Mendix Reviews

The most valuable features of Mendix includes the most vital logic building component called the microflows which cuts down the need to write code and instead using logic blocks to interpret the way the function should work. As part of microflows, there are ways which gives the developer flexibility by writing code using Java actions. There also other vital features like the ability to easily use web services and export and import files of different kinds.

The main way in which this product has improved my organisations functions is the ability to promote agile methodology and rapid development. It also allows users see what has been developed quicker than writing physical code. This means it allows us to test out different scenarios with ease and also changing entities and attributes are easier than ever. Another way this system has helped is the ease of releasing the product we are developing on different platforms whether it be desktops, tablets or phones. Being built using bootstrap also helps with the responsiveness of the system.

The area of this product that needs improving is the templates in which the user uses to create documents. As it stands it is not very intuitive and not pleasing to the eye.

I have been using Mendix as a system for almost nine months.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There are a few bugs when new versions are released which sometimes affects the program when it is run.

I have had no issues scaling it for my needs.

7/10 - I haven't needed to ask them for much but the Mendix community which also includes some developers in Mendix help to solve issues in less than 24 hours which I was impressed with.

The Mendix developers and community continues to add useful features and add ons to the system which makes it better in every iteration.

We are able to service our customers in a way that differentiates us. This makes us more competitive and able us to expand our business.

• Integrates - Suite allows you to easily and smoothly integrate with pretty much anything.
• Cloud-enabled - It provides a full Cloud Foundry-driven cloud environment with one-click deployment.
• Digital execution - Mendix provides a complementary program to drive digital execution, so you not only get a platform but also instruction on how to leverage it best.
• Super fast - I can develop full apps in weeks instead of years.

It could use a more comprehensive widget creation studio in the IDE.

There is not one feature that is better than the others. All are good because it is a platform and the features work well together.

The power is in the entire solution provided. You have one answer for:

• MDD - Model Driven Development
• DTAP - Develop Test Acceptance Production environments
• Visual web app editor
• Visual database editor
• Mobile and web app development
• The ability to deploy to any major cloud hosting system, like AWS, Azure, and now SAP cloud.
• Integrated support for Agile software development and the SCRUM working method.
• Strong front-end development options out-of-the-box, easy to extend new features, and isolating front-end functionality, yet giving the possibility to integrate with the platform.

We can deliver six times faster than working with regular third generation languages.

Also, the platform helps set up a proper software development architecture on an enterprise level.

"Security by design" is also a phrase for Mendix.

I see little to no improvements to its core functionality since Mendix 7 was rolled out, creating web apps for businesses.

From Mendix 6 until 7, options on creating mobile apps have improved, but offline capabilities are not mature enough. Still, this gets a good focus within the company, so I believe this will be something of the past soon enough.

I worked at Mendix in 2014. I did not stop using it when I left the company in 2015, so three years.

No issues.

Yes, the Mendix Cloud out-of-the-box does not support autoscaling.

I would give the technical support a 10 out of 10 rating.

I have worked with many third generation languages (Java/.NET /PHP) and have found that you still need an extra third party software next to the development environment provided to come up with the same toolset as the Mendix platform.

The initial setup was both straightforward and complex.

The prices are fair for an enterprise product that has a target audience of big companies/enterprise companies.

Not applicable. I am a Mendix consultant delivering Mendix solutions.

It is a great platform that will help you solve hard business problems in a digital way.

The single most beneficial feature is the rapid development and prototyping of the product. I was able to construct real demoable software in a very short time and show the client. The technology is a no-brainer and allows me to focus on the business of the client over mastering or wrestling with the software. Not only do I create workable software, but due to the high-level nature of how logic is written (using Microflows akin to Business Processing Models), a business person can clearly understand the code itself.

Their attention to detail and resistance to feature bloat to maintain the platform’s elegance and simplicity drives the platform’s success in integrating business an IT. They have implemented the right features, like easy integration mechanisms, robust configurable security, database and client device portability, a project and team work portal and much more to deliver valuable solutions, fast.

During an implementation of a Rules Engine for Credit Risk and Loan Eligibility which integrates various Credit Bureaux data systems for online loan applications, we experienced some performance issues. We then broke out into four teams to find optimizations of which three teams were technical and one was business analysis. The team who came up with the best solution, was the business analysis team. Since they could understand the flow of logic in the microflows, they could reorganize certain calls and optimize the process to gain the few milliseconds we needed to bring the application inside it's non-functional performance requirements.

This example shows that something that used to be confined to hidden alleys of the IT department was solved by business people with knowledge of the business process : Mendix enables a frictionless interaction between the business and IT domains to produce integrated solutions rather than point optimisations.

Reporting isn't Mendix' strong suite. The Business Modeler is amazing for rapid application development but the Reporting lags behind. Mendix relies on third party products who specialize in reporting to supplement their product. Other areas where they could improve are already on the roadmap, for instance clustering and NoSQL databases. Generally speaking the community and R&D are on the ball when it comes to features that their client base desire.

I've used this product since 2010, that is six years.

Deployment is straightforward and very solid.

