Alpha Five vs. Filemaker: "It Pays to Switch"

by Marc King

In these times of ever tightening budgets I was recently reminded how a software provider’s real commitment to developers can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Case in point

The client: A San Francisco marketing consultancy, 30 employees. Projected growth: 100 employees in 1 year with a second location in Asia. Continued growth in years 3 and 4 with additional locations in other countries.

The client’s corporate guidelines mandate the provided solution must be:

1.	Cost Efficient
2.	Scalable
3.	Portable
4.	Customizable

The client having had some previous experience with Filemaker envisioned a Filemaker solution. Having been a Filemaker developer for several years I was up to the task. My first job was to provide a complete breakdown of all costs and requirements associated with the project to be presented for executive approval. Here is an overview of that report.

The user requirements

•	The ability to track and manage multiple types of concurrent marketing campaigns.
•	Each campaign to manage multiple attached files (.ppt, .xls, .doc, .swf)
•	Each campaign to manage expenses and measure income/expense profit margin.
•	The customary bells and whistles: Calendars, Timed events, Email, File handling, and Reports.
•	A bulk email utility for communicating press releases and partner incentives to approximately 400 media and associate contacts.

I had recently downloaded a copy of Alpha Five for evaluation and this project provided an excellent opportunity to compare the two products. After several days of experimenting with the Alpha product I was impressed by how the ease of use was not only on par but far surpassed Filemaker’s familiar toolset. Although the plethora of available plug-ins for Filemaker will perform quite well I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the included features of Alpha Five were even more versatile and rich with options. I deduced this was because of the fully integrated nature of the features.

Another interesting aspect was the full featured send and receive email client, allowing the creation of text or html templates with mail merge fields and the ability to connect every input to any data source with just a couple clicks. All from within the email client window. This would take a considerable amount of scripting with Filemaker.

With such a strong set of features I was already leaning towards the Alpha camp but the real clincher was the staggering difference in the licensing structure of Alpha Five. Here is a product that truly allows you to build fully distributable unlimited user runtime solutions. I’ve never even heard of another company with such a liberal pro developer policy.

For those familiar with Alpha’s unlimited multi-user runtime it should be noted that Filemaker’s developer runtime is designed to create only single user solutions that cannot be customized or networked. In this way Filemaker forces developers into the FM Unlimited / FM Server purchase.

Therefore for purposes of estimating my marketing management solution within the corporate guidelines this examination compares the required FM Unlimited / FM Server combination and the Alpha Five / Unlimited Runtime combination respectively.

Filemaker also has a long standing strategy of requiring 3rd party plug-ins for all of its extended functionality. In this case the number of users and locations means purchasing a developer license for each of the required plug-ins.

Cost analysis