Many Pies

Many Pies

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Alternatives to Dabbledb - my conclusion

This is a follow up to this article - Alternatives to Dabbledb.
In the end I picked Teamdesk (but see update at the end). Here are my conclusions.

Zoho Creator
The deal breaker with this one was that you couldn't display parent records and child records on the same page. Also, according to one person their support isn't so good. From what I can tell they only have one person assigned to support.

So in the end it came down to Infodome or Teamdesk. Looking at their respective pages with wishlists of features it looked like Teamdesk had more people using it. Also, the fact that Teamdesk has other products was encouraging, as it meant that their income wasn't vulnerable to the popularity of one product.

As I started implementing I struggled with the complexity of our data, with four levels of relations to nest. However that's the limitation of these web interfaces and programming-free approach. There were also some niggly things with the way that relations worked, but I could have lived with those.

Due to external reasons we're thinking of using another system to manage the data.

(Update 18 March 2011 - That other system is Highrise, and we've decided to go with that instead. That's not because of a shortcoming of Teamdesk - it is a good equivalent to Dabbledb. However the nature of the data is about people - contacts and cases, not so suited to a rigid database format like Teamdesk or Dabbledb.)

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