With the exception of FileMaker Pro, none of these apps gives you much power to customize the forms you’ve created. But using FileMaker Pro to create your own relationships between files is much harder than doing the same thing with Tap Forms or Bento. Several of the app’s templates offer files with relationships to multiple databases. After creating them, you can use the form to add new records to the related database the form, or you can select from a list of the related database’s records to add them to the database you’re working with.įileMaker Pro’s relational capabilities, though stellar, are a bit complicated to locate and navigate if you’re new to the idea of creating relational databases. By using a specialized field type called a ‘Link to Form’ field, you can create relationships with any of the other forms you’ve created. Tap Forms offers something quite similar to what Bento did. You can create a database in Symphytum, but the app doesn’t do enough to let you make practical use of the entered data.

If you have any images stored in your Bento database, they will not show up in your new database. Bento has no problem exporting data in a CSV format, but, since CSV files are text files, they can contain only text data. TapForms, iDatabase, and Symphytum only offer options for importing data files in their native formats or as comma-delimited (CSV) files.

Which of these apps gives you the best options for importing your existing Bento data? The short and unsurprising answer is FileMaker Pro. Tap Forms lacks the customization tools that some power users may want, but it offers a lot of prefab databases, plus iCloud support and data encryption. Each offers useful database tools-some of them better than Bento’s, but most of them not. Symphytum ( ) For this story I also looked at Filemaker Inc.’s flagshipįileMaker Pro, as a slightly more expensive and far more capable alternative.

Over the past few weeks I’ve reviewed three apps that offer features similar to Bento: Tap Zapp Software’s

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