ABBYY and Appian are both solutions in the Process Mining category. ABBYY is ranked #11, while Appian is
ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.0. ABBYY holds a 1.9% mindshare in PM, compared to
Appian’s 5.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ABBYY users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Appian users who would recommend it.
Appian and ABBYY Timeline compete in process automation and data analytics. Appian seems to have the upper hand with its comprehensive automation features, though ABBYY Timeline provides superior analytics for data-driven insights.
Features: Appian offers robust process modeling, AI-powered automation, and powerful integration features. ABBYY Timeline specializes in capturing and analyzing business processes through process mining and delivers data-driven insights with advanced analytics. Both products have distinctive features that cater to their strengths in automation and analytics.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Appian is known for rapid deployment, supported by intuitive low-code platforms and robust customer service. ABBYY Timeline ensures quick deployment with a cloud-based model, offering strong support for analytics and process mining. Appian's intuitive setup eases integration, while ABBYY requires specialized support for deeper insights.
Pricing and ROI: Appian's pricing reflects its comprehensive automation features, focusing on long-term ROI through efficiency. ABBYY Timeline, despite a higher initial investment for analytics, provides significant ROI through enhanced process insights. Appian's cost-effectiveness is seen in automation benefits, whereas ABBYY's investment justifies analytics-driven improvements.
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Categories and Ranking
ABBYY Timeline
Ranking in Process Mining
11th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Appian
Ranking in Process Mining
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (9th), Process Automation (7th), Rapid Application Development Software (10th), Low-Code Development Platforms (3rd)
Mindshare comparison
As of October 2025, in the Process Mining category, the mindshare of ABBYY Timeline is 1.9%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Appian is 5.5%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
The software is user-friendly, flexible, and can be used with various data sources. It provides various reports and charts that help organizations to identify areas for improvement and optimize their processes. ABBYY Timeline is a great choice for business process analysts, process owners, and IT professionals who are looking for a tool to help them analyze and optimize their processes. The process flow/diagram is the most valuable feature, as it offers a helpful visual simulation that allows users to see what's happening in the grand scheme of things and then drill down into specific tasks and processes to see where the bottlenecks are. For those companies that look for the low-hanging fruit in terms of process automation and operational excellence, this is the tool you need to succeed.
The features of Appian that have proven to be the most beneficial are its capability to create processes and integrate with external systems while ensuring data consistency across all the systems. The latest features of Appian are quite useful around the UI/UX design and the artificial intelligence integrations. Appian is aiding in leveraging AI technologies in multiple ways: one way is for developers, as they make development efficient and quick by enabling developer co-pilots across various phases of the application, which helps design Appian quickly and provides suggestions along the way. Another way is through AI Skills, which can be integrated anywhere in the process model to leverage artificial intelligence for tasks such as extracting data from documents, summarizing information from documents or long paragraphs, and building custom prompts with Appian. Appian also utilizes AI for business users, providing a feature called process each view, enabling business users to create their own dashboards, reports, and gain insights from their data and processes using artificial intelligence. It's multi-fold and always growing.
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"ABBYY Timeline provides various reports and charts that help us identify areas for improvement and optimize our business processes."
"The low code functionality and being able to get applications faster to customers or to the market are valuable."
"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."
"The technical support for Appian rates as 10 out of 10 because they have a great support team."
"Good workflow engines that bridge the gaps of processes."
"Appian is a very low code platform. It's very easy to learn and use."
"The most valuable features of Appian are workflow management and the ease with which you can build the UI."
"Low code development: Code can be developed pretty quickly which leads to less turnaround time for automation of business processes."
"There are a couple of new features available in Timeline that still need more time to mature."
"My only request is that they decrease the license costs."
"I would like to see more enhancement in the user interface to allow more freedom in designing the sites and pages."
"From a reseller's point of view, subscription licensing could be improved to be more cost-effective, especially for new prospects and smaller investments."
"Native mobile capabilities or hybrid mobile app capabilities are very limited. Things like offline sync, offline storage, access to smartphone device features, etc. are not supported by the Appian platform yet."
"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 see more features for enterprises. They would also benefit from adding documentation and training on their site."
"The solution could use some more tutorials to help brand new users figure out how to use the product effectively."
"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."
"The pricing can be a little confusing to customers."
"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."
"The licensing will be on a monthly basis. We are estimating that cost to be around $2000 to maybe $3,000 per month. We don't foresee any costs above that."
