Caspio levels the playing field for all and opens opportunities!

I am not a programmer but am constantly coming up with business-solution ideas that require programming. Before discovering Caspio, I had to consider investing tens-of-thousands of dollars in programmers, only to end up with a compromised product that I could not make a small adjustment to without going through the programmers again. Additionally, I was under the contracted programmer's long timelines, and a compromised vision. As an entrepreneur, you want to control the speed at which your product is developed. With my basic understanding of relational databases, I was able to easily navigate through Capsio and to develop a robust functioning app. When you add to that Capsio's stellar customer support and development help, my app was better than I envisioned. Capsio has opened opportunities for new business ideas for someone like me who never imagined they would be building apps!

A Canadian pleasure to receive Caspio's help, service, security & support

My overall experience with Caspio has been absolutely wonderful and extremely favourable, and I would never consider leaving Caspio except that if the cost of maintaining my table was too costly for me. I am very, very proud of how Caspio has been able to tailor my table needs to the precise and exact style of what I want, and what I want my clients to learn from exploring the table. My table is modern, accurate, colourful, precise and as I have said I am very proud of it. I am also very conformable about the high level of security which Caspio Bridge provides for my table. Security of my table is very important to me. Thank you.

Pros

First, I am extremely pleased with the affordable cost of Caspio Bridge provided to me by Caspio which allows me to continue my historical research and record my work on a table which is open to all of Canada as well as the whole world. I am a senior citizen with a limited income so the cost is very important to me. Secondly, I sincerely appreciate the dependability of Caspio Bridge because my table has never failed my thousands of clients. Since I first started with Caspio many years ago, my table has never failed. Thirdly, I value the dependability of Caspio Bridge support including the expertise of Jovy and Jeff who have the ability, knowledge and skills to improve the performance of my table. I am amazed how technicians including Jovy and Jeff are able to resolve every little glitch which I encounter. I am very appreciative of their service, professionalism, and friendship.

Cons

I can only think of one issue, and that is the complexity of the 'styles'. This is one area that I always need help with as the learning curve about 'styles' is too steep for me. In the case orf 'styles' I always ask for and receive help from Caspio, and I thank you.

Living in the low-code age

There is no doubt that Caspio allows you to create robust cloud applications very fast. As we have now entered the age of low-code and that the opportunity to have SaaS systems, that used to be reserved to large enterprise and government bodies, is now reachable to man small to medium size enterprises. In this respect, Caspio has played out an important and critical role by offering a reasonably priced and powerful platform to them.

Pros

Caspio is a very flexible tool for creating and maintaining SaaS systems for your company or for your customers. You need a basic understanding of relational database and how to work with them. Once you are there then, maybe after a few hours, you are ready to go. Everything else when it comes to creating queries and views, unless you want to create something unusual, is straight forward. Designing datapages is also quite easy and only requires a minimum of learning time. Publishing the datapages on your website is also excellent as Caspio offers different options for achieving it, depending on what web publishing tool you are using.

Cons

As we are doing solution prototypes using MS Access, we tend to upload the application database into Caspio to speed up the process when implementing a solution. The drawback with this method is that although we can upload tables and data, we cannot upload views. This is mostly due to the fact that Caspio does not handle views in the same way as MS Access, in fact not allowing a few functionalities such as calculated fields. Caspio, over the last few years, has come up with means of addressing this shortcoming by adding extra functionalities in database management.

Great potential, but stay away if you're not an enterprise client

Pros

- Basic database builder tools have more built-in options than similar software, so it's easier and faster to build more complex setups - If you don't know code, the interface and logic is very close to MS Excel, so the learning curve isn't too bad - Easy to embed and publish applications - Has an unlimited app user model (though not administrators), which is superior to other database app builders that limit user capabilities and charge based on users. This is ideal for customer-facing applications where users need to be able to more advanced functions outside of simply viewing. - Offer a free plan that is fairly well featured, though would only be useful for internal or personal apps

Cons

- Pricing structure is highly frustrating for a small business user or team. Basic paid plans have no access to APIs, Zapier, or automation/importing, which is high for the base plan compared to similar apps. To get those features, the next level jumps over 4x higher. - "Datapages" allotted for each plan (which is the foundation of the app) are misleading since similar competitors use an allowed number of "apps". Some basic applications in Caspio need 10-20 data pages, but the basic plan only allows 5. Ultimately a large amount of time was spent figuring out how to cut out pages and combine features, killing user experience. - Had a bad experience with customer support (sales) when I accidentally deleted an entire table. Was informed that as a basic/free trial user they would have to charge me to get the table back, even though it existed. And days saved was only a few, so had to quickly decide. They were not sympathetic to my plight even as I was in the evaluation stage. - If you're a major enterprise with a large budget and some programmers, Caspio may be an ideal solution. If you're a small business, be very careful when evaluating and I'd recommend looking elsewhere. The subscription models and definitions are confusing and you may find yourself with an app built during the free trial and realizing you can't possibly afford to launch it.

Extremely Useful Resource

We use Caspio to help distribute data, to inform stakeholders, to allow users to narrow results and answer their questions, and to hopefully allow for a stronger understanding of what we do (our business plan) and how we do that (our business model). Ultimately, as a public research university's academic program, we need to provide transparency and accountability.

Pros

Ease of use, ability to develop skills within and while using the software. Online tutorials (including YouTube videos/projects) are very helpful.

Cons

Some of the definitions for associations between fields (e.g., cascading listbox...) can at first leave a new user uncertain about how the form or data-page will function.