
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. Layout design is fairly static and dated (this is improving with the Filemaker 12 and above).Requires the mouse to access functionality.Unable to copy and paste/import or export some items from solutions.Pretty much only drag and drop programming, you can only use predefined script steps, relationships are made by making a graph.The plugins required to extend functionality can be expensive as well.In addition the server part of the software is about $300-$800 a year 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.Inflexible: it does what it does well, but if you need more your out of luck for the most part.

Built in support for importing exporting excel, cvs, tab-formatted.Has some neat built in tricks like built in graphs, tab controls, web viewers.Changing field/database/script names after the fact is free.For the most part, drag and drop programming.Anyone with access can edit the program.There are many plugins available to extend functionality.Cross-platform (Mac OS X, Windows, iOS).Easy to deploy locally, turn on sharing and connect from another client.Here are the pros and cons of using Filemaker Pro vs PHP/MySQL/HTML in my experience. Comparing the two, they both have pros an cons. It's like you have MySQL, PHP, HTML and your editor put together in a GUI.

They're both in the same category of software, they're integrated programming environments. Calling Filemaker Pro, Access for the Mac is kind of like saying, Mac OS X is Windows for the Mac.
