topic Re: Tools used for frontend data entry / what does your stack look like? in Workato Pros Discussion Board

Tools used for frontend data entry / what does your stack look like?

deads — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 23:50:20 GMT

Thinking about an "application stack" with Workato being the engine, I'm curious what other folks are using for different parts of the stack. We have lots of recipes that do something with entered data, and then store the results. The stack for that generally looks like:

A data entry frontend (Google Forms)
Application layer (Workato)
Data storage layer (Google Sheets)

What are other folks using at different layers?

Data storage
Sheets seems like it works pretty well for many simple use-cases. Depending on the speed required the built-in Lookup Tables are also great.

Frontend
The frontend piece is really where I'm looking for some ideas. We have Google Forms feeding Google Sheets for many recipes. In other recipes, it's just raw Google Sheets. This has some advantages in that it's generally easy to have other people set up the data entry pieces, but also has a lot of downsides. Does anyone use something more robust than G Suite applications for this?

Re: Tools used for frontend data entry / what does your stack look like?

gary1 — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 00:12:50 GMT

I highly recommend checking out Quickbase as a potential frontend and also as a data store. It's has a flexible frontend with user-friendly reporting, customizable form views, dashboards, gantts, etc. I swear this isn't a sales pitch, but QB and Workato are like peanut butter and jelly! I've been using this combo for about 7 years now and haven't found a better alternative.

Re: Tools used for frontend data entry / what does your stack look like?

isabelle-leong — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 20:45:33 GMT

Do you use Microsoft Teams or Slack? You can consider Workbots as your frontend for collecting data too.