Appian Reviews

I mainly use Appian for end-to-end process automation.

We use appian for IT services implementations of our esteemed clientele in CX transformation, process automation ,EX transformation and app modernization areas

Appian's most valuable feature is that we can create end-to-end process cloud ntive  workflows with minimum turnaround.

Appian could be be further improved by making it a strict, no-code platform with in-built process packs.

I've been using Appian for six years.

Appian is stable.

Appian is scalable.

Appian's technical support could improve, especially their response turnaround.

Positive

used multiple options. Since i represent  product agnostic  IT services organization, cant comment furthur on this

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, and deployment took around an hour.

NA

first year itself break even happened.

no

Anybody thinking of implementing Appian should have an enterprise-wide roadmap. If you're doing an enterprise-wide digital transformation, Appian is worthwhile, but not for just one or two use cases because the license costs are higher. I would rate Appian as nine out of ten.

Appian is a very low code platform. It's very easy to learn and use. It provides a lot of built-in functionality to address common business use cases, like user and task management, record and data management, and robust reporting on both business and process data.

Appian has greatly improved how quickly we are able to build and deploy technology solutions for our business partners. We're delivering a lot more than we used to and at a lower cost. It has proved especially useful for building regulatory applications, which are usually very time-sensitive and have to be delivered very quickly with hard deadlines.

The main challenge with Appian has been our inability to customize the user interface. It has it's own built-in UI components and doesn't provide much flexibility to customize or extend those components. This is becoming less of a problem in newer releases of the product as they continue to enhance their UI capabilities and introduce new slick features, such as sites, billboards and embedded interfaces.

More than four years experience spanning development, deployment, and administration for versions 7.4 through 17.3.

No, we have not encountered any significant stability issues with Appian. The product is very stable across all its different versions.

We have been able to easily scale Appian to meet our needs and haven't hit an upper threshold yet. We've encountered performances issues now and then, but we have always managed to resolve them through code, configuration changes, or additional hardware.

Appian technical support is generally good, especially for high severity issues. They are usually able to quickly bring in experts who can be very helpful in quickly narrowing down issues and driving resolution.

We wanted to consolidate multiple existing legacy desktop applications into one unified web-based platform and Appian was one of the best options available.

Pretty straightforward, since we had people with the necessary foundational system administration background, and Appian was very engaged early on to help us get up and running.

I don't have enough exposure to pricing and licensing.

Oracle BPM, Pega, and D+H.

Excellent BPM tool: The best among all the ones I've tried.

To get the most out of the product, put the right team in place first. Follow the Appian recommended setup/development/initial rollout best practices and do things right the first time.

Using this solution allows us to have faster testing on multiple devices.

The solution is simple to set up.

It's a stable product.

The product is open-source.

The solution needs to have more features. If you compare it to, for example, Katalon, Katalon had more features. 

We'd like improved functionality for testing new devices. For example, the last Apple phone is always a pain. The CEO of the bank has it, however, he wants the application running there. The testing of the latest models needs to be possible.

I've been using the solution for about a year. 

It's my understanding that the solution is stable. We haven't dealt with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.

I've never directly dealt with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive. 

We find the product simple and straightforward to set up. It's for a mobile application for bank solutions and mobile banking.

We are using the open-source version. We only invested in a couple of tests. However, we are using the open-source version which doesn't cost anything.

We also compared the solution to Katalon, and Katalon had a few better features than Appium. I cannot name each specific feature, however, I know that Katalon had some features that made it even faster.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a partnership with Appian.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using at this time. 

I'd rate the product nine out of ten. We are quite happy with its capabilities. 

They are different zones because we have customers spread across various industries. It's spread across BFSI, manufacturing, and retail. The use cases are multifold. Appian is a solution more for finding solutions within the businesses, which are industry-specific, and business-specific. If it is retail, then we use Appian for onboarding solutions, customer onboarding, case management, and multiple.

Appian's most valuable features are the quick time it takes to develop for the market. It's easy and faster than other BPM solutions. 

I have been using Appian for more than 10 years.

I have found Appian to be stable.

Appian is a scalable solution.

We have premium support from Appian.

I rate the support of Appian a five out of five.

Positive

The initial setup of Appian is straightforward.

The number of people needed for the implementation depends upon the use case, the business area, type of customer, and type of engagement. It varies from a minimum of three to a ten-member team depending on the complexity of the project.

Appian has different models of licenses, such as enterprise-wide or user base. The price is less expensive when compared to other solutions and the various models are an advantage.

More flexibility in the licensing model is still needed because initially there were customers who are looking at only one or two use cases of business areas, but now the business areas are changing and there is a larger scope. One license model may not fit everyone. They need to be a little more flexible on the licensing model.

