Betty Blocks Reviews

We have multiple use cases for the solution. One is an application for fundraisers, which is a construction that I sell to charities and use Betty Blocks as the application platform. We created a planning solution for school groups visiting musea. We also created registration software for homeless people that have housing in the winter so they have to be checked in and checked out using the solution.

Betty Blocks, when I started with it, was similar to a back-end platform with the ability to have a standardized back-office UI out of the box, which is perfect for a lot of situations. For more customer-facing UIs, we had to create the front end ourselves, building endpoints with HTML and JavaScript. Then Betty Blocks started in 2018 with the page builder. This allowed us to create drag-and-drop interfaces. That was quite cumbersome. Now Betty Blocks is entering a new generation of it - next generation forms - which should be a lot better.

The most valuable feature is the back end. The way we can create action flows for things such as sending emails, creating PDF reports, or connecting to web services is very complete. I never experience a lack of functionality in it.
The standardized back-office UI is said to be deprecated over time, which is a shame, because it is a real time-saver and is one of their strong points, only if it was kept up-to-date.

I've recently worked with low/no code solutions from other manufacturers. Some of them have nice functionality in building drag-and-drop frontends. I hope that the next generation forms of Betty Blocks bring them up to that level. Combined with the strong back end, Betty Blocks will have one of the top offers. What I find lacking in the software is its ability to query the database. For example, it is difficult to make calculations like the total sales of customers over a specific period. Another issue is the reporting features, which are not as strong as they could be.

I have been using the solution for six years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten. Sometimes there's some downtime, but not long. If we encounter a block, then support is always very quick. Betty Blocks seems lacking in personnel, so things may take longer in the last year.

The drag and drop page builder had issues, which may improve with the new 'next generation forms'.

I have some databases with tables of around 10,000 or 40,000 records. But I'm not sure if the solution can handle scaling up to gigabytes or millions of records. I don't know if the performance will be good in some situations. For example, if you want to delete a bunch of records from a table, you have to create a loop action, which can take some time. The solution is not query-based, so that will be a disadvantage if we scaled it to millions of records. The solution is more suitable for smaller in-house applications rather than, for example, recreating Facebook.

The first level of support is a nine out of ten. When it gets more complex, we have to go to tech support, the second line of support. Then things may take a while, a week, or two weeks to be acknowledged. I would give that a seven out of ten.

Positive

The implementation was completed in-house.

For the application that I resell to small customers, I have trouble making a profit because of the high subscription cost. But for situations where app development is costly, low or no-code can have a lot of advantages.

We sign three-year contracts with Betty Blocks which are reevaluated at the end of each contract. The complexity of the application is what makes the price.

I've had a bad pricing experience with Betty Blocks. For one application, I'm even thinking of leaving them. The pricing is quite high, but the pricing is also not transparent. I had an application, which to start cost me about 7,000 euros a year. But after the first period of three years, I received an email that my application has grown and if I would like to pay 70,000 euros a year. I got in contact with them, and we settled on 15,000 euros a year. That was reasonable and in line with previous pricing tables they had. In my opinion, Betty Blocks is trying to get as much out of its customers as it can. I am leaving them now with that application because I'm not waiting for the next contract term. I then may get a bill to pay 140,000 euros and then maybe I can settle about 50,000 euros. The pricing is not transparent. I would give Betty Blocks a one out of ten for pricing. 

Betty Blocks is going in the direction of servicing larger corporations, where 70,000 euros a year is not much compared to an employee cost. This is a whole other ballgame than what I play with my mid-market customers. From that perspective, Betty Blocks is losing me which is a pity, because it's a super product.

The support is free, and it is certainly elite. I once needed data restored, not for the complete database, but for specific tables. The support person created an Excel document for me, which I could not have done myself because it was out of a backup. The support person did that for free with no hidden costs.

Before going with Betty Blocks, I evaluated some other products, Zoho and Caspio, which gave me some headaches. The solutions had features I didn't understand. I never had that with Betty Blocks. Of course, there is a learning curve that may be steep, but for me, Betty Blocks was one of the better systems to learn from the beginning. Betty Blocks came out as the clear winner in my evaluation.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

Betty Blocks can help speed up development time by five to ten times. However, this comes at a price. Costs are reduced in terms of development time, but with Betty Blocks, these costs are moving to the subscription fees. In the long term, it may be more cost-effective to use low-code to build a custom application than to go the low- or no-code way.

I've made software for charities before, around the turn of the century in Windows with low code. It took me around two years to build. In Betty Blocks I was able to build the same software in about four months. So the speed gain in terms of development time is obvious.

My experience has shown that if you are a software company that uses Betty Blocks to make solutions for mid-size customers, you need to be careful with the pricing. Customers may not be able to afford the solution. Other solutions, like Bubble, Xano, or Jet Admin, may be better suited, because they are much cheaper. This can allow for making a larger profit margin. When targeting corporate clients and big corporations that need software solutions, Betty Blocks is perfect. For smaller customers that we want to make solutions for, Betty Blocks is not ideal.

We are implementors. We advise our clients on building applications and doing innovation.

We have a strong belief that no-coding is the future. Betty Blocks is a Dutch no-code platform provider, with a similar background to Mendix, and OutSystems. 

In our view, they are very promising because they really go to the no-coding promise, which basically means that a business user could use the platform to build its own applications.

Betty Blocks is taking this concept one step further than Mendix and OutSystems. 

All these platforms have different areas, you have an integration layer, you have the forms and you have the back-up. 

I think the sense of Betty is that they perform, having all of those elements pretty well, and I think that the most crucial one is the front apps. 

To have an application look good with something that more or less comes out of a box, that is quite complicated.

If you look at Pega, they are very strong in integrating new technologies such as AI in-depth.

Betty Blocks is sitting within the Microsoft Azure environment.

All these components are separately tuneable, which makes it a very strong platform, and we believe that this should be considered in the enterprise market.

In my opinion with all platforms, you will have to make a consensus, because not every functionality will work for every client perfectly well. 

In many cases, they make choices where flexibility is a little bit degraded, but if you leave everything open and the flexibility is great then the usability is a little bit less. 

It's a better trade-off from Betty Blocks. Also, it's clear the no-code promise will surely decrease the flexibility that you will have. There are some back doors to solve that system.

I would like to see full integration with AI. 

It can be integrated but it's not something that comes out of the box. You can't just switch on the machine learning in one of the components of the platform.

I have been acquainted with Betty Blocks for a year and a half.

We have scaled this solution. We had a client with a large volume on a real-time basis that we fully scaled. It's definitely scalable.

It is feasible because the application components are in Azure. From what I understand, you can tune the components instead of the total platform, which makes it very suitable to tune some of the elements of the platform while others are the default.

We have contacted technical support and they are very responsive.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

Licensing is on a yearly basis.

There are several pricing structures at the moment. The pricing structure that we have been working with was based on a number of blocks. (A number of blocks, is a translation of what you use in the platform).

It's a calculation based on how much you put on the platform, and not depending on the number of users or the volume of data, although that is now also possible, especially for the larger clients, where they can have a user or data, based pricing.

Pricing could always be better. 

We are struggling sometimes a bit because if you look to a lot of the older shelf solutions, they provide a full solution where a platform or a toolbox is slightly different, but in most cases, it's just as expensive, and you still have to make your own applications.

We have evaluated several solutions but Betty Blocks is our preference. They are a real challenger, and they go one step further and really go for this no-coding. We are strong believers in business users having a platform to make applications.

I can recommend this solution to other users.

I would rate Betty Blocks an eight out of ten.