while we’re at it. If you’re past that point, the next step is a fixed-fee assessment: we interview the people who run the process, inspect whatever you’re running it on now (a spreadsheet, a stalled app, a Base44 prototype), and write a report with a recommendation and a fixed price for the build. The report is yours whether or not you go further with us, including when the recommendation is a platform we don’t build on, or no new software at all.
