What is Knack?
Developers can extend these apps with a RESTful API, custom CSS, and JS event handlers.
What do you like best?
Knack is an incredibly fast, powerful, flexible, and reliable tool that has completely transformed the way we run our small business of approx 40 employees. We built one central system on knack to manage all our data and operational processes (company-wide) in one spot online. The transparency, efficiency, and ease of use has been a game changer for us, and I honestly don’t know how we would operate without knack at this point. You don’t need to be a coder or super techie to understand and use knack, it is very intuitive and well designed, and super adaptable to most scenarios.
Knack is an online database application platform that is superb for creating our database objects depending on our client procurements. It is easy to migrate our pre-existing databases to Knack with its import feature, which ensures record mappings and key validations. Querying is very simplistic, and its backup occurs regularly, thereby ensuring database latency & integrity.
No User Limits – Most database softwares count customers as users. So if you build a customer dashboard, where each customer has to register can get really crazy. This is one of the reasons we first started using knack because we can have 10,000 customers access their accounts and it’s still the same low price.
Build complex databases with very little code knowledge – Every business is a little different, but organizing your business and creating processes around different stages is super easy. If you connect it into something like Integromat, you can sync informations across all your systems and have lots of complex triggers.
What do you dislike?
Knack requires some getting used to to build stuff. It’s very rigid in how to associate data, so you need to do a lot of work arounds to do some tricky things. Almost anything can be done, but it is not always intuitive on how to do it.
As objects get larger with lots of fields, latency errors start to occur within the api causing lots of errors.
Update 1 year later: Weve continued to work wtih knack and build other applications. However, the 503 Upstream errors has made me change my mind about recommending it to others. We are using Integromat to move data between softwares and into knack. As we’ve built out our applications and added functionality the upstream errors have become unbearable. On one day this year we had over 100 upstream errors. We have tasked an employee to review and resolve these errors but you can imagine that doing that across 100+ scenarios would take up almost their entire day.
The purpose of building an app is grow it in functionality as your business grows. If Knack is your primary database, you will no doubt at some point need to manipulate the data or add records from outside resources. If this is your intent, then I would else where.
It provisions inline editing so that we can edit our records simply by click and edit rather than reloading the platform to reflect the changes. I don’t find anything to dislike about Knack.
Every now and then I will run into a small limitation or want to customizing something that I can’t. Overall, the functionality covers the bases for what I need to do the majority of the time.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Knack has solved countless problems for our business, including: dramatic reduction in paper/shift to digital, automatic email reminders to people when they miss an important deadline, aggregating relevant data automatically so we can easily see company metrics and performance at the click of a button, shared access to company data/information but still being able to control levels of user access for each role, the system tells us when we need to invoice a client and emails us an alert, creating a central database for the company and eliminating countless spreadsheets, creating relationships between our data, saving us from data entry, getting our field crew to use tablets to report their information. The list goes on and on… too many solutions to list.
The best thing about Knack is its capabilities to create multiple database cluster applications which can be integrated into a cordial platform provided by Knack. This process helps me to collect memory logs, process interactions, and transaction requests which are key performance metrics to evaluate the optimization strategies for our enterprise applications. It has brilliant load balancing implementations which automatically allocate resources based on our incoming workload. Navigation features are convenient, and we can guide over our application. Its easy to replicate my database application clusters as it offers no-code platform for developing them for our customers.
We have over a 100 different order statuses with 5 different departments. We use knack to not only track these statuses, but track efficiency and move data to different softwares. It has become our central source of truth for all our applications. Since it’s easy to use, we can hire lower level developers to maintain and create automations within the business. Non-coders can even help. We can make big changes to the system within minutes without the help of a developer in most cases.
Features
Pros
Cons
Pricing
$39.00 /month
Yes, has free trial
No free version