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.