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OutSystems vs Xamarin Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

OutSystems
Ranking in Mobile Development Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Rapid Application Development Software (4th), Low-Code Development Platforms (2nd), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (6th)
Xamarin Platform
Ranking in Mobile Development Platforms
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Mobile Development Platforms category, the mindshare of OutSystems is 10.7%, down from 21.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Xamarin Platform is 6.3%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Mobile Development Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
OutSystems10.7%
Xamarin Platform6.3%
Other83.0%
Mobile Development Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Aditya Bhatt - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Lead at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Rapid delivery has transformed complex enterprise apps and supports faster cross-domain projects
Every platform or low-code platform tool is quite good in its own area, but there is always space to groom or enhance or improve. The same is with OutSystems as well. A couple of things from the integration point of view can be enhanced. If your application or the enterprise organization is tackling a huge data application where you have bulk amounts of data, it becomes a challenge for all the technologies and the same with OutSystems. You have to design your architecture in a very magnificent and decent way so that how you process your data so that load can be easily balanced. Data handling and huge data handling is a kind of challenge you may need to face. Then we have some vendor lock-in. If you are trying to migrate your application from OutSystems, then you probably get into this vendor lock-in system. Some organization may face challenges if some organization is on a small scale size. The small scale businesses may find OutSystems costly because of its high cost and pricing due to the licensing cost. Apart from that, OutSystems really plays well, and it needs a learning curve. If a traditional application or programming is there which your developers are skilled into and they are directly deployed into OutSystems, it may take some significant amount of time for them to get comfortable with OutSystems. There is a learning curve. OutSystems community is already in place, but it can more be enhanced regarding some aspects. They did organize lots of bootcamps and other user groups as well, but those can also be improved from the documentation point of view and having some integration guidebook as well. A couple of things which can be improved into OutSystems include the licensing cost, the vendor lock-in side, the learning curve, couple of integration aspects and customizations.
Prince Tiwari - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at AAPC
Facilitates UI development with XAML, enabling shared UI code across platforms and reducing platform-specific work
I like its simplicity. As someone who didn't start my career as a dedicated developer, I was used to building websites or Windows applications. Transitioning to mobile app development meant learning new languages like Swift or Java. With C# and Xamarin, though, I could leverage my existing skillset. Xamarin, and specifically Xamarin.Forms, let me write my code once and deploy it natively to both Android and iOS. Xamarin.Forms are very useful. Essentially, it's a framework that allows me to create the UI mostly in XAML. This XAML code is then translated into the native UI elements for each respective platform. The advantage is that roughly 90% of my UI code can be shared. This significantly reduces the amount of platform-specific UI work compared to having to write separate UIs for each platform. For the most part, Xamarin's integration with Visual Studio improved the workflow, whether I'm on Windows or Mac. Since I'm familiar with Visual Studio, it provides a comfortable development environment. Additionally, features like Hot Reload and the integration of tools like Copilot help streamline the development process. Overall, it offers a positive development experience.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The scratch coding is useful. The solution is easy to understand."
"The product is mostly stable."
"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."
"The scalability of OutSystems is very good, it scales automatically very useful for us."
"It is a stable solution."
"OutSystems has no issues so far, the drag and drop environment is quite dynamic, and we can create our own UI on top of it."
"I like the mobile features the most, and there are also various features around the portal we created that I enjoy."
"There is literally a ton of stuff it can do. It's very flexible."
"The ability to share a platform-agnostic common core, or business logic, enables a mobile developer to write code for all targeted mobile platforms, independent of the individual developer's specialization in iOS, Android, or Windows. This helps not only during development but also enables easier maintenance of deployed apps, since bug fixes or feature additions can be often made in the platform-agnostic layer."
"It is a true native solution, and we can use the cross-platform framework."
"The most valuable feature of the Xamarin Platform is that both the UI are the same in Android and iOS, in one project and Android and iOS, are applications for developing PCL projects. Additionally, the dashboard is good."
"On the market, compared to everyone else, they're the top solution. They're the best solution out there that I could see."
"Xamarin.Forms reduced the effort and time to build and market our solution, market our features, and get our solution into production."
"The most important impact is the reduction in product lifecycle costs."
"You can create one solution in C Sharp."
"Xamarin makes it easy to create white label applications for all platforms."
 

