What Are the Pros and Cons of Filemaker?
A potential customer has asked me to look at some promotional flyers for a couple of apps which fall into the contact management / scheduler category. Both use Filemaker as their backend. It looks like these two apps are sold as web apps. At any rate I had not heard of Filemaker in about ten years, so it was surprising to see it pop up twice in the same sitting. I think it started out as a Mac platform db system.
I am more partial to SQL Server, MY SQL, etc, but before make any comments on Filemaker, I'd like to know some of the pros and cons of the system. It must be more than Access for Mac's, but I have never run across it as a player in the client / server or web app arena.
Many thanks Mike Thomas
Answer
Calling Filemaker Pro, Access for the Mac is kind of like saying, Mac OS X is Windows for the Mac. They're both in the same category of software, they're integrated programming environments. It's like you have MySQL, PHP, HTML and your editor put together in a GUI. Comparing the two, they both have pros an cons. Here are the pros and cons of using Filemaker Pro vs PHP/MySQL/HTML in my experience.
Pros:
- Easy to get started
- Easy to deploy locally, turn on sharing and connect from another client
- Cross-platform (Mac OS X, Windows, iOS)
- There are many plugins available to extend functionality
- Includes starter solutions
- Anyone with access can edit the program
- For the most part, drag and drop programming
- Changing field/database/script names after the fact is free
- Has some neat built in tricks like built in graphs, tab controls, web viewers
- Built in support for importing exporting excel, cvs, tab-formatted
Cons:
- Inflexible: it does what it does well, but if you need more your out of luck for the most part
- Expensive compared to the free alternative: It costs about $100 per year for a local user, $150 per developer, if you are using it as a website you need specialized hosting, which tends to cost more. In addition the server part of the software is about $300-$800 a year
- The plugins required to extend functionality can be expensive as well
- Pretty much only drag and drop programming, you can only use predefined script steps, relationships are made by making a graph
- Source control is problem
- Lack of scalability
- Unable to copy and paste/import or export some items from solutions
- Requires the mouse to access functionality
- Layout design is fairly static and dated (this is improving with the Filemaker 12 and above)
In general I would say that if you're developing exclusively for the web or a large organization Filemaker Pro probably isn't the best fit. It's difficult to have multiple people developing on the same solution. On the other hand, for a smaller organization in need of a customizable in-house database it could be a great boon. You can build rather complicated applications very quickly with it if your willing to deal with it's deficiencies.