Claris FileMaker Reviews

The easy and stable way to use it and improve it daily, as you want.

Only iOS mobile App (no Android). Restriction without big consequence for me.

FileMaker works right out of the box as a relational database that can run the back end of your business. Doctors, shopkeepers and consultants can all benefit from using FileMaker. It's powerful yet, simple to use.

Over the years, the licensing of FMP has progressively gotten worse. If I could find another solution, I would. Believe me, I have looked. I return to FMP because I can develop sophisticated solutions myself, or with the help of a seasoned developer.

The software is easy to use and relatively easy to learn from a developer's standpoint. It has all of the functional capability one needs to develop a useful database application, such as contact/client management or - in my case - management of an art gallery's permanent collection.

What do you do when you outgrow the system or want to migrate to a more robust database system? For me this is the major drawback of Filemaker Pro - there are no tools to help you export a complete file that can be imported into another database. You can import text fields and fields with yes/no on/off switches, but you cannot export images/photographs.

This is a major drawback if you are planning to use the product for a couple of years before migrating to a standard relational database.

Basically, Filemaker Pro files are proprietary files and are not accessible to standard relational database methods, such as SQL. This is okay if (a) you will not outgrow the product or (b) you have no images/photographs included in the database.

FileMaker allows anyone to create anything. Ok , that's a bit of an exaggeration. The truth is, with a little work, you can build most every kind of database you would need - Payroll, CRM, Time Management, Mass Market Email, Inventory, etc. And what you can't build, you can find skilled developers to build for you. Plus there are add-ons galore, and FileMaker is compatible with any system that allows for an API interface.

There are only three things wrong with FileMaker. They are 1) the price, 2) the price, 3) the price. It's not that the price tag is not necessarily hefty, but the pricing structure makes entry difficult for a small business. Yet, FileMaker is IDEAL for small businesses in every other way!

The ease of creating forms and spreadsheets for data tracking with this software was pretty great. We used this mainly in our event planning business and I didn't really have a complaint. You can tell the program what information you need and it will track it and input what ever you've indicated you need it to input. It definitely depends on user input and you have to take the time to ensure your databases are updated. If you do that, you won't have a problem.

The only real aspect I didn't like was that there was no workflow type tracking. As our business grew, this is something we desperately needed, but it was never marketed to us as such, so I can't really complain about this. If you're looking for an all in one platform, this wouldn't be my first choice.

Feature set is quite large.
Very easy import/export of data.
Great tool for proof-of-concepts for large systems, or for small to mid-size applications.

Initial login interface is not very customizable. To truly make a custom login, you have to essentially "log in" with a dummy account, go to a specified layout, and then re-log in with the credentials supplied by the user. This opens up potential security holes.
Using the native security virtually eliminates this gap, but leaves little to no customization of initial user experience.
The FileMaker platform is still not easy to replicate asynchronously, and it does not scale all that well to multiple widespread locations without serious effort.

I suggest and purchase this software for our research teams that need a database to track projects, supplies, responsibilities and other facets of their research centers that do not warrant a sql database or the reporting issues that go with that. They can easily customize the interface, prioritizing what they think is most important.

It can get expensive when you are ramping it up for a growing department. Adding dozens of users and a FileMaker Server in a secure on-premise standup is a budgetary consideration for anyone, and therefore usually delayed until the monies become available.

It can do almost anything & allows for the most detailed (anal-retentive) person to make even minute changes to suit their preference.
Powerful, cost effective (for our 10-15 person office) & mobile for our teams on the road.

Finding a good programmer can be painful.

Easy to learn and program
Easy to implement into an existing organization
Tons of information out there in regards to tips and tricks!

Currently the 17.0.2 release under Mojave has some issues that aren't set to be resolved until mid December 2018.

Easy to create databases with detailed tutorials for each function. It has made managing all of my paperwork a lot easier and it is simple to share files with coworkers.

Calculations were difficult for me to figure out at first but after some trial-and-error, I was able to get it just how I wanted it to be.

I honestly have only scratched the surface of what FileMaker is capable of doing. As I go further down the rabbit hole, I am finding that there are so many tools to aid in my ability to create unique business solutions.

While FileMaker has what seems to be an endless amount of possibilities, it can make it difficult to feel like you know what you are doing. I would recommend getting some initial training or watching tutorial videos.

It was easy to use. Creating jobs based off your client data base and being able to keep track of each round of creative changes was simple.

Keeping track of hours for the team was nearly impossible. As an account person, I need access to hours per project for budgeting purposes.

I enjoy all of the options and how much you can customize it to your needs. Me and my team have built a system to control and input all of our work and it helps us track the the history of our products.

I experience some bugs here and there but nothing specific enough to call out. Small things such as the window changing sizes after macros are done.

is quickly to develop, and you can use in windows and mac systems also in web direct is great to have, FileMaker is very versatile

Filemaker doesn't have vertical portals those are very important we have many reports and this type of portals are very helpful

Powerful scripting options and very configureable. The business finds there is very little down time due to system stability

Some of the management of the database is unintuitive for users used to using SQL management studio or similar.

Easy to use
Instant Features deployment without downtime
Available on multi platform
Easy to maintain and to share

Limited communication with other platforms
Not suited for Big business
Limited reporting capabilities especially Graphics

I used to like FileMaker, it was easy to use but powerful. As it evolved it got complex and confusing. It requires a computer scientist to figure out how to use it now.

It requires a computer scientist to figure out how to use it now. What was simple and intuitive became complicated and confusing.

Easy to manipulate and change our interface as needed.

The updates can be inconvenient to our formatting. Unexpected changes can occur in our database.

It has al of the beauty of an Apple product, rapid application environment, agile, fun. Secure and stable server environment. Web and mobile ready.

Medium easy to use, but with great results, the data base behind it its amazing to access to create your own Exccell customized date based

its difficult ate the start to set up and fill up to get the best results, but its completely worth it

If you have the right developer, you can do almost anything to suit your business' needs.

Very compatible with other softwares when trying to import/export.

The server can slow down at times when bandwidth is being stretched thin.

Ease of deployment, lots of documentation on the web. The web interface was intuitive and found it easy to use

Price and support, They want to charge you just to answer the phone. When there was an issue getting support was rather difficult.

I like that each new version offers more options which suit my needs. I also like that I've never had any technical issues.

Allowed us to create a very sophisticated database that could track donors and all direct mail responses

Every time filemaker upgraded to a new version we couldn't count on functionality continuing so we would have to rebuild

I like that everything related to a request is in one spot and it had all the fields I needed for requests.

Clients didn't have access to the program.