Pega Platform Reviews

I have worked with it for multiple use cases, such as insurance, banking, asset management, and oiling. I'm currently using it in banking operations. Before that, I used it in insurance, and prior to that, it was used in asset management.

The most valuable feature of the product is that it's very customer-centric. It's easy to use for a customer or a user. It's also easy for someone who is developing an application. You can develop different features in just one place. You don't have to go to different places. Unlike Salesforce, where you have to buy different components to make a complete application, Pega comes in one single package.

I also like the fact that a lot of platforms and new automation are coming in.

The UI has always been the weakest part. These days, the competition with Salesforce is with respect to the outreach of handling the process. That has been one of the challenging factors. So, mostly, it's about the UI, which I believe is because Pega is dependent upon a third-party application, be it React or Angular, to have a UI.

At times, the performance can be a major issue, which is something they're working on. So, performance can be a concern sometimes.

Their support could also be better.

In terms of additional features, I have no requirements.

It has been more than 12 years.

It's stable because it has been in the market for more than 30 years. There have always been some hiccups, but it's evolving pretty well. There are a lot of features such as NLP, AI, decisioning, process management, and process automation. They have a lot of features coming in. I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of stability.

It's quite scalable in nature. I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of scalability.

I work for a huge client organization with at least 500,000 people. Across the globe, there might be many more. In my organization, there are 2,000 to 3,000 people. It's a tool that is being used on a daily basis.

That's a pain point at times. I'm not that happy with their support. They should improve their support in terms of responsiveness and understanding of the customer's needs. It should also be improved in terms of skill because at times, they don't have someone who understands the problem well, and they take unnecessary time in resolving even simpler issues. I would rate them a four out of ten.

Neutral

It's straightforward. There are no complications. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of ease of setup.

So far, it has been a bit of an expensive tool to manage. It's not as expensive as Salesforce and others, but it's relatively more expensive than some of the simple applications that can be developed in Java. However, it gets more leverage than usual application-making languages.

Its pricing is on the higher side, but they have come up with different plans and different small products that can be used by smaller organizations that don't have that much money to spend. They have different pricing packages depending on the number of users or depending upon the number of cases created in the production or live environment. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of pricing.

My advice would be to know what a product is offering and align your requirements. You should have a clear vision of how you want to use a product and make sure that you are getting what you are looking for. Many times, the salespeople sell something, but the end client or the company doesn't get what they were looking for. So, first of all, the company needs to have a clear vision of the product and requirements.

I've been working mostly with Pega throughout my career. I find it very good in terms of how easily a process can be developed around a customer's thinking. I've not seen any other tool that can be used in such a manner. So, from my perspective, as a developer, I would always recommend Pega, and I would always go for it.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Pega BPM is a business process management tool, and a use case for it is case management. There's a problem statement; for example, for bank support, where you need to work on customer onboarding, you'll find customer details verified by a bank authority. Once the detail is verified, the customer will be onboarded. Pega BPM will handle the three steps or stages. You have to create a case where onboarding will be one stage, verification another stage, and then customer registration as another stage, and Pega BPM takes care of the stages or process model.

Pega BPM is very user-friendly, and business people won't have to do a lot of configurations on it. The Pega team also came up with App Studio.

With every release of Pega BPM, new features and modifications emerge, enabling business people to do many things, which helps improve the organization.

The most valuable feature of Pega BPM is step-by-step voice guidance that converts your problem statement into different diagrams and then implements the process.

Pega BPM is a technology, not merely a tool, so it has different industry frameworks. It's customized for various industries, such as financial, insurance, healthcare, etc.

Other valuable features of Pega BPM include AI, decisioning, and robotics. It also has a more intuitive UI. Clients weren't as happy with the UI in the past, but that has now improved.

I also like that Pega BPM has a UI that can be integrated with JavaScript-based, such as React or Vue.

An area for improvement in Pega BPM is security. It's secure, but it still has a lot of vulnerabilities, though Pega takes care of security through upgrades and different patch versions released from time to time.

Pega BPM is robust, but it still needs some improvement performance-wise.

I've been using Pega BPM for twelve years.

