Appian Reviews

I am working in a software house, and we are using Appian to build a custom-made application while trying to fulfill our client's requirements.

I don't think we currently have any applications for our internal processes, which include a set of Oracle APEX products or applications, especially custom-made applications, which is something we need for ourselves. However, we have many use cases for our clients.

Workflow Engine is a valuable tool. Besides the resource kit, I believe both tools are very, very convenient for our clients.

I don't think I have anything to comment on the areas that need improvement in the solution, but I can refer back to my technical team. As the solution architect, I don't have hands-on experience with both products.

If you ask me about my thoughts on what is missing in Appian or my opinion on what I would want the vendor to add in the future, I would say that the product is in a state of perfection. However, we can't really guess what AI and big data models might sell us in the near future.

I am currently using Appian and Oracle APEX, and I will soon start to use Appian Version 23.1. Also, our company has a partnership with Appian.

I won't be complaining near the client. Stability-wise, everything is okay.

It is definitely a scalable tool. I would rate its scalability not less than eight and a half out of ten.

Even with an on-premise implementation, the scalability is still high, so it is easy to scale up.

I don't have any experience with it personally, but our team that practices on Appian uses the technical support very frequently, maybe on a daily basis or so.

We have been using APEX in our organization for some time now, and I was checking the comparison between Oracle APEX and Appian on peerspot.com for an unbiased opinion. Presently, we are implementing both Oracle APEX and Appian almost equally for small to medium purposes. However, for enterprise needs, I think we will choose Appian.

It depends on the functionality that we are using. For instance, having an LMS solution for our clients is a bit straightforward. Sometimes, clients expect us to implement ERP using Appian, which is very complicated. In such cases, I don't believe that Appian is a good tool for that.

When it comes to pricing, it's definitely not affordable. However, it really depends on the requirements that you're seeking from the solution. If you're looking for an on-premises distribution, it can be a bit expensive. But this is usually the case with on-premises solutions. That's why we have a cloud solution available, which is more cost-effective.

Additionally, the cost is justified by the use cases, and Appian is a good solution overall.

In terms of hidden or extra costs for additional features beyond the standard license, I don't think we've had any exposure to such scenarios, except for the resource kit. From a technical standpoint, I'm not sure if it's paid for separately or included in the license cost. As you may be aware, we've partnered with Appian, so I believe we have an official case here.

I suggest that those planning to use Appian take care of the practice lead because many resources claim to have solid and vertical knowledge of Appian. We are not sure why there is a risk of resources being unavailable during this trip. Additionally, we have a shortage of Appian resources, so finding a good practice lead could be a challenge. Overall, I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I work on the system administration side. I have customers who develop their applications on it for sourcing and procurement. In the past, it has been mostly related to nuclear facility management and risk applications.

The low code functionality and being able to get applications faster to customers or to the market are valuable.

There should be more flexibility for the developers to choose the look and feel of the UI. They should have a better ability to design their widgets and customize them with different colors, shapes, and sizes. That is a limitation that could be improved upon.

I would like to be able to integrate Appian and store various codes in external repos rather than just having everything within the Appian platform. 

It should integrate with open source a little bit more. There should be more flexibility and integration with various other tools in the organization, such as Jira and Confluence for release tracking, bug tracking, and being able to automatically tag items related to bug fixes and things like that. It is currently a little bit difficult to do in Appian. If it opens up to external integrations, it would be great.

I have been using this solution for about 10 years.

It is pretty stable.

It is scalable. You can horizontally scale the servers to add more nodes and have a clustered and high-availability environment.

Currently, we have about 20,000 users in the company. For maintenance, we have a big team of about 50 people, but they don't maintain just this environment. There are a couple of other environments that they maintain.

I have interacted with them several times. They're pretty good, pretty helpful, and knowledgeable. So far, it has been great.

I didn't use any other BPM solution prior to Appian. Appian was my first solution. Prior to that, I was basically developing applications from scratch using J2EE. In that aspect, Appian has been very helpful in getting the applications out very fast.

