FileMaker vs. Alpha Five - One User's Experience
Someone posted a message asking about the merits of Filemaker Pro and Alpha Five. Here's what I told him:
by Bill Belanger
If you want to distribute multiuser applications, Alpha is the way to go. With FMP you need to buy a complete program for each seat and for each site. The "runtime" you can build with FMP is not multiuser. For example, if you have 1 database and 5 users and you want to deploy it to 10 sites;
Alpha...Buy a full version and a 5-user runtime bundle for about $900, deploy it to 10 sites or 100 or 1,000, same price.
FMP, buy 5 full versions at $300 each, $1500. With 5 you don't need server unless it sees intense usage. If you go beyond 5 users then add $1,000 for the server program and still pay $300 per seat for the clients. Deploy it to site #2 and pay that all again, site 3, pay again. So 10 sites would cost $15,000 or $25,000 if you need the server program. If you want Filemaker to execute a script upon leaving a field, buy a plug-in for each site, another $300. There are many plug-ins to buy if you want to come close to Alpha's functionality.
FMP is fine for a single user environment. You can buy FMP developer and sell single user runtimes for about $500. Multiuser? Fugetaboutit...
Updates are another reason to use Alpha. If you need to send your FMP clients an update, they will have to dump all their data and import it into the new version. You can script it all, but it is still time consuming. With Alpha, send them some new files to install and they're up and running. I'm working with a new customer now and have been sending updates daily and with Alpha it's a breeze, with Filemaker, it was a nightmare.
Having said that, Alpha has a steeper learning curve because it has a richer feature set. I used both for a time because Alpha was harder for me to learn, I kept FMP as a crutch. Now that I've gone beyond the extreme novice phase, I've dumped Filemaker and am not looking back.
If you need something that runs on a Mac and PC, you have to use Filemaker.