There shouldn't be any issues with Pega BPM stability-wise as it's the number one BPM tool in the market, and it's been in the market for forty years. It's pretty stable, though when there's a new version released, sometimes, there's an issue, and the Pega BPM team quickly resolves that.

Pega BPM is scalable. You have horizontal and vertical scalability. One type of scalability is just adding servers. Pega BPM is Java-based and runs on JMS, so you can add different servers. You can add other nodes, or in one node, you can have different JMS, so in this way, you can increase the processing power easily.

Another way to scale is classifying nodes, so based on the job, you can run the nodes and also run the different functionalities of Pega BPM, which is another process for scaling it up.

Scaling Pega BPM isn't challenging because it's running on the cloud, so you can always add and subtract nodes as needed. If your Pega BPM is on-premise, you can scale it horizontally or vertically. It supports both horizontal and vertical expansions.

I've contacted the Pega BPM technical support team many times because of issues I found in the tool that only the Pega core team can handle. I create a service request, then a person from the Pega BPM technical support team will be assigned to the case, then I'll work with that person.

It's normal in a day to experience an issue, need modification, or get help from Pega support. The support process is pretty streamlined. You have to go to the Pega website, create a service request, and immediately someone will be assigned to your ticket, and he will get in touch with you. Quickly, you can get into a call with support and talk to him, so technical support isn't an issue.

My  Pega BPM technical support rating is seven out of ten because you don't get to talk to an expert on the first call. If your issue isn't resolved in the first call, then that's the only time you'll get an expert. Otherwise, Pega's support is good.

Neutral

Pega BPM is the number one tool in the market, so the only reason a client switches over to another BPM tool, such as Appian and IBM, is purely because of finances and nothing else. Functionality-wise and feature-wise, other BPM solutions aren't at the same level, not even close to Pega BPM.

In my fifteen or sixteen years in the software industry, I've never seen a client move to another solution because Pega BPM isn't a good tool. Clients always switch from Pega BPM to another tool because of the cost.

Pega BPM is easy to set up, particularly its cloud version, because Pega will help you do all the setup. Pega also provides a JAR file that you can import to your database, and then once the connection is established, you can start using Pega BPM, so the setup is easy.

Infrastructure setup is different when you do it on-premises. Setting up Pega BPM on the cloud is easier.

There's ROI from Pega BPM because it expedites time to market. You can also complete your work based on a Java tool faster when you use Pega BPM within three months, for example, rather than one year.

Businesses get ROI from Pega BPM, which is why many financial institutions use it, for example, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo; you name it.

The costing model for Pega BPM is different. One is a license that you can pay yearly. Another licensing model for Pega BPM is based on the number of cases you create in production in a year. Costing based on use cases is also available for Pega BPM. I don't have information on its exact pricing or costs, though.

I handle different projects that use Pega BPM. Some use version 8.5, while others use 8.7. I also have some using version 8.8 of Pega BPM.

Pega BPM is deployed differently for different projects. Some on the public cloud and Pega Cloud on AWS. Some deployed Pega BPM on-premises, while others deployed the solution on a private cloud. All three versions of infrastructure can be used for Pega BPM.

My organization is a pure Pega organization, so out of one thousand people, at least six hundred people within my organization work on Pega BPM, but my organization is a service organization with different clients. It's an elite partner of Pega, and only ten elite Pega partners exist worldwide.

My rating for Pega BPM is eight out of ten.

Application development is very rapid. A lot of code gets reused while building the applications, which is something we highly appreciate. 

People are also very happy with the robotic process automation and the dashboards. They are very good.

Its implementation in the public sector was a bit complex. 

In terms of features, I have not come across any limitations in the last four or five years. I'm on the sales side. I work with customers, and my role involves reading a customer's mind and providing the best solution so that all pain areas are addressed. Pega has got very good features and tools. I didn't come across any limitation where a customer wanted something, and we were not able to provide that. Generally, whatever a customer demands, we are able to meet that demand. 

We have been using Pega since 2017 or 2018. It has been about four or five years.

Its stability is good.

I have not come across any scalability issues. The government customer has perpetual licenses. We are very populous in nature, and people come from the web as well from the mobile. They are able to process all those requests. I've not come across any issues.

