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Appian pros and cons

Vendor: Appian

4.2 out of 5

62 reviews
95% willing to recommend

2,980 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Appian offers rapid development with low-code, increasing ROI and enabling efficient workflow management but requires programming skills. It ensures security and seamless integration yet lacks support for Jenkins and Subversion, restricting DevOps. Though it boasts excellent technical support, backend complexity and underdeveloped offline capabilities are drawbacks. Pricing improvements are needed for broader appeal, especially for subscription licensing. Regular updates keep it up-to-date with the latest features despite these limitations.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Appian offers rapid development through low-code capabilities, significantly reducing turnaround time for automation of business processes.

Process modeling in Appian simplifies the creation of complex business workflows, making it easy to debug and monitor, thereby enhancing efficiency.

Appian's security features ensure a secure system, providing peace of mind regarding vulnerabilities.

The integration capabilities of Appian are flexible, allowing for seamless interaction with various data sources on-premises and in the cloud.

Appian is beneficial for its robust process automation features, including Appian Process Mining and RPA, which streamline business operations effectively.

CONS

Authoring tool is slow, limiting solution development speed.

Requires improvements in team development, DevOps, and enterprise tool integration.

Lacks comprehensive business rules management and struggles with complex processes.

Needs better integration with existing ecosystems and external tools.

Training tutorials and documentation require enhancements for effective user guidance.

Appian Pros review quotes

Robotic Process Automation Engineer at a logistics company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 27, 2022

It has good integrations. We were looking for out-of-the-box integration with both on-prem and publicly accessible data sources. We needed integration with the cloud, OData, our REST API feed, and then on-prem passthrough to go to a SQL database or on-prem APIs through Azure local deployment, etc.

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reviewer1727346

Practice Leader - Digital Process Automation at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Dec 8, 2021

Appian has many valuable features, the first being the ease of development—rapid development. Second, the process of learning the product and tool is faster when compared to its peers in the market. It's closer to low-code, and while it's still not very easy, it's more low-code than other products in the industry. Appian has a good user interface, a seamless model user interface, which comes without additional coding. It can also integrate with multiple systems.

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IT Advisor to Banks at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Mar 15, 2018

The tech support is quite good.

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Appian Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Aug 4, 2020

Appian also has very flexible local integration.

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Data SME at Sparta Global

Dec 27, 2021

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.

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Regional Sales Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 28, 2018

What stands out are the speed of the product, the quick, easy development, and visual diagramming.

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JC

Software Architect at BABEL Group

Apr 9, 2024

The most productive aspect of Appian lies in its ability to develop interfaces, particularly user interfaces. Creating user interfaces is highly productive, when these interfaces are integrated with the original database. In such cases, using record types proves to be a very efficient method of handling data. The synergy between interfaces and record types enhances productivity.

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Sr AVP - EXL Digital at EXL Services

Feb 19, 2024

With low-code, we don't need a lot of coding, and then from the plumbing perspective, there is a complete CI/CD pipeline that exists within Appian that can be leveraged for open deployment.

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reviewer1639440

CTO Digital Division at Ness Technologies

May 25, 2022

The technical support is excellent.

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Project Manager and Technical Leader at Exus

May 1, 2018

Call Web Service Smart Service - Web service integrations with other systems are super simple and fast to create, supported by low code menus.

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Appian Cons review quotes

Robotic Process Automation Engineer at a logistics company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 27, 2022

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.

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reviewer1727346

Practice Leader - Digital Process Automation at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Dec 8, 2021

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.

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IT Advisor to Banks at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Mar 15, 2018

It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem.

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Appian Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Aug 4, 2020

They should provide more flexibility so designers can create a more picture perfect device.

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Data SME at Sparta Global

Dec 27, 2021

Something I would like to see improved is an SQL database connection.

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Sr AVP - EXL Digital at EXL Services

Feb 19, 2024

There are some restrictions with respect to using external components within Appian. So, for example, if we do not have a particular feature available, there's a long cycle of getting approvals and all of that. That does not offer flexibility, which definitely can be improved on.

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reviewer1639440

CTO Digital Division at Ness Technologies

May 25, 2022

The UI of Appian is more internal. Recently, there has been an addition of an external user portal for the customer-facing stuff. It's still coming out.

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Project Manager and Technical Leader at Exus

May 1, 2018

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.

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reviewer1358715

Deputy Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 29, 2020

The solution could use some more tutorials to help brand new users figure out how to use the product effectively.

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RD

Digital Transformation Architect/Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Jul 21, 2017

The biggest areas of improvement would be in facilitating team development, DevOps, and integration with typical tools used in enterprise development (Jenkins, Subversion, etc.)

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