I would advise others there are multiple solutions in the market, low code solutions, BPM solutions, and case-finding solutions. There are multiple factors that make a good solution, such as ease to use, configuration, faster time to deploy, development and deploy scalability, and manageability. These are all factors that I would consider when purchasing a solution.

I rate Appian an eight out of ten.

We use this solution because End-to-End Process Automation in Appian is robust and scalable. Thousands of process instances can run concurrently. Apart from that, development is fast for process and workflow automation when the developers are experienced, and the code can be reusable.

This solution has helped in creating a process platform for the bank because it can handle cross-department processes. Process culture is making noise inside the organization because now, everybody knows that their time is being monitored. 

This solution provides for fast development with Quick Apps and simple CRUD user interfaces. 

Some of the other features are:

• Fast development with SAIL
• Beautiful user interfaces that are limited in customization but have the benefit of fewer problems with usability
• Having data in memory using KDB technology is also a good idea
  

I would like to see better monitoring for business events in synchronization with business rules.

There should be a better development for Cases, because it is not really a capability of the product. You have to develop the behavior.

The documentation needs to be improved.

This is a scalable solution that can run thousands of processes concurrently and fault tolerant

I used IBM BPM 8.5.7 prior to adopting this solution.

The cost depends on the number of users, although I recommend taking an unlimited license.

We evaluated both Pega and Activiti before choosing this solution.

In general, Appian is a great competitor in process automation. However, in my opinion, compared with IBM they lack documentation, development methodology guides (scrum is not enough for BPM adoption) organizational change management is a prerequisite for any BPM journey, real examples like IBM Redbooks, the academy is great I think that more real business cases would be better, webinars etc

In my opinion, it is not good to let developers design their own business database. Normally, they are not experienced at this. Perhaps for mid-size business, there is no problem, but when you have a big business it gets complicated and a database designer is required.

We use Appian for client on-boarding, anything onboard related, really: loading institutional clients, tracking that information in a single reporter, doing the follow-up, creating the plan parables for them, and developing for them.

In my organization, there are about 150 users who are currently using Appian on a daily basis. We use Appian very extensively. Every day, there are more than 100 unique logins to the system.

Appian also has very flexible local integration and we have used that extensively to integrate with our Legacy system.

The user interface is good, but it's not perfect. They should provide more flexibility so designers can create a more picture-perfect device. There should be more features on mobile UX development as well. 

Currently, it's easy to use and It gets the job done, but it's not flexible in regards to creating the mobile application from scratch. You have to play within the framework and the rules of the UX; however, that's something that not many customers like. Customers want a flexible mobile application development platform. I think Appian should make a lot of improvements with respect to their mobile application development by providing more flexibility for designers in order to allow them to create their own UX components and control the display of the data onscreen. 

I would like to see more flexibility in terms of the UI. I know that it's not designed to be a big application that allows you to do multiple things, like creating the second year stream of the pie, for example. I feel like Appian has been so instrumental in making their entire product local, and have really improved the user interface design, but the user interface design is limited to authenticated users only — although there are some limited pieces available on the login page. I would like Appian to extend their local capabilities to the login page as well so that we could create an available application that can be targeted to any customer. For example, if you flipped it, you would see information about various products and other information, something that could be very realistic if only Appian would allow these capabilities to be extended to the login page.

I have been using Appian for more than 10 years.

The stability is good. We have been using Appian for our strategy and tactical solutions and it has held up very well for us. The team was able to adapt to the changes of the new version  very quickly and were able to implement the application without any complexities or jumping hurdles relating to development. There were no issues for us. Appian has been meeting just as many of the requirements in my department as the stakeholders have. The stakeholders are happy with the UI and ease of the application. The overall usability has improved and everyone is happy with Appian. 

We believe that the scalability of Appian depends on the expertise of the Appian designers. It completely depends on the skill of the designers — how they design the applications determines the scalability of processes and data. In other words, the platform is very scalable. It stores the data as memory so the data allows us to retrieve the information rapidly; but again, we had already done the data management so the team was focused on data retention and data management. They set up their architecture in such a way that the system and the application can be scaled very quickly, so we are not seeing any problems with the scaling of Appian. 

My team mainly interacts with Appian cloud support who regularly provides them with solutions and advises them about any existing platform issues.

We previously looked at the Pega system; actually, one of our departments is currently using Pega system, but we wanted to diversify our technology base to provide a better experience for our stakeholders. My CIO recommended we make an investment because these two platforms are leading BPM tools offering similar functionalities, including BPM, EI, and case management. So we were calculating the pricing, trying to figure out what the return on the investment would be if we went with one platform or the other and what it would cost us in terms of losses between Pega and Appian.

The initial setup was straightforward. The team was able to set it up quickly, build up the applications and deploy it within six to ten weeks.

We have an in-house team that is comprised of Appian architects, designers, consultants and professionals who are trained on the Appian platform.