Their support has been excellent because the person who heads the Pega practice is very senior. He was the sixth employee of Pega in the UK. He has an excellent relationship with the CEO, Mark Allison. Mark has been to our development centers because we have been expanding in the last three or four years. Our focus is banks. So, he has been visiting us. 

As an organization also, there has been tremendous support from Pega. We are a small but growing organization. We are not very big, but we are competing with the big brothers in the industry who have been there for over decades.

The finance part that people were doing was not too difficult. It was straightforward. However, when we implemented it in the public sector, it was a bit complex because of the disparities in the data structures and the maturity of the customer. They had different ERPs. So, it was a bit tough, but they appreciated it. We are a Commonwealth country. So, whatever works in India would work in any Commonwealth country. We have an education department here, and there are two categories: higher education and technical education. Based on merit and a lot of other parameters, such as caste, people have to be given subsidies, grants, and aid, which change with the political system. A new leader can announce that he wants to give laptops to all standard 12 students who have scored 90% marks. So, all such rules can be built very quickly. The SLA is for about five working days. We have to complete a new request in five working days. Most of the customers here want parallel development. Normally, we have six to eight teams working. Generally, we give a new Pega solution in about 100 days. After a solution is rolled out, we have a separate team with about 10 people, and they cater to 10 and 15 customers.

There is a team that looks into its cost. When it comes to licenses, we don't get involved with selling the licenses. We insist that Pega sells the licenses directly to the customer. This is the model we work with. We make money only through our implementation.

The licensing is on a yearly basis. Because of our special relationship, all the training certifications are free of cost. All our employees can do Pega certifications at zero cost. It is all on Pega.

We have a small team based out of London, UK. We have Pega and Appian. We don't have anything else. It is a very small team, and we only cater to financial institutions. We are trying to acquire a few Pega customers in the Middle East from the UK.

I am based out of India, Bangalore, and in India, Pega is just coming in. There are not many installations in the government as well as enterprise sectors. There is a private sector bank that is trying to move to BPM. They have not yet made a decision about what they want to procure, but they have been talking to Appian and Pega teams.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. We have had a beautiful experience with them.

This solution is useful for business process management if you have any banking solutions or need to manage a process. Maybe a very simple example could be a loan approval process where you need to upload your documents and have them be verified by users. In other words, you have a methodical process in place that encompasses reviews. It can be anything, it might be an order that you have placed on Amazon which needs to go through another. Anything that involves a methodical process is a good fit for Pega as a product.

What I found the most valuable is the case management and the UI design capabilities. We have the ability to do any kind of integration on Pega, which is really beneficial. 

I think there is room for improvement in the low code/ no code environment that they're promoting now. That needs to be aligned a little bit more. I still feel that it is not that friendly for a person who has no experience with Pega to just go in and try to create something. It is a little bit difficult to comprehend, which can be a challenge for the developers who manage the solution because they will have a hard time getting people to use it. For example, if several business users start developing an application at the same time, bottlenecks can happen and the developer will have to go in and kill the conflict in the rules that they have created. That could be better streamlined, which means there is room for improvement there.

I have been using this solution since 2010.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate their support a five, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. There are lags in their responses.

Neutral

My impression is that the initial setup process has to be followed via documentation. It's becoming a little bit less complicated, but it is still not easy for an inexperienced user to kickstart and deploy. The deployment an hour and a half at most. It can be deployed by one person. 

I would rate this process a six, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

The pricing is a bit costly. Although it is a little bit costlier than all other tools on the market, it is more consistent. It also shortens the time to go live by quite a bit.

As far as maintaining this solution goes, how extensive it is will depend on whether or not you will be maintaining just Pega. It allows you to delegate many of the business rules to business users where they themselves can actually go and configure their rules and modify them. A user can have their own dedicated set of rules that they can go and configure. 

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Our customers range from banking to insurance to telco. In banking, customers use Pega for marketing, sales management, and onboarding processes as in loan onboarding or customer onboarding. They also use it for customer service, for example, when a customer calls up the bank to handle a payment inquiry or a problem. Pega also handles collections. We also deal with many of the operational processes inside the banks. 

