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.
"Appian's most valuable feature is that we can create end-to-end process workflows with minimum turnaround."
"The product's most valuable feature is the low code aspect of development. We can develop an end-to-end VPN solution using a single platform."
"I find the BPM the most valuable feature."
"Technical support is quite responsive."
"The low code functionality and being able to get applications faster to customers or to the market are valuable."
"The application life cycle is very clear. I started learning it and giving some workshops to my team. Creating the users and the building is very structured. Documentation is nice and it's easy to learn."
"The most valuable features of Appian are the VPN engine, it is fast, lightweight, and easy to set up business rules. Business teams can do it by themselves. That is a very good feature."
"In terms of interface, it's very good. In terms of infrastructure, it's amazing and already using multiple tools behind the scenes. It's a low-code platform, so it's very easy to implement."
"We can do the validation before calling the API."
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of OutSystems is easy."
"The most valuable feature of OutSystems with discipline and the development processes. Instead of each developer doing tasks on their own with their own approach, et cetera, the solution would help bring some organization to the development process."
"We have no complaints surrounding both the scalability and stability of this solution."
"Their out-of-the-box UI is quite good."
"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 scratch coding is useful. The solution is easy to understand."
"The product is mostly stable."
"The solution could improve robotic process automation."
"I wouldn't say their response time is long, but it could be quicker."
"I would like to see more features for enterprises. They would also benefit from adding documentation and training on their site."
"There are four areas I believe Appian could improve in. The first is a seamless contact center integration. Appian does not have a contact center feature. The second is advanced features in RPA. The third would be chatbot and email bot integration—while Appian comes with chatbot and email bot, it's not as mature as it should be, compared to the competition. The fourth area would be next best action, since there is not much of this sort of feature in Appian. These are all features which competitors' products have, and in a mature manner, whereas Appian lacks on these four areas. I see customers who are moving from Appian to Pega because these features are not in Appian."
"The tool itself is pretty good, but the main area that we struggled with was the backend. The frontend development is really good, but the backend modeling can be streamlined a little bit. There are good integrations, but tying them through the data layer and then up into the frontend could be improved a little bit. It does read/write on the data source, and you can configure it to just write or just read, but there is a little bit of work involved."
"The documentation needs to be improved."
"Form creation and SAIL proprietary language still basically require programming. The claim a BA type can do everything is hogwash."
"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 dashboards in OutSystems could improve. There are a lot of tabs in the service center that can be confusing."
"In OutSystems, cloud management is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"While I can't speak to the market impact, as a developer, I've seen significant reductions in development time across different versions of our applications. One area for improvement would be the UI controls in Service Studio. Sometimes, controls don't appear in the IDE, requiring us to check them in the web browser instead. Overall, our experience with OutSystems has been positive, though improvements in UI development would be welcomed."
"I would like to see improvements in versioning. It can be challenging to keep track of what changes should be committed, especially when many developers are working in one environment."
"Its ability to create and run automated tasks could be better."
"Writing custom code still needs to be done via Integration Studio. This might have been added to the IDE."
"OutSystems does not provide any native reporting resources. All reports must be created with other tools or as a webpage."
"Mobile apps need improvement."
Appian is ranked 6th in Rapid Application Development Software with 57 reviews while OutSystems is ranked 3rd in Rapid Application Development Software 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 "Useful natural speech to algorithm, reliable, and beneficial automatic task". 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 Rapid Application Development Software vendors and best Low-Code Development Platforms vendors.
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