Knack Features

This is Everything I need from a database & simple interface builder. I took a long time evaluating existing products for my business programs to no avail, and decided I needed custom solutions. As a nonprofit I know we couldn't afford paying someone to do it so I took it upon myself to research options & move forward. Knack was my first intro to "no code" cloud app builder and I love it. I check around every 6 months or so to see what competition is out there, I've yet to find anything I enjoy using quite as much.

That apps cannot integrate / stay in sync. It's going to take a lot of extra work to integrate all my company's apps, as it is not feasible for all our programs / branches to use one app, and some information needs to be in sync across all apps. I just know by the time I've finally done it, they will have built in the feature / option...

Look of the app is very nice. The "Builder" they have come up with is innovative, not your normal database building tool. It takes some getting used to. There are some limitations to it, that other databases don't have.

Very poor customer support, if you are on the lowest plan. They will not pick up the phone and call you, nor can you call them. They claim a response time of between 24 and 48 hours....not true. I am now having support requests unanswered for 4 days. Their blog and self-help support site are very poor. There is no main office or phone number, they all work from their homes across the US. Apparently, they don't have titles and they think it's funny to post pictures of themselves on their website with funny made up titles in the organization. This organization needs to grow up and get serious. I will terminate my plan with them and ask for a full refund if things don't improve dramatically in the next day or two.

Super easy to get going (it is the most intuitive interface). Price by number of apps instead of by user works well with our company. Powerful features including, for instance, users logging in by their Google+ or Facebook profile (single sign on). I have not run into any bugs.

You can't adjust the presentation layer (the website) as much as, say, Caspio. You can change some things like colors and basic layout, but most of the CSS is fixed. Their formulas are very weak. They only allow basic functions, especially for manipulating text. For formulas, I found Airtable to be much better.

Hi Mike, thanks for the great review! We take a lot of pride in our support so we always love to hear that it makes a difference. We also have a major formula upgrade coming in the next few weeks!

Its highly customizable and you can adapt it to fit whatever your company needs might be. Be it just a simple data base, a team management software or something else. Its great for large sets of data, but needs you to be smart and data savy.

Its not always great when using outside the US. The smartphone view is close to impossible to work with.

Power, capability and ease of use

Would like more form layout capabilities

Incredible product for building databases/order systems for small organizations. Functionality is substantial.

The lack of support and the turn around time for support is difficult. For companies that use as an integral part of their business it is risky for an ordering system, etc... Also, having problems with the rules and parameters disappearing randomly on forms has been a problem for my organization.

I like Knack does not charge per user. Also, it includes most of the features that you would need is a common business application (CRM, ERP, etc.). Low-code programming workflow is easy.

No a great user community around the software. Knack should promote more user interaction. Also it should produce more education content.

The Knack software is easy to use to set up forms and pages to collect information online.

The software can take a little getting used to when you first start out. I would think this is normal for any advanced system like this.

Powerful and yet easy to use. Extensible

Some of the features take some time to learn, have to invest some time up front getting to know what it can do.

Great app. Super support.

No way to preserve application files at reasonable cost if account is place on hold.

Hi, thanks for your review. We actually feel really good about offering an affordable plan to freeze your account! We added this feature at the request of our users. This way you don't need to pay full price if you have a seasonal app or just need to pause it for a while. And of course you can export all your data at any time.

Packed with features and easy to use/build whatever you want.

Dashboards and Reporting is the biggest drawback. It needs more development.

It allowed me to easily customize a website to allow multiple users to enter information without having a pay account.

You have to program yourself. I'm not the most technical person so this takes some time. Only training will help.

The pricing model makes it an easy sell to get started. You don't have to pay per user, so if you aren't sure whether you'll be able to achieve your goals, it provides a low cost opportunity to make an attempt.

My biggest concern is that our app has become complex enough that it will be difficult for it to be handed off to a new user in the future. Once the software is launched for the team, any changes you make are in effect instantly - there's no opportunity to preview them and roll them out later. Additionally there are a couple of glitches in the builder interface which are frustrating at times. Knack is in Beta with a new interface and I anticipate that these will be resolved.

I like that in Knack I can access all-inclusive data, and see it reported in a variety of ways. I can opt for simple summary reports, more complex detailed reports, or even colorful and pretty graphs. I can use a wide variety of parameters to create the report, and I can sort the included data in a variety of ways. I can also export data in different formats. Knack is extremely flexible for me. Full disclosure - I am a frequent Knack user, but I do not record data into Knack, nor do I set up the databases at all. That magic is all done by someone else, so I cannot comment on the administrator aspects of Knack.

Sometimes Knack will log me out while I am in the process of using it. I try to accept the blame when this happens because I always have too many tabs open in my browser, and I often work in 2 different sections of Knack simultaneously. However, it is definitely frustrating. Also, I have a pet peeve about the number of items I can view in one page of a report. For a report with lots of items, I have to navigate forward or back between many pages. I would much prefer to scroll further down the same page to see data in a long report. I don't know of any way to alter the number of items per page.

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.

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.

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...

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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,...

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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.

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.

-Easy to learn and build numerous apps -Lots of functional field types -Easy to customize CSS and Javascript for each app if desired -Excellent price point

-Very buggy -Customer service was initially very responsive, but eventually stopped responding to my requests for simple bugs in my app to be fixed, even after numerous attempts to resolve.

- 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.

- 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).

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.

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.

Easy to create web-based apps. Can achieve a variety of tasks using 3rd party tools. You can embed your app in your website.

The interface is slow and limited. Can be quite clunky and frustrating and trying to work out how to achieve something with the help of Zapier. Customer support stinks. No one is ever able to sort any issues and if you make the slightest mistake or accidental you could break the whole app and be needing a backup which they charge , they quote 1-3 hours usually and takes 3-5 working days so not particularly...

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It is so easy to set up a relational database as well as a website to access that data. Very easy to learn. You can quickly create software to solve your organization's needs.

New features are not added often. Workflow actions are triggered by the page accessing the data and not by the database itself. There are limits to the design customization so the software sometimes seems old.

Super tool for developing multi-user database focused applications. Per developer pricing (as opposed to per user). Easy to provide ROLE based access to different inputs, views and reports Super documentation and templates to learn from or get you started Rules to display and update screens/records Easy to add rich functionality to an application Really nice data import tool Single sign on with Google (and others) Excellent support API/Integration using tools like zapier

Need to know some basic html/css if you want customise the look of your screens No IF THEN logic (probably could use Zapier for this) Nice if users could import data (as opposed to builder) Easier back up tools

I really do not know what I would do without the resource of the Knack platform. There is so much cross talk of data between those who provide it and those who need it that than an online, customizable, easy to implement data management platform is the most optimal solution. Love the ability to customize with CSS and JavaScript and connect to other software through Integromat

Not much to NOT like ; as I see it there are features I haven’t figured out how to use yet and things that don’t work because of pure user error.