In insurance, we work with Pega on property, casualty, and health. In insurance, we have built underwriting systems, and systems to manage attack claims, as well as the sales and customer management service part.

When it comes to telcos, it's primarily in the marketing area. Besides that, we have customers in the government sector. So, in government sectors, it is primarily to automate many of the citizen services, as well as to automate many other online operations.

Pega has traditionally been very good in inclusion automation, which primarily deals with case management, and following the automation along any other processes.

Pega has a capability called the Pega series, which is a customer lesson hub. With it, you can offer or create a business conversation with the customer. For example, if a customer comes onto a bank's website and they're searching for a loan, we have to present the right offer to the customer in milliseconds. With Pega, you can quickly understand the customer and therefore be able to present the right, most personalized offer to them.

Many customers use Pega for customer service also. It's quite useful for that.

It is stable.

We find the product to be scalable. 

Customers expect more out-of-the-box solutions. Right now, Pega is a platform on which you can build anything; as a platform, it's very powerful. However, what customers also expect is a quick turnaround. That is one area where they can improve. If they could create more business-friendly, customer-friendly solutions in the areas where customers traditionally use Pega, that would be helpful. That way, the same solution can solve similar problems for other customers, and it is more plug-and-play.

They are building in process mining. They acquired a technology company in Brazil, so they're bringing process mining over into the product. Process mining will help the customers to do continuous business implementations since they will find challenges to help adjust processes. That is one thing that we're looking forward to. 

We've been a Pega partner for seven years. 

From a stability point of view, Pega is increasingly used in markets like Southeast Asia, where the volumes are very high. From that perspective, it's able to handle large volumes. Also, as a modern SaaS technology, it is compliant with all the standards which are required. It is very compliant and very stable.

When it comes to using software in a low-volume market and a few of the other smaller markets, scalability is not much of a factor. When it comes to implementation in countries in Southeast Asia like Vietnam or Indonesia, then the volumes are very high, and we have seen Pega stand up to those challenges. It is scalable.

Technical support on Pega has improved in recent days with the advent of the cloud. If there is any kind of improvements that are required, Pega manages that.

For anything where any of the customers require advanced support from Pega, the support team is always available. They have specialized teams now to basically provide the exact support that is needed. Earlier, it used to be one team. Now, most specialized teams are available on Pega to provide the required support based on the need.

The initial setup is very straightforward, although if it is a customer who is new, they might find it challenging. If they involve the right system integrator, then along with the right system integrator, I don't see a challenge there.

Pega is also available on the cloud as well as on-prem. It is one of the few types of software which is available both on-prem and on the cloud. With the cloud solution, starting up is pretty easy. A successful setup is basically a combination of using the right partner and going onto the cloud to reduce the initial friction to onboard Pega.

From a staff point of view, for a standard application, it requires 10 to 12 resources, and they would involve people who are lead architects and developers.

It would require business analysts or someone who can work with the business to understand and visualize the solution.

It requires one engagement lead to work with the customer and manage the entire project and one or two clusters. With a team of 10 people, we have seen we can deliver end-to-end applications on Pega quite easily.

When it comes to maintenance on production, it requires a team of either two or three based on the size of the application.

We have witnessed an ROI. 

It varies based on the business case of the customer. For traditional operational processes where either the operation process is not automated - or even if is - it can create time-saving scenarios. 

In the scenarios where Pega is used in the market capabilities where it's more for offer generation or to upsell and cross-sell to the customers, we have seen an uptick in the revenue as Pega did show a conversion-based increase in outcomes.

When it comes to other scenarios, like based on the business context, if it is a customer's service application, that's where we have seen Pega help improve the average call handling. It has the capability of RPA. Therefore, during the call with the customer, if you have to fit information from other systems and quickly provide all the information in a very short time in front of the call center representative. It has helped reduce the average call handling time and the number of FTS required to manage customer service.

Therefore, it has had an impact on customer satisfaction, as well as reducing the overall cost related to servicing customers.

We are one of the largest Pega partners.

They have a primary product: case management, clean automation, and customer engagement. Various customers will be in various versions of Pega, and we deal with all versions.