Stability is not a problem, although you might have to tune your environment for its use cases since the out-of-the-box configuration, like any app, is for general use cases, but there is no real problem here.

Scalability requires a bit more expertise but is not insurmountable, at least not for any of the products we have developed, which includes Big Data climate sensor systems, GIS, Risk Decisioning, Lead/Queue Management, Loan Origination/Loan Applications both online- and agent-based channels like phone/email/web/mobile etc.

Generally support is friendly, helpful and professional. There are two channels of support, the Forum and the Support Portal.

The community is very active over the Forums and included the participation of the Core R&D team.

The support portal does have a few minor problems but when you make Mendix aware of this, they strive to accommodate the pain-points. In no way do these pain-points prevent Mendix from finding a temporary workable solution. For instance, if I am unable to log a bug for a client because of an account restriction, they would log bugs on my behalf. After that communication is followed up on properly and I'm pretty happy with the process, except that their support portal is in the Netherlands, so there is a slight time difference if you are working in the Americas.

Mendix is a first-rate business modeling solution. We have evaluated other solutions which focus more on the technology and gives developers too much flexibility with which they could hang themselves. This sounds counter-intuitive, but in real fact Mendix is a modeling solution that evolves upward in the software evolutionary chain, in that it is business-centric instead of being tech-centric; you model instead of code. We've been stuck in the code-mode for decades. Modeling isn't a new concept but it is hard to craft a first-rate modeling solution which Mendix has done a great job at.

Using the modeler frees you from technological burden and gives you more space to focus on mastering the business of the client.

Setup is an easy wizard installation process. It is straightforward and downloads and installs missing dependencies like the Java Runtime and SDK.

We have done both in the past, but mostly it is done in-house. As the product matured over the past few years, we became completely independent of vendors, since everything required is well documented and supported. In cases of emergencies, a quick forum post is enough to fill missing gaps.

Despite high licensing costs, the time and cost of development is dramatically reduced. On average our timelines are in the range of five to 10 times faster than choosing a more traditional software approach. Licensing costs are on negotiation basis, and this works for countries with weaker currencies and global economic disadvantages, like countries in Africa.

Find people who are willing to try something different, people with a teachable attitude. Mendix is a paradigm-shift and might not appeal to ego-centric developers in their comfort zone who want under-the-hood control. Instead they should be business orientated, concerned with delivering working software fast and interacting with clients.

Mendix provides the big-picture to the detail and the detail to the big-picture and they do that well. The tool chain allows one to model the business in the easy-to-use Business Modeller, then to deploy the app server with the model, deploy the DB schema to the database and have it running with : One click. They wrap all of this detail, in a big picture platform by integrating everything into the software development life cycle that provides the techies with the detail of what to do next and the business owner with where things are and how long they will take. The most valuable feature is being fast without painting yourself into a corner.

Mendix has helped to dissolve the divide between “business” and “IT”, between business speak and technical jargon, between classical project management and disciplined agile delivery. It reduces friction to deliver projects iteratively and reduce time to market and helps change the organisational culture, if the culture is open to this. In short, Mendix has improved our ability to delight our customers.

We need better support for master data management, consuming corporate dictionaries and exporting the models to others. We also need better reporting and visualisation as this is a critical part of each app and currently the reporting side has to rely on external BI tools. Additionally, we need better support for quickly integrating with external data sources without writing code or reliance on ETL tools. A Mendix profiler will also help and lastly, a multi window business Modeller so that one can use the Modeller more productively on two monitors.

We've used it for six years, since 2010.

There are very rarely issues with the deployment.

We have had Mendix apps that were not maintained properly and left to tick over that were difficult to keep stable and upgrade due to large databases and insufficient resources : This is more due to a lack of engineering than anything related to Mendix. But because Mendix makes things easy, clients often feel like it does not require the same engineering disciplines and this sets up a client for deployment, stability and scalability issues.

Generally there have been no issues scaling. Keep in mind that Mendix runs on a RDBMS as its main persistent store and as such will scale with the data base. We find that the Mendix App server is only the bottle neck on tight loops over LOTS of data and when using dynamically calculated values. However, this is not typical use cases for Mendix and can be avoided by using microservices that do tight loop/ETL, simulation etc. work loads and leave complex business processes to Mendix.

At times when we hit a serious bug, Mendix has always been quick to respond and fix the issue. The user forums are active and Mendix staff is encouraged to provide answers. In general, quite good. Can always be better but in comparison to other large tech companies, they like to please and help.

We evaluated a number of tools that claimed to offer productivity platforms and model driven development. The success of Mendix is of course using it where it is strong. Mendix is not an BI or ETL tool and we rather use Mendix in collaboration with a number of tools like Blaze, Talend, YellowFin etc. Why Mendix? Its model driven approach is superior rather than a code generator as used by many other productivity platforms. This keeps you fast rather than being fast in the start of the project. A model driven approach makes it possible to focus on solving the problem at hand rather than tinkering with code that has to be maintained in three months.

Mendix is not a "RAD" tool and there really is nothing like it, similar tools have started appearing and the approach is catching on. Model Driven tools differ in philosophy and implementation and needs a different mind set to leverage optimally.

