We compared Appian and OutSystems based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, Appian is praised for its intuitive interface, customizable workflows, seamless integration, efficient task management, and robust reporting capabilities, with highly regarded customer support but improvements needed in UI, performance, scalability, and reporting features. On the other hand, OutSystems is valued for its ease of use, rapid application development, platform compatibility, scalability, built-in tools, and strong support, with positive feedback on pricing and ROI, although users desire increased speed in development, improved UI, more customization options, enhanced collaboration features, and smoother integration capabilities.
Features: Appian stands out for its intuitive interface, customizable workflows, seamless integration, task management, and powerful reporting capabilities. OutSystems, on the other hand, excels in ease of use, rapid app development, compatibility, scalability, tools, integration options, support system, time-saving, and cost-effectiveness.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Appian product has been mentioned by users as requiring consideration. In contrast, OutSystems product has been described as having a straightforward and hassle-free setup cost., Appian users have expressed satisfaction with its efficiency in streamlining processes, decision-making capabilities, and ability to achieve business goals. They also find value in its automation features, resulting in time and cost savings. On the other hand, OutSystems users have reported increased efficiency, streamlined processes, improved productivity, and cost savings due to its ease of use, quick development time, and scalability.
Room for Improvement: Appian: Users have requested improvements in user interface, performance, scalability, and reporting features. OutSystems: Users seek increased performance, efficiency, and speed in development. They suggest intuitive UI, customization options, enhanced collaboration, and smoother integration capabilities.
Deployment and customer support: The reviews for Appian and OutSystems indicate that there may be differences in the time required for deployment, setup, and implementation. User feedback suggests that Appian users may mention different timeframes for deployment and setup, while OutSystems users mention specific timeframes for deployment and setup. It is important to carefully consider these differences when evaluating the products., Appian's customer service is highly regarded and praised by users. The support staff is knowledgeable, friendly, and willing to go the extra mile. OutSystems also has positive feedback, with customers appreciating prompt responses and helpful troubleshooting throughout the development process.
The summary above is based on 50 interviews we conducted recently with Appian and OutSystems users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"What stands out are the speed of the product, the quick, easy development, and visual diagramming."
"The most valuable features of Appian are workflow management and the ease with which you can build the UI."
"With low-code, we don't need a lot of coding, and then from the plumbing perspective, there is a complete CI/CD pipeline that exists within Appian that can be leveraged for open deployment."
"It's heavy on business processing in terms of logic, process workflows, and primarily on the process design modeler. Appian is really great at that. In terms of the full stack set from a low-code platform perspective, it's definitely an eye opener since it can be deployed via mobile app and on the web as well."
"It has very flexible adaptation and the ability to save and automate processes."
"The product has a very good mobile app."
"The tech support is quite good."
"Form building capabilities and well thought out process modelling are key points to this product."
"One thing I like about OutSystems is that there's no lock-in. You can keep running your applications because it's on .NET and hosted centrally. That's one of the advantages I see there in terms of not having an IT strategy that has a dependency on a particular platform."
"The most valuable features of OutSystems are the user-friendly platform. The drag-and-drop feature is great. I have used other rapid application development tools before, but they were not as advanced as OutSystems. With the previous tools, I had to manually build certain features, but OutSystems does it automatically."
"The most valuable features of OutSystems are the user interface, the flexibility to quickly integrate with almost anything in the system, and the ability to connect with databases."
"It is very stable."
"The scratch coding is useful. The solution is easy to understand."
"Scalability proved to be an exceptionally beneficial feature."
"The most valuable feature is Agile development. I love that you save a lot of time on development and can focus on logic and business requirements."
"In terms of user support and community engagement, I rate the tool a ten out of ten."
"They should provide more flexibility so designers can create a more picture perfect device."
"It has it's own built-in UI components and doesn't provide much flexibility to customize or extend those components."
"The solution could improve by being more responsive when dealing with large quantities of data. Additionally, they can make the decision or rules engine better. It cannot handle too many rules or too many decisions at once."
"We would like to see more reduced latency. We would like to make sure that the scale-out factor will be much more as workloads come in."
"Even though the company has made great improvements in online documentation, featuring rich material which includes case studies of real-life use cases, the material could definitely be better in quality and coverage of use cases."
"The graphical user interface could be easier to use. It should be simplified."
"Appian has a few areas for improvement, which my organization raised with the Appian team. One is the Excel output which is limited to fifty columns when it should be up to two hundred or three hundred columns."
"Sometimes, clients expect us to implement ERP using Appian, which is very complicated. In such cases, I don't believe that Appian is a good tool for that."
"The solution is costly."
"Mobile apps should have been fully native."
"One of the biggest areas for improvement is that every time an existing data element is modified, it creates a new data element. It doesn't really modify that particular data element. So, a user has to follow an extra step of removing the existing data element and bringing in the new and modified data element that is being added, which sort of goes into negative productivity."
"The solution's testing framework needs to be improved, and the workflow should be slightly more mature."
"We had some lagging issues under high data loads, and the solution needed to be customized to improve this."
"There is room for improvement in technical support."
"When shared extensions are updated, all the applications are redeployed."
"The resource availability needs to be increased."
Appian is ranked 5th in Low-Code Development Platforms with 58 reviews while OutSystems is ranked 3rd in Low-Code Development Platforms with 46 reviews. Appian is rated 8.4, while OutSystems is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Appian writes "Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OutSystems writes "The visual program provides the advantage of only requiring one skill set for both the front and backend ". Appian is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, Camunda, ServiceNow, Pega BPM and Mendix, whereas OutSystems is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, Mendix, ServiceNow, Oracle Application Express (APEX) and Pega BPM. See our Appian vs. OutSystems report.
See our list of best Low-Code Development Platforms vendors and best Rapid Application Development Software vendors.
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