OutSystems Reviews

I'm using OutSystems to build an ERP system and a customer portal.

OutSystems' best feature is that you can build tests with the flow, so even the tests are made in the PDD framework in a low-code way.

The PDD framework can't be used for the behavioral-driven development way of working. They're working on improving that, but it's taking a long time. OutSystems also doesn't have branching, which means if there's a production issue, it's not so easy to fix.

I've been using OutSystems for a year and a half.

OutSystems is stable.

OutSystems is scalable.

We've had good contact with OutSystems' consultants.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a team of OutSystems developers.

I would advise anyone considering implementing this solution that you need a senior OutSystems developer to help your in-house developers because it can be quite hard to work with in the beginning. If you have a senior OutSystems developer who can help with best practices, then you're good to go. I would give OutSystems a rating of seven out of ten.

We use the product for developing applications.

It improved our output, mostly in the reactive and mobile applications we developed. 

We used almost all of the features, themes, styling guide, and approach components. They are useful in our applications. 

Technical support could be better, and out-of-the-box performance could be improved. 

We have been using OutSystems for five years.

We had some lagging issues under high data loads, and the solution needed to be customised to improve this.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support would get a three out of five, as there is some wait time involved and some solutions were not adequate. This is an area for improvement. 

Neutral

We previously used Darknet but switched to OutSystems because it offered some more tools and features.

Setup was easy and there are a lot of forums to help, I would rate it five out of five in that respect. 

We had an in-house setup, requiring only one person.

It depends on the use case, but we found the solution to be pretty expensive.

Setup is easy, the solution is also easy to learn and there is a lot of community support on forums to help. Aside from the cost, OutSystems has been good for us. I would rate OutSystems a seven out of ten.

It is a stable solution, and the initial setup is straightforward.

I think the resource ecosystem could be improved. There are not enough resources on the market.

Multiple LDEV support would be great to have in the next release.

I've been using OutSystems for three months.

It has been stable so far.

It looks as though it will be a scalable solution.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I would suggest that you go for at least five or six environments. Typically, they provide three environments, and I think you should go for more, perhaps. six environments by default.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate OutSystems at eight.

We use OutSystems to analyze disparate applications that are about to become obsolete.

As we currently can't afford it, we are still in the testing and evaluating phase.

You can use this solution to build applications very rapidly. It can also easily be deployed on mobile devices and applications as well.

The biggest challenge for us is the licensing model and the cost of OutSystems. The apps that we are interested in have a very large user-base and OutSystems drastically ramps those costs up.

I have dealt with this solution for roughly 18 months.

We have no complaints surrounding both the scalability and stability of this solution.

We use ServiceNow for CMDB and ITSM related needs; we don't use ServiceNow for application development, so for us, the two aren't comparable. I don't have any experience with SericveNow's capabilities in that space. 

Our team had no issues with the technical side of the initial setup. Ultimately, they were able to create prototypes and build apps really quickly. But I think where we failed was with the commercial side of it, in terms of the licenses and the costs surrounding deployment.

I believe our functional labs were up and running within a couple of days; however, we have not deployed it on a wider scale as we can't afford to.

Our in-house team of one or two people took care of everything.

OutSystems is a good solution, but it's not cheap. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of five. The technical features are good, but the actual commercialization is out of reach.

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 integration points need to be increased. People have also started to adopt this solution for their regular needs. That means it's not only the big enterprises that are adopting this solution. There are also small and medium enterprises that are adopting it. 

I've read that where you have large deployments, OutSystems starts to crumble a bit. That is the idea that no customer would know at the beginning and would also not like to hit the wall there. When it is on the client, there are a lot of applications already on low-code, and then suddenly you realize that you want to do some big applications, and you face hurdles. This is the general feedback for all such platforms.

We have been there with OutSystems for two and a half years to three years now. 

Stability could be from multiple perspectives. From an enterprise perspective, it is the stability of the company. For example, most of the enterprise ERPs are SAP, so I don't have to check twice if a product is okay. 

It's the IT strategy a company is taking, which is effectively what they're going to do for the next five years. They're going to onboard a lot of applications onto this platform. So stability-wise, of course, the scale of the company is not so big, whereas large enterprises could say that it's stable as an organization.

Coming to the other part of the stability which is at the platform-stability level, I think that the features and the support that they provide are quite good, and because it is horizontally scalable, so it doesn't matter there.

It has good scalability in terms of the target platforms, multi-tenancy, or hosting on multiple clouds.

My team has been interacting with technical support and their feedback is good. Their training is good. I think OutSystems provides one of the best trainings out of all similar platforms.

The development environment is quite easy. You install it out of the box, and it works. It's a one-click install there. I have not been involved with Enterprise setup, so I do not have any comments on that.

We primarily suggest the IT and OutSystems work together for the setup.

If I talk about enterprise-level implementation, we work very closely with Siemens, which is where Mendix comes from. We are partners with Siemens, and that's where it helps us in developing applications on Mendix because we get good community support there. I'm not sure how things are otherwise. 

For OutSystems, it is more of community support and a kind of library they have, in terms of the reference implementation of libraries, which can be applied.

For the industrial and enterprise nature of work, that is, for B2B scenarios, Mendix fares well. OutSystems might have a slight advantage for B2C scenarios. I would say that they are equivalent in most of the aspects. There are certain features that Mendix provides which OutSystems does not provide. Similarly, there are areas where OutSystems fares good but Mendix does not. I would rate Mendix and OutSystems the same. 