Mendix presents a deceptively simple environment that seems too shallow for many techies, but is not. It does present a completely different paradigm and team culture and to leverage Mendix a change in corporate culture might be required. From us and them, to a integrated innovative whole where technologists can focus on delivering value to the rhythm of business demands. Convincing classical techies might be a challenge and this often limits the success of implementations.

We started off by seeding our team culture the Mendix culture by working with them on a number of projects. Since then we have grown a number of teams for ourselves and our clients. Advice: Get a Mendix Engineer to seed the different culture and flourish from there, it will put your investment on a faster benefit-track. However, this is not required and growing organically might work depending on your lead Mendix engineers’ propensity to innovate, integrate and deliver business value.

ROI is dependent on the importance of a “fast time to market”. If a fast time to market is not a determinant, then write assembly or C, else Mendix might have a part to play.

Mendix can be expensive if you stare at the bottom line and compare it to traditional tech - which is flawed. Think big picture and time to market with a few bright resources rather than micromanagement and a army of developers and it might lead one to realise that saving a number of salaries, training, career building and hand holding might be a bigger saving than your average capex/opex watching manager can see. Mendix is negotiable on licensing and will try to make the project where possible.

We had a look at OutSystems, some open source initiatives and BPM tools.

Mendix requires adoption from the top and support for the teams that implement it to not be ham strung by IT. Do not approach Mendix like a “traditional” IT shop will : It requires a close integration with business, driven by Business for Business by IT rather than by IT for for business. It requires a model driven approach to solving problems that provides speed gains when describing solutions in its language rather than designing everything from scratch, think different, leverage models, accelerate delivery, speak business.

They have good attention to detail and keep things simple and clean.

Mendix is used to develop an application that is used by the business to achieve business goals, such as easy data interaction, data storage, reporting and monitoring of business assets, and ticketing.

Easy document generation saves a lot of time. The integrated security also saves a lot of time, especially when it comes to setting up user-roles and security. Finally, database updates work automatically. There is no need to write queries to update the database, once you make an update.

• The ability to rapidly build applications.
• Built-in management tool called Sprinter gives everyone involved in the development of the application an overview of the current state and progress of the application being built.
• Supports collaborative development which minimizes the risk of having multiple developers working on a single piece of code.
• Easy to integrate with both RESTful and SOAP web services. This is helpful because a lot of applications are dependent on others for data. For example, if you were to develop an app that does a background check on employees, you would integrate to systems like TransUnion to feed data to your application.

They need to enable multiple database connections so an app can directly read/write data to/from multiple databases. This would enable easy splitting of big applications that have complex entity relationships.

I would also like to see automatic adjustment to the Java Heap, whenever an application load becomes too much for the application.

It could also use hot database replication.

I would give it an eight out of 10 because of the ability to rapidly build apps with Mendix. You could actually build an application as someone from the business side is explaining what the solution requires.

Built-in security, easy of use, support and available examples of how to use it.

The built-in security makes security-by-design from the start possible. The local modeler is easy to use. For the few occasions that I need support, after a beginner's fault, it's available, as is the cloud solution. The many available Mendix software examples make it possible to develop using of existing solutions.

I use it to learn how to program Mendix.

Indeed nothing is 100% perfect. But who am I to say what should be better? Nevertheless, I think Mendix is very strong if you want to store and retrieve something in a database. My personal experience with connecting the LoRa device (which itself is not fully developed yet, so the interface requirements are not fully known) is that it has been a hard job to get done. Be aware that I’m a Java developer so loading the encryption, hashing and decryption libraries was hard for me to find. On the other hand, interfacing with new Internet of Things (IoT) devices creates endless possibilities.

A half year.

It is very stable and there is 24/7 support.

No.

Very good support if you have a problem.

No.

Simple, and there is a free course which shows all the in and outs of how to use the modeler to design and develop a solution. It helps, but it's not necessary if you have Java experience, for those cases where you want to go further than the standard.

No.

Developing standardized programs even with a custom design interface is possible. Such easy Java interface possibilities make it possible for me to realize a secure, remote, two-way interface with a LoRa device, even with very little Java knowledge.

Being a device agnostic solution and responsive design support are most valuable.

To market time has been reduced as development time has come down a lot.

Seamless integration with legacy application is what I would like to see the most.

I started with v5.7 approximately two and a half years ago.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

We initially faced issues with complex web services, but now Mendix have evolved and fix most of the major issues with web services.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Initially the support was very good and quick, but now it is taking more time and needs a few follow ups.

I have not used a different solution similar to Mendix. I started using Mendix since my organization wanted it.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward. Just an exe to run. Also they provide good 18 Hrs training for you to get started with the product.

We use the cloud option only for implementation, but In-house cloud deployment is also supported. You can chose your deployment option based on your need and type of application. They also provide third party cloud support like AWS, HP Helion etc.

As far as I know, the licence is costly.

Mendix is a good option for people looking for fast deployment and Multiple device support with single code. But they need to check if the licence cost fits to their budget. Other than that no issues. I have seen large scale applications also running in Mendix.