Its initial setup was not complex. It has been a pretty straightforward installation for the most part. There have been a few changes over the years in the support of app servers, and they've improved the functionality. Initially, it needed more work, but recently, they have added a lot of functionalities to be able to deploy quickly and migrate the code between environments. There used to be a few more steps previously, whereas now, it takes just a few clicks to get the code from one environment to another and finally into production.

It was implemented in-house.

I don't work on that side of things, but I have worked with various implementations of Appian in various organizations. Everybody seems to be liking it very much. They seem to be sticking with it for a long time and adopting it for more and more applications and different organizations within the company. I've seen good success with Appian across organizations.

I would advise starting small and developing applications in phases and adding as you grow. It is a pretty scalable environment, and it is easy to start small and learn along the way to be able to develop high-performance, complex applications.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I've done a lot of personal projects, but we haven't yet implemented anything at an enterprise scale. We're just toying around with it and seeing if we can find a good solution for our needs. What we're focusing on is bringing apps to market faster than what a typical application development team takes, which can be a six-month to a year timeline. We want to see if we can do more proof of concepts, prove ideas, and provide value to our business as they ask for it.

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.

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. 

I have been using it for less than a year. We started around December of last year looking into it.

It is as stable as you make it. If you're following good software development practices throughout the process and you're doing good checks and balances and maintaining solid architecture principles, then it is pretty stable. If you don't do that coming into it and you don't establish COE in standards, you can definitely get yourself into trouble.

The way Appian manages its software makes it directly scalable to new systems. Especially with the cloud distribution, Appian is going to integrate with any new hardware architecture that comes out, and you don't have to do any updates for code. If you're on the cloud, then deploying it is very easy, and scaling that outwards for capacity is also very easy. One limiter that we had for scalability was on our side. Our on-prem data had to feed through that, and there were scalability issues with the demand on the server, but that was more on our side, not on Appian's side.

In terms of its usage, right now, we are exclusively looking at it from our analytics and intelligence standpoint, and we don't have anybody dedicated to Appian. We have more teams who focus on low code efforts and are playing around with it to figure out the capabilities and the standards that we want to work with it. We are building out the integrations that we need to scale it up. So, there is nobody fully dedicated to it, but there are definitely people playing around with it. There are only a handful of people right now. There are probably four to five at most at any given time.

We don't have a plan in place to increase its usage because we don't know. We haven't really found an incredible use case where we can deploy it. Once we set up the infrastructure and get business buy-in with a few demos, we can talk about scaling.

I did not go through tech support too often, but when we reached out to more of a technical account managing team, from an enterprise level, the support that we got was pretty solid.

We didn't have a BPM in place beforehand. 

Its initial setup is a little bit more on the complex side. It takes more of a data engineer mindset to set it up the right way. The benefit of a low code tool should be that you can put it in the hands of business users and let them scale with it. From the frontend perspective, it is really good, but when you have to go into the data and actually integrate it, it takes a dedicated IT team to really set it up. I'm not sure if there is much they can do to fix that because it really takes domain expertise to set up data sources, but that's the blocker that we've seen.

I'm sure it is cost-effective, but right now, we're just toying around with it. So, I don't have any hard numbers.

We were looking at other solutions as competitors when we did our initial investigation. If I recall, we talked to Creatio. They're a smaller name in the space. We talked to LANSA. We also talked to Pegasystems, but we didn't really get much of a response from them. We talked to Retool as an option. They're not much on the BPM side. They're more on the frontend development side. So, we factored them out pretty quickly.

We didn't really come into it looking for a BPM solution. We came into it looking for a low-code application development solution. All of those fit the bill, and they had various benefits and drawbacks. Where Appian stood out was the full stack integration. They have the data integration layer for both on-prem and public sources, and then there is the full stack, including RPA integration, integration with different systems, frontend development, and data modeling. They also offered a BPM solution, which was really nice.

