What Are the Pros and Cons of Filemaker? [closed]

Answer 1

It has been more than a year now since I run through FM and use it in developing solutions for various clients. The following are my FM experience:

1. learning curve is much less than using the hard coded industry standard technology;
2. it can fit well as to industry standards platforms because of it's ODBC and JDBC connectivity. Your data is not locked in FM and other data format can get in FM;
3. it fits well as front end and back end solutions.
4. FM can match enterprise platform having a right database design and deployment i.e. workgroup or department oriented solutions. This is data to it's workgroup owner and make it available for other workgroups or departments;
5. FM is fits well for rapid application development that employs prototyping;
6. FM has many more capabilities you therein...

I suggest you try it yourself and I'm sure you'll love the stuff FM can offer!

Happy computing...

Answer 2

I'll admit to bias on this subject -- I work with one of the larger FileMaker development shops out there, and have written the odd book on the subject. We actually employ many respectable developers who love using FMP. I'll try to keep it brief. :-)

FileMaker Pro is a rapid app development tool. It's primarily client-server, though it has some very respectable web publishing capabilities which work well for many applications. It is not SQL-based, but does have ODBC and JDBC interfaces, as well as an XML/HTTP interface.

As far as lock-in, FileMaker Inc has grown sales steadily, with very significant growth in new users who are attracted to the platform's solidity and ease of use.

I think Matt Haughton nailed it -- for the right applications, FMP is simply the best choice going. That said, your customer is looking at apps written in FMP Pro, and you need to evaluate those apps on their own merit. They may be good instances of FMP development, or they may not.

To know more about FMP's fitness for the task, we'd need to hear more about the proposed application and user base. Are these indeed web apps, or client-server? How many users will be using it? Do they work at one or two site, or are they spread across the Internet?

Happy to elaborate further if there's more interest.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Pros:

• It's cheap

Cons:

• It's cheap(ly made)
• It's non-standard (easy to find MySQL/Oracle/MSSQL/Access experts but nobody knows Filemaker)

Using subpar and/or nonstandard technologies only creates technology debt. I've never found a respectable dev that actually enjoyed (or wanted to) using this niche product.

In my opinion this product exists because it is Access for Macs, and it gained enough of a userbase and existing applications that enough people bought each upgrade to keep it in business. There are many products on the market that still exist because it's users are locked in, not because it's a good choice.