Alpha Anywhere

Pros: Not many as the product doesn’t work and you waste your time trying to find fixes for the problems that you encounter.

Cons: Don’t waste your money on Alpha Anywhere. Features they say work doesn’t work and they always try to blame you the client because it doesn’t work. You are better off hiring someone to build your front end for you in a native coding language!

Overall: Terrible product, terrible customer service, shady business practices. I wasted too much time and money on Alpha Anywhere.

Pros: You can develop almost anything in Alpha Anywhere from complex, enterprise-strength, multi-language cloud-hosted web applications to mobile apps, APIs, web services and everything in-between.

The developers are very responsive to feature suggestions and bug reports. They are also really nice people to deal with - an important (and often overlooked!) factor when choosing a software development partner.

The Alpha Anywhere framework exposes almost unlimited opportunities to get "under the hood" and code as much as you like (or as little as you like). Most Internet standards and languages are respected and available.

You can develop applications which look they have been coded by hand, with virtually no coding actually needed. You can also use the built-in features, templates and genies (wizards) to quickly prototype and test out ideas for software. Even deploying and sharing the results with clients is easy, once you understand the basic Alpha principles.

Cons: The flip side to being so responsive is that the product is rarely "stable". We would actually prefer fewer updates for a more consistent and reliable approach to public builds.

We are a growing, multinational software company and it isn't always easy to find new Alpha Anywhere developers to bring into the team. Instead, we now look for staff and contractors with good web dev skills (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL) and then add the Alpha Anywhere special sauce to their skillset ourselves.

Overall: Alpha Anywhere has helped us grow our software development company from annual sales of USD300K to USD2M and growing. There is a learning curve and we would like Alpha to focus on quality and stability rather than new features, but this is certainly the most comprehensive, best-supported and most engaging platform we've found yet.

Pros: That we can create apps for web, iOS and Android all from the same platform using one code base. A user can make significant progress on an app within a very short amount of time in comparison to other platforms.

Cons: Applying styling to things could be a little bit better.

Overall: Alpha Anywhere allows you to create any kind of application you can think of, and we've created dozens of them to this point. Being able to quickly generate a basic app to demo to a client has been really helpful. Complex functionality can be incorporated using additional server side and client side scripting and there are plenty of built in functions to help you.

Pros: I have used Alpha software products for 30 years. There is no other company as responsive to feature requests.

Cons: The styling and CSS could use some improvement, especially if you want to style anything other than straight out of the box.

Overall: I highly recommend Alpha products. My 2 full time employees and I use it daily to earn our living. It is the only database development software we use.

Pros: Strong security mechanism; robust features; we haven't found any task it can't handle; powerful data exchange tools; works well on all devices; builds powerful, device friendly 'apps' that don't require download from the app store, though you can integrate and sell through the app store, too.

Cons: Takes a little effort to optimize page loading, but not that hard.

Overall: We have built one of the most powerful health tech apps in America, OnTime Care, using AlphaAnywhere and Alpha Transform. See it on the Patient Innovations website.

Pros: - Speed of development
- Flexibility
- Ability to connect many, many datasources
- Developer environment meets you where you are at in your coding skill. By this I mean if you are new to designing web apps for your business or external use, with some minimal application of effort, you can produce something that works with minimal code and using action scripting from within the program. However, if you have experience, know javascript, or would like to grow, you can skip the action scripting and program, but leave the monotonous stuff to Alpha.
- Product is very well supported and its management is continually improving it. They genuinely care about the product and are invested in it.
- Developer community is well founded and active. Developers who genuinely care will answer well thought out questions. You get what you give and do best if you actively join that community and participate helping others as you grow as well.
- Alpha is very active in producing weekly videos on new features and using the app in general. Dion and Sarah are rockstars and very skilled and easy to watch and listen to. They do an hour every Tuesday and just watching those you will advance your skills. Very large library of videos if you are getting started.

Cons: - The written help files on the website are very comprehensive. At times I do wish each subsection had a few more code examples. My style of learning pushes more towards looking the reference up and examining code examples to figure out how they did it.
- The counter to above is Alpha has many template forms you can quickly install and look at how a pro did it.

Overall: Alpha Anywhere is a very, very good software to write line of business applications in quickly and/or design and publish mobile apps. Our use in it has been mostly developing an internal ERP system within our company. This application has grown in size, use and scale to become a critical system and Alpha has taken the load we have thrown at it.
While some of our systems are complex and have many hours of development in them, we have many that were completed in less than an hour and are still in use. Quite frequently we have a use case that needs something built to solve an issue and this software allows us to respond and implement in hours, not days and weeks.

Pros: We have been able to develop our apps (both web and mobile) in a quick, efficient manner using Alpha Anywhere. This has allowed us to grow our SaaS offerings without having to grow our team.

Our customers are always blown away at the great software we can develop using Alpha and the speed with which we can deliver products.

Cons: The only con I face is that customers with existing development teams that haven't used Alpha always want to argue that it isn't the correct tool for the job. To date, we have won everyone of them over once they see the power of Alpha and the ease of development.

Overall: Alpha Anywhere is a great low code development tool for web and mobile app development. It is easy to learn, very powerful, feature rich, and makes development very quick and easy.

Additionally the Alpha Transform product makes replacing your existing paper forms/data collection processes a snap.

Pros: Alpha has everything that you need to build modern Cloud-based applications. You can create no code, low code, or custom code programs. Choose from a number of popular databases, start with the built-in security framework and build a custom application. Web desktop or mobile. Publish to the Alpha cloud and your app is ready to go.

Cons: If you are a new user it can be overwhelming because there are so many tools to pick from. However, you set your IDE to see only the most current tools and ignore the legacy ones. There are really no Cons that I can think of.

Overall: I love Alpha Software. They have been around and understand the Data-Centric application. The Alpha IDE is mature and robust. It is really a one-stop program to create any kind of business application that you need.