I would advise setting up your standards beforehand and identifying which teams are going to be responsible for the governance side of things. You need to identify a tech focus team that's going to be handling that. Once you have that built pretty solid, going from there, if you're targeting a citizen development model, then you can start pouring out into citizen development. If you're sticking within IT and app development and building a low code team, you have to set standards beforehand and make sure everybody is on the same page.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It is a pretty good solution. I haven't yet seen any major drawbacks. There are other competitors that offer more specialized solutions, but as a general solution, it takes the lead.

Our customers are medium and enterprise companies.

Recently, we added Appian Process Mining, Appian Portals, and now Appian RPA.

There have been a lot of improvements, and Appian is now claiming to be a low-code platform with other market leaders, like OutSystems and Mendix.

One room for improvement is the ease of UI UX development, like in OutSystems and Mendix. I'd like to see Appian develop some kind of interface in their platform where the wireframes can be developed.

If Appian could have a partnership with leading platforms like Salesforce or Oracle, I think that would be beneficial for them.

I would also like to see Appian develop an interface to speed up development for business analysts. That sort of an interface is lagging in Appian right now.

I'm a solution architect and have been dealing with Appian for 10 years.

Appian is stable. 

It's scalable.

Technical support is very good. As a partner, we receive very good support from Appian.

I have previously worked with IBM BPM, OutSystems, Mendix, Unqork, Quickbase, and Pega.

Initial setup was fine. It was user friendly. Appian has the Appian Cloud, so development is fairly easy on the cloud platform.

The cost is a bit higher than other low-code competitors, OutSystems and Mendix. The price needs to be more competitive. 

With solutions like OutSystems and Mendix, you can implement headless commerce. For a B2C mobile app, Mendix is pretty good. For customers that have SAP, they have Mendix because it has been acquired by Siemens, and Siemens and SAP have a very good handshake. If they want to implement a low-code platform, they're going with Mendix.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

Normally, we are building platforms. At the moment, we are running 19 big projects, and we had never used Appian before. One of our customers is a big consulting company, and one of their customers wanted a project with Appian.

They don't have Appian developers, but we have a very good team. They reached out to us and they had some projects in 2022 with Appian, and they asked for our support. I gave my BAs and PMs an introductory level Appian course, and now some of the developers are doing the associate and lead developer part for Appian.

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.

There's a nice fundamentals course that I can ask my project managers to easily learn, while the other local, no-code platforms don't have that option.

The certification is pretty expensive, and it doesn't allow for a tailored UI. I'm a little bit disappointed with the exam. It's different from the preparation, training, and sample exam.

One of my lead developers failed to pass this morning. I'm a bit sad because it's $200. If I ask 10 of my developers to get a certificate, it's $2,000. It's a scaleup company, so we have more than 60 people at the moment, but I can't ask most of my developers to get the certificate.

From a developer point of view, I can't try this in the free version because you can't buy one or two subscriptions. You need to get the minimum package for premium, which is about one hundred seats.

From the first day, I wanted to see the capability of reaching other functions, Google Cloud services, and cognitive services. There is already an OCR, intelligent document that comes in the My Cloud and which Appian gave me as a sample. I can't build it because it uses the Google cognitive services as a backend, and this is the thing that we couldn't try. 

You can't really test the software properly without actually buying the license first.

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

We have been using Appian for over a month. We are still on the trial license instead of the full license.

I'm happy about the stability. It looks promising for me.

I can't predict how many developers it requires. It really depends on the type and size of the app and the capability of the developers.

We run a one-hour workshop from scratch. My developer can create the users' data, custom data types, a small UI, and a nice flow and read right from the databases easily. In one hour, he can complete as many tasks that normally take many days.

The scalability is a bit limited for the SQL databases because for some of my cognitive services, I'm using no SQL databases in the cloud. Appian doesn't support it. Appian only supports relational databases. There is no database for the unstructured data.

We are building platforms, but normally we are fully in Azure and the whole platform is in Azure, but because some of our customers and potential customers want to use Appian, I'm preparing my team for such opportunities.

You can't really test the software properly without actually buying the license first. Certification is expensive.

Appian is like a butter knife, not a Swiss Army knife. It will serve the business user's solution. It'll create a very good thing and the application is clear.

I really enjoy it because the PowerApps from Microsoft mature and are internally connected to other platforms inside Microsoft.