If customers require an enterprise-wide implementation, they should be aware that there are requirements that are specific to the various lines of business. If they require such complexity to be addressed in a very specialized way, Pega can work well.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It is just for business rules. An example would be that you want to apply for a credit card limit, and if the credit limit amount is less than a certain value, we won't necessarily do a real-time check. We do basically auto adjudication. So, the rules can be used as part of the flow.

They're pretty easy to create, and they're pretty easy to deploy. 

In theory, business rules tend to be something that business users can use. What I mean by that is that I don't know whether it always works out that well because the problem in banking specifically is that you need auditing and you need some kind of control. So, even if you're doing rules, there has to be an approval process. You can do all that in Pega, but it is not exactly everything that the vendor says it is. I've spent some hands-on time with the platform, and you can do those things, and it is all low code, but is it as easy as they make it sound? No. That's my two cents. For example, if I want to do something, there is no way to switch from low code. I just want to do a simple If-Then-Else rule, but I have to go through their low-code tool and do dragging and dropping. I'm a development person, and in my opinion, even some business users could do this easier. There is no way to go back and forth to an editor where I can just type in an If-Then-Else rule, which would be much faster than drawing in their low-code editor. They don't support that. They lead you too much. It depends on your level of expertise, but in some cases, it is just not that easy to use.

I don't like their whole deployment pipeline. It is very closed in nature. You have to use their pipeline to push things out to production. It is a turnkey solution, and I'm not a big fan of that. That was one of the things that we liked better about Salesforce. With Salesforce, we could use our own deployment tools or we could use a third-party deployment tool. Pega is a pretty closed system. It is closed in the sense that the deployment pipeline and some of the things that you do go through their tool. They don't integrate with GitHub, Azure DevOps, and so forth, which are really effective for versioning. I just don't like that.

It works, and it is effective.

At a previous organization, there were a couple of thousand users executing PegaRULES, and there were 30 to 50 users creating and modifying rules.

They're decent. A big organization or a big bank is going to want to pay for the premium tech support. If you don't, then you got to be willing to wait. They're no different than any other enterprise solution. Their support, as an example, is better than MuleSoft because we had rather big challenges with MuleSoft support, but Pega was better.

We also have an IBM rules management solution, and we also have Appian, but the situation is that we're having challenges getting the productivity out of them.

I've also used FICO Blaze rules, but that was not here. It was at a previous job.

It took a while to onboard.

They're very cagey in giving out prices, and it is very difficult to find out the real price any organization is going to get. It is almost never their list price, if you can find it, and there are a lot of factors that go into the whole pricing. 

Their SaaS deployment model, which was the way we were going at a previous organization, had some benefits over Salesforce, but the concern was the price they were going to charge depending on the number of rules or something like that. We were afraid that the cost was going to blow us out of the water. We didn't choose it. We went with Salesforce.

Pega can be effective, but it is not trivial to get it set up, get it deployed, and get people to know it. That's not unlike some of the other big enterprise solutions. Even for Salesforce, as an example, you're going to need to staff appropriately. Pega isn't one of those solutions that you can basically put in an ecosystem and expect three or four people to roll out successfully. I just don't think that's the case. You're going to have a challenge finding people who already know it.

When we were doing the RFQ, there were some other organizations we talked to, and they were very successful, but now, they had quite a large installation base. I know at one of the organizations when they installed Pega, and this was circa 2018, they had a lot of road bumps. They had to get Pega consultants in. Maybe they had SI in because I was indirectly working with it with consumer lending, and it was one of the many factors that they were late and over budget for delivery. That's the challenge with these big platforms. For a simple point-click solution, they can be quick to get going, but most organizations, especially banks, don't have something simple. You've to integrate with a bunch of APIs. You have to do testing, and you got to do the deployment, etc. So, you need to create a center of excellence, and I hate that term, at least to get started until you get some organizational-wide talent.

In terms of maintenance, if you've got it on-premise, you're going to need two or three admins to work with your infrastructure team to stay on top, but it isn't something they're going to do full-time all the time. SaaS offering has a lot of advantages because it gets you out of that whole deployment perspective. To most companies, I would recommend seriously looking at the SaaS version and not getting involved with on-premise.

I'd rate it a seven out of ten.