I would definitely recommend Appian. It has come a long way and it's a good product. It's entering into the area of a local application development platform. Appian is continuously making product updates every quarter. 

I would give Appian a rating of nine out of ten.

• Process Designer - If properly used, the executable flow itself helps you understand the business flow.
• Call Web Service Smart Service - Web service integrations with other systems are super simple and fast to create, supported by low code menus.
• Write to Data Store Entity - Saving data in SQL databases is done easily using entities. Entities (CDTs in Appian terminology) define relationships and target schema tables via XSD files.
• SAIL interfaces - Writing code that creates forms requires coding skills in Appian SAIL, a proprietary language. The forms are mobile-ready and components can be reused in forms and reports.

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.

Another point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose.

Last but not least, I am missing a team collaboration solution. Only one person at a time can work on objects. This is not a big issue really, because, if you follow the Appian best practices, all objects are pieces that fit single-person workloads.

The platform is super stable in BPMS and rules execution. 

Issues can appear in the following ways, related to development and design choices:

1. The underlying database is facing locking or performance issues. The instability of the database is very quickly propagated in the flows and forms executions (Appian engines/application server) and the platform can become non-responsive, experience deteriorating performance, or create numerous exceptions in running processes.
2. If the platform is used for data-intensive tasks, especially in deep nesting of data manipulation rules, the performance can quickly be affected and may also lead to exceptions.
3. If you don't follow the Appian best practices, and your application is scaling up, then on pick times the performance will be bad or exceptions may occur. This situation can be avoided by identifying potential issues by running the health check diagnostic tool.

Scalability is very good, but there are limits imposed by the underlying hardware and the JVM's heap size. Notably, even with a configuration having multiple application servers, the Appian engines installation is always one. However, the capacity of the topologies is very high and will not be an issue for companies with up to 10 applications per installation and up to 4000 active users per day. Appian provides a sizing document and Professional Services to help with decisions on the subject.

Technical support is considered good, and various levels of support can be selected.

Prior to Appian, there was a Java-based BPMS solution, but Appian was valued for its low-code characteristics that lead to the fastest development cycles in the industry. It was also valued for the scalability, the flexibility on development, the level of support, and the increasing developer base.

Appian has two offerings for its customers, on-premise and Appian Cloud (PaaS). In the case of PaaS, setup is very minimal and straightforward. For the on-premise product, the initial setup is pretty straightforward in most cases but requires a level of systems expertise, especially if you are setting up a high-performance production machine.

After some initial use, tuning the database is advisable. For mission-critical applications, an initial round of stress testing may be a good idea for identifying potential bottlenecks in your applications. Setup can also be tricky if you try to migrate from very old installations which used a different topology. If this is your situation, you may need support from Appian Professional Services.

The alternative we evaluated was Pega BPM.

If licensing cost is not a problem, then Appian is definitely a go, either as a stand-alone platform or with the PaaS offering in the Appian Cloud. When it comes to speed of development, system integrations, BMPS workflows, and digitization of manual processes, Appian is possibly the best choice there is.

I've used it for analytics and automation. I use it for processes related to validation. It's for business process automation. It can be used for mail ticketing, validating products, invoicing, processing, order to cash, et cetera.

It helps with working with API projects. It helps me work with clients and helps with automation with UiPath. 

It's a popular solution with clients. 

The price is not that high. It's affordable.

The setup is easy.

It is stable.

The product is quite innovative. 

There is a lot of documentation available.

The solution could offer better features. We'd like to have more options for automation. We have more affordable UiPath automation features, which are lacking in Appian. It really needs to invest in automation more. 

It would be useful if they could create an academy or forum in the future to help active users answer questions they have about the solution.

I've been using it for one year.

The solution is very stable and reliable. It is innovative. The customers I have been working with choose Appian based on its innovation and reliability.

There are a variety of customers using the solution. We're a consultant group and have customers across many sectors. It's hard to quantify how many people are using it. 

Technical support is very helpful. I've also uncovered a lot of documentation that can help me. It would be ideal if they could create an Appian Academy or official forum to help people learn more about the solution and troubleshoot problems. 

I did not have any issues with e Appian installation. 

The deployment of projects depends on the data I work with or the projects I deploy. A simple project will happen fast. A more complex project will take longer. Typically it takes a day or two. A more complex deployment may take a week.

I use orchestrators during the deployment. I simply need to develop a process in the studio first and then I need to activate the robot and connect it with the orchestrator. 

I'm not sure about the licensing. It's not part of my direct scope. However, my understanding is the pricing is reasonable. 

I am using the latest version of the solution. 

We have an on-premises deployment for right now. However, I'm open to trying the cloud deployment in the future. 

I provide the solution for my customers. I am an AI engineer. I provide a solution and find use cases for the customers. 

If people are interested in the solution, they should start by reading more about it and learning more about the offering. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.