Cons

"The asynchronous processing and multithreading tasks for which the current resources of the platform are very generic and not built for the end-user. Any asynchronous jobs have to be constructed with an end-user dashboard to allow inspection of the status of the activities."
"In my opinion, the support and the pricing could be better."
"It's difficult to do the component version control. I would like them to add more studying materials."
"Currently, in mobile applications, we don't have push notifications."
"The dashboards in OutSystems could improve. There are a lot of tabs in the service center that can be confusing."
"The prices should be lower. It is a little bit too high for a small market."
"The product's high price is an area of concern, where improvements are required."
"The documentation needs to be more robust."
"We need to think about partnering with IBM because there is a need for a big data partner; someone who has machine learning and can help us connect the app to big data."
"The android application compilation time needs to be reduced."
"The recent move to .NET MAUI is a big change that's affecting a lot of the good features."
"Xamarin Platform can improve by making the enterprise documentation better. There's a lot of basic documentation of how to do many of the functions of the solution, but there's not much enterprise-level documentation."
"The solution always has room for improvement with price, integration, stability, and documentation."
"It is common to find a problem that you would need to develop from the start since there are no third-party components to reuse."
"It needs offline sync capabilities to store data on devices persistently."
"The solution struggles a little bit with binding libraries."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a free trial to use this solution and other options available, such as enterprise. There are different subscription plans."
"OutSystems is expensive, and they changed the pricing model in the last couple of years. It's changing too much and it's becoming unstable. They are constantly shifting their prices based on users, courses, and other factors."
"You should contact OutSystems for more details but my opinion is that it is not for small business budgets."
"For one developer to use, the cost is around $5,000."
"I believe they are very strict with their pricing platforms, or the pricing policies, and it changes."
"The solution is expensive."
"I think the pricing for OutSystems is comparable with similar solutions. I would place it somewhere in the middle. We pay for the bundle and don't pay anything extra in terms of licensing and other fees."
"OutSystems is a good solution, but it's not cheap."
"It saved a lot of time and resources needed to develop a cross platform mobile app."
"Xamarin is free. There is no license unless you go for some high-end enterprise features. Other than that, everything's free."
"Xamarin is available under several licensing arrangements. Each developer needs one license at least. All features, especially the Profiler, unlock only with the highest tier."
"This is a free product, so there is zero investment on licenses and IDE."
"This is an open-source solution, but there is a subscription charge to use the App Center of around $100."
"There is no requirement for a license. It is available for free as an open-source product."
"You can build in Xamarin without paying any money."
"In most cases, it is sufficient to have free/community license. But if you plan to seriously develop production-level, highly polished apps, you need to use Xamarin.Profiler and the professional or enterprise license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
19%
Marketing Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Performing Arts
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
What industries do you think OutSystems is most useful for?
I cannot really name an industry in which OutSystems cannot be beneficial. Who does not want to make top-notch applications that work in no time? And OutsyStems does exactly that. The low-code plat...
How did you decide which OutSystems edition was the best one for you?
We started using OutSystems fairly recently, so we are still on the free version of it. My company is still testing how we like the platform, but so far, we have been satisfied with it and will li...
What do you like most about Xamarin Platform?
Xamarin.Forms are very useful. Essentially, it's a framework that allows me to create the UI mostly in XAML. This XAML code is then translated into the native UI elements for each respective platform.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Xamarin Platform?
Xamarin Platform is free, and we use an Azure subscription at a relatively low cost for our builds. It offers a good value for money, although it requires time to make it work effectively.
What needs improvement with Xamarin Platform?
The primary area for improvement is the support for third-party libraries, especially for major providers like Microsoft and Google. The lack of robust documentation and support for third-party bin...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Randstad, Warner Brothers, HP, Intel, ING, Banco Popular, Thrivent Financial, Bacardi, Kent State University, Bacardi, FICO, ING, Vodafone, AbbVie, Estafeta, Siemens, Vopak
Cinemark, MixRadio, Sqor Sports, Storyo, JetBlue, The World Bank, Cr_dito Agrcola, Applied Research Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about OutSystems vs. Xamarin Platform and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.