Our use case for Pega BPM is BFS process management. Earlier, we were facing some challenges such as using the end numbers of applications, but now we are careful. Decision-making took too much time in the past, but now that can be done within a few hours or a few days. For example, when managing a claim, that used to take almost five days to a week. Now, that would only take two to three hours in terms of resolving issues. The processes are much faster now in Pega BPM, in particular, almost ten times faster.

The most important features of Pega BPM are case management and claims management, and soon they'll also be offering claims processing.

I also love Pega BPM in terms of performance. It's also one of the very few user-friendly solutions in the market. It may take some time to learn Pega BPM, but once you get a proper handle on it, tracking and managing processes become very easy anytime, anywhere.

Pega BPM also has very good documentation you can use to learn the solution. Pega has a community portal that has complete information and explanations, and if you're facing a challenge, you can post your challenge on the community portal and get a resolution at the same time.

Currently, there isn't any feature I want to be added in the next release of Pega BPM because Pega always adds new features that my team welcomes and looks forward to learning.

One area for improvement in the solution is the long learning curve, but after that, you'll find Pega BPM easy to use.

I've been using Pega BPM for almost four years now.

Pega BPM is a stable solution.

Pega BPM is a solution that's easy to scale.

I haven't contacted the Pega BPM technical support team yet, but when an issue arises, and I would need to contact the team, hopefully, there would be a good response and availability from them.

Pega BPM is my first BPM solution, so I have no experience with other similar solutions.

Setting up Pega BPM was very easy for the team. Deploying the solution is so much faster and takes up a lesser amount of time than other solutions. For example, if a competitor takes a month to completely deploy, Pega BPM deployment will be completed within two weeks, or almost half a month.

I would rate the setup for Pega BPM four out of five.

We implemented Pega BPM in-house through our BPM team.

In terms of the pricing for Pega BPM, other solutions may be cheaper, but it doesn't matter if Pega BPM has a higher price tag because what's important is that it's the best solution, and that is what people look for.

If I would rate the pricing for the solution, I'd give it three out of five.

You have to pay extra for additional features in Pega BPM.

The business process management solution my team uses is Pega BPM, particularly the older version 7. My team is planning to onboard the new version of the solution, version 8, soon.

Maintaining Pega BPM is sometimes expensive, but it's manageable. It takes money to maintain the solution, but it's a good product based on the service it provides to customers. Pricing doesn't matter because what matters to any client is that the solution should be very good and should provide accurate results. This is the main reason people go with Pega BPM.

My company has a team dedicated to maintaining the solution.

Five to six people currently use Pega BPM within the company.

For now, I don't have any suggestions for people looking into implementing Pega BPM because for sure those people have research teams that do the research and implement the solution according to market research. They know exactly what type of solution is needed based on research.

I would recommend Pega BPM to new users of BPM solutions or local platforms, but research is still required before implementing the solution.

My rating for Pega BPM is nine out of ten.

My company is a partner of Pega BPM with clients it provides services to. My company also provides implementation support to clients.

The rule engines work well.

It is a stable product.

The solution could be more scalable. 

It has some DevOps limitations.

The product could be more robust and faster compared to what they have right now.

Pega is also stable. It is also an old product. They have DevOps limitations if we compare it with Appian. That said, from the tool perspective, Pega is stable and reliable.

It is not as scalable, as, for example, Appian. However, I don't have extensive knowledge and therefore can't speak widely on the scaling process. 

I've never contacted technical support. I'm not sure if they are helpful and responsive. I've never talked directly with them. 

I've also used Appian.

I have limited experience with Pega. I don't have extensive knowledge about the Pega, however, there are a few things, which may be the reason to prefer Appian over the Pega. The engines, the rule engines, internally, on Appian or Pega work. However, in terms of how they process your request Appian is more scalable and more robust.

The setup is also good. It also provides the cloud, so it's not an issue from that perspective. I did not use it very extensively, however, they do have a cloud, so it's fine in terms of implementation.

I can't speak about the exact costs. I don't deal with that aspect of the solution. 

I don't have that much experience on the Pega, however, from what I have experienced, there's a little bit more that can be offered. I'd rate it a six out of ten.