However, it doesn't explain the learning part very well non-technical people. There is a separation, but in the Appian fundamentals, this course is just for the BAs and the PMs. If they want to lead a project with Appian, this is the minimum standard that they need to know. At that point, it's easy for me to train project managers and business analysts. I think that's the advantage of Appian.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

My humble advice to someone who is looking to implement this solution is that they need to replicate. It's a so-called no-code platform, but it's not no-code because it has its own coding site. That's why they need to build one of their own solutions with Appian first to understand the how-to-dos first and become more confident. Luckily, the learning curve is not that steep.

The solution is used for automating software processes for creating internet sites for internal usage. The solution can also be used to make the process easier for external entities. Appian can be deployed on the cloud and on-premises.

The solution helps by providing an automated out-of-the-box process that helps us quickly publish applications within six weeks without requiring any customizations.

The most valuable features are the low coding and low code data.

The solution needs more features. For example, a way to connect to our viewing database, to record, and more interface and component design.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support for Appian was just expanded to support multiple regions.

I previously used APEX Oracle Application Express and OutSystems. From a local perspective between the two solutions, I prefer to go with OutSystems. Overall I prefer Appian because it has a VPN engine compared to OutSystems which is just a workflow engine.

The initial setup is straightforward. The average deployment takes around two days and requires around 30 percent of our developers.

We complete the implementation for our customers.

In general, our customers are satisfied with the return on investment.

The price is high.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We have multiple environments. We can move our application from one environment to another environment through a governance process and approval through the application manager.

The solution is easy to maintain and very configurable.

We use Appian for a variety of processes in our large company. We use it for some financial processes, such as approvals.

Appian had definitely improved the productivity, and functionality of our company.

It is really simple to create a new app, and I like the data-centric aspect of the BPM tool.

In terms of what could be improved, there is nothing worth mentioning.

I have been using Appian for one year.

We are using the second most recent version.

We use the Appian managed cloud.

The performance is pretty good, but the distortions need to be optimized in order for it to work well.

I have not yet experienced the requirement for scalability.

We have 100 people in our company who use this solution.

We use this solution widely throughout the company. As I am new to the company, I cannot say whether we will increase or decrease our usage.

Technical support is good. They are responsive and were able to resolve my issues.

I would rate the technical support a five out of five.

Previously, I used IBM BPM, on a limited scale. I am not able to make a comparison.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy even for a developer.

The development itself can take a month or two to deploy.

We have 10 to 20 people to maintain this solution in our organization.

We used a third-party reseller and a consultant because we are a large company.

I am not aware of the licensing cost. It is handled by someone else.

It is fully managed, and I don't believe there are any additional expenses.

It's a good, solution, that is easy to use. If you are a large corporation, go for it.

I would rate Appian a nine out of ten.

Our organization uses Appian for content management for our documentation. We are also using the solution for endpoint authentication in our clinic for clinical trials. In terms of banking, we use Appian for contract and access management.

Over the past 13 years, we have implemented Appian for 53 customers.

Appian is easy to install and set up, and it does not come out with your audit. It has accessible process orchestration and process management. With Appian, the time to market is much faster.

We are anticipating a few improvements from Appian. The product competes well with peer platforms, however, when you compare past that scale, there is room for improvement.

I would like to see more features for enterprises. They would also benefit from adding documentation and training on their site. 

I have been working with Appian for 13 years.

Appian is stable because it is on the cloud and it has options, actions, and latency. 

The solution is scalable when compared with the support of the infrastructure. It has proven to be scalable as far as the authentication time has been procured.

Technical support with Appian is good, however there is room for improvement.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. When compared with other solutions, Appian is much faster. It is easy to install. It is simple to transfer from the cloud, allowing you to get started immediately with the solution.

The process took us two days. If someone were implementing on-premises, it may take longer.

The licensing of Appian is less expensive when compared to other BPMs in the market. 

Appian is a good solution if you are going to implement BPM or automation into your organization. It can work on a small scale and scale larger afterward. 

I would rate Appian an eight and a half out of ten overall.