The initial adoption of Microsoft PowerApps is a little bit of a hurdle. If that's overcome, then other things would be reliant. When we talk about PowerApps, we talk about the whole Microsoft ecosystem, that is, Microsoft Flow, Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Power Automate, which effectively brings a lot of power in terms of an ecosystem. 

If I have to go with applications related to Microsoft Office 365, I might go for PowerApps. If I need external integrations and things, where they provide premium APIs and things, it becomes a little bit of a challenge. 

Development-wise, PowerApps could provide a free version. They always have but it's quite restricted. If you download OutSystems or Mendix, you could do anything with the free version. That's where, in terms of acceptance, PowerApps gets a little restrictive because you need a license to evaluate it. If it is not restricted, there'll be more adoption. Of course, you can restrict deployment, the size, and all that, but development capabilities should not be restricted.

The value proposition is not clearly visible out of these platforms as yet. Your penetration level will be decided based on if you are able to reach small and medium enterprises. If I compare something like Zoho with OutSystems, Zoho is getting good traction by purely focusing on the small and medium enterprises. These kinds of things could be game-changers in the future. 

That's where the licensing model becomes a little cryptic. Of course, for enterprise, it makes sense at certain times, and it does not at certain times. The licensing models are one of the things that could be improved there and changed in terms of adaptability.

OutSystems is quite a mature platform. OutSystems provides a lot of capabilities as such. However, it's not a one-size-fits-all kind of solution. Based on the needs, the platform that would be the most suitable one should be decided. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We don't sell OutSystems as a separate solution. We sell it as a platform. And then you win a lot of solutions on top of it. So that can be a second process, it can be a middle phase, it can be a portal, it can be many things, but it is useful for small apps to complete ERP systems and everything in-between.

It supports implementing Agile at scale, as it enables working in an iterative way, and it is very fast. Time to value as a result has dropped significantly!

What I like most about this solution is that it does automatic dependency checking in enterprise environments, which means that the application will automatically test if it can work in the environment of the customer or not. Instead of only having to find it out when it is too late. Normally, if you build software, you test it and then you deploy it. In the real world, it sometimes happens that it does not work and then you quite often have to figure out why is it happening. So this step is completely taken away because OutSystems tests the functionality of the software against the existing systems in an automatic session and that is very valuable.

Something that can be improved is that I would like them to be a little more flexible in the area of containerization. They're currently running on Docker on Windows, but I think they should also support Docker on Linus too. Needs a little more effort.

I've worked with OutSystems for many years now - I've worked with it, I've implemented it, and we use it in our company too.

OutSystems is extremely stable. We are replacing complete back-end systems with it, and are in progress to go complete mainframe replacements with it.

You can go to huge back-ends with OutSystems - so it is definitely a scalable solution.

The technical support is quite good, although it could be better: it currently fluctuates a little depending on how busy they are. Also it depends on your contract (what level of support you have).

The initial setup is super simple and you can do it from your desktop. That is if you only want to implement the platform, but if you have a more complex enterprise setting, then it will be a little more complex and you will have to do some configuration, and up-front think about what functionality you expect to need (particularly if you chose to run on a native AWS or Azure environment so that you can make full use of all the functionality of those 2 CLoud environments. If you do not know exactly how the platform works and what it can do, you can implement certain things and redo a few things. But that's not a deficit. More power comes with more responsibility, l always say. 

That depends on the kind of solution you are building and at what speed: the more you build, the higher the ROI.

For a single application, it's too expensive, but that's also not what the OutSystems aims for. Personally I don't think that's the smart approach. Their model is really based on platform and not every customer is ready to adopt a platform at the start. So, as a result, they actually limit their own success and results at the moment. But that isn't a huge issue. If you look at the value of the platform, I think the pricing is fair.

We looked at multiple alternatives, including (but not limited to) Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, Kony , Pega etc. They all have their own stronger and weaker points, yet we chose OutSystems as it is the most suitable platform for an Enterprise environment. As we do end2end transformations, this is why we chose OutSystems.

I will rate OutSystems a nine out of ten because if you look at other solutions, they do not have the functionality, the scalability and the performance of OutSystems, even if their prices are lower. So if you need a platform for a large organization, OutSystems is the one. 

To make it the perfect solution, it needs improvement in the AI capability. I would say that it would be nice to augment the functionality for the citizen development even further and augment the cloud's platform controls so that you can more easily run in a hybrid cloud environment too. Next to better branching options.

A word of advice to others is that they should align the business and IT because many people look at it from a technical point of view. And that is another really smart thing to do because it is really about driving the value. Because I've seen customers that bought either mandates or OutSystems or any other platforms and a lot of them had difficulties in getting the value out of it. And the reason was because if the IT or individual departments don't know how to define the proper user requirements, and then it is too difficult to successfully deploy it. It is therefore very important for the business and IT team to work together because that is the most common mistake people make. 

Created an operational-risk-management and issue-management application.

We got discounted pricing from them in writing and built for a year, but now they require 50% more.

• Fast for server-side development. 
• Easy to learn. 
• GUI is good.

• You need jQuery/CSS skills for customization of the GUI. 
• Reporting is very light. 
• No built-in BI.

The primary use case is to build applications for internal users.

• Speed of delivery: We were able to reduce development time by 30%.
• Able to automate manual processes in various departments.

• Great built-in features to get us up and running in no time.
• Their out-of-the-box UI is quite good.
• Easy deployment
• Refactoring with TrueChange is very simple.
• Monitoring and logging are built into it.

• Writing custom code still needs to be done via Integration Studio. This might have been added to the IDE.
• When shared extensions are updated, all the applications are redeployed.
• Mobile apps should have been fully native.