"The cost depends on the number of users, although I recommend taking an unlimited license."
"It is fully managed, and I don't believe there are any additional expenses."
"Licensing of Appian is less expensive when compared to other BPMs in the market."
"You can't really test the software properly without actually buying the license first."
Appian is fast when building simple to medium solutions. This solution offers simple drag-and-drop functionality with easy plug-and-play options. The initial setup was seamless and very easy to imp...
Appian is actually pretty big on educating its users, including with courses that reward you with certifications. There is a whole section on their company’s website where you can check out the edu...
We had some issues when we were setting up Appian. It was quite surprising, since this is a low-code tool which, in its essence, means it is meant for business users and inexperienced beginners. So...
ABBYY Timeline is a cloud-based, AI-driven process mining tool. Using the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology, ABBYY Timeline automatically builds an interactive digital twin of your business processes, analyzes them in real time to identify bottlenecks, and predicts future outcomes to facilitate better decision-making.
Why use process mining & task mining?
✔ End-to-end process visualization: Visualize the flow of your work through the process stages and see the delays, bottlenecks, and outliers. Gain insight into your “as-is” customer processes to understand challenges.
✔ Compliance risk management: Simplify compliance by using audit trails to build a model of your process and reason against it. Receive alerts when rules set in place are broken and follow up immediately to ensure that it won’t happen again.
✔ Greater ROI from automation: Drive down the cost of process evaluation and make it easy to identify high-value improvement opportunities. Discover the most valuable opportunities to implement RPA or automatically monitor the performance of your existing RPA processes.
✔ Accurate, un-biased data: Before, process mining relied on subject matter experts. Now, process mining software gives decision-makers facts and figures from real-time event log data to back up their decisions by serving as an irrefutable source of truth.
How Timeline process mining works
In four steps, discover and visualize process execution details automatically by leveraging artificial intelligence to examine desktop user interaction (known as task mining) or by analyzing your existing data (known as process mining) to quickly identify opportunities for improvement, monitor ongoing performance in real-time, and predict future outcomes.
Appian is a unified low-code platform and solution used by businesses to build enterprise applications and workflows. This product adapts to the needs of clients and the technologies they are already using to combine their data in a single workflow and maximize resources. The platform has four main components through which it transforms the work process for companies of various sizes. They are:
Complete automation: Through complete automation, companies are able to coordinate and manage employees, existing systems, bots, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) in a single workflow. The solution offers a way to centrally manage all third-party automation vendors as well.
Low-code applications: Appian offers the ability to build applications faster with visual development and low-code tools. All applications are ready-made to be suitable for mobile.
Low-code data: Appian lets companies source data from multiple types of sources, eliminating the need for data migration. Through no-code and low-code solutions and industry-standard connectors, the platform also eliminates the need for data silos.
Enterprise ready: The platform offers options for companies to scale their businesses to an enterprise level without complications.
Appian is utilized across a diverse set of industries, including automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, education, financial services, telecom and media, transportation, retail, insurance, healthcare, and life sciences. The most frequent use cases of Appian are customer journey, governance, risk and compliance, operational efficiency, supply chain, distributed order management, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management.
Appian Features
Appian has various features that allow users to create solutions for their businesses. These features can be separated into a few groups according to function, including automation, low-code application development, and integrations and data. Some of the most frequently used features of Appian include:
Robotic process automation (RPA): Users of Appian can assign software bots to perform rules-based tasks that need to be repeated over a set course of time. This can improve efficiency and performance within an organization while saving human resources.
Intelligent document processing: The tool offers a feature for quick and accurate extraction and structuring of data. This can reduce time and costs for organizations because it eliminates the need for outsourcing such services.
AI: Appian utilizes artificial intelligence to enhance applications, workflows, and automation. AI is also used to address complex processes and unique situations.
Business rules: Organizations can automate and simplify work processes while adhering to their operating procedures.
Application development: Appian provides a low-code development feature that allows users to deploy applications over ten times faster than through conventional approaches. This feature not only allows for quick application building, but also applications that run on multiple types of platforms, seamless data integration, and business scalability.
Integrations and data: Appian allows for data integration from a wide array of sources without the need for migration. This contributes to easy access to data across systems, real-time data insights, improved user experience, and accelerated development.
Appian Benefits
The benefits of using Appian include:
The solution ensures seamless organization growth, as it supports various UX patterns, common data schemes, and upgrades, used to facilitate application development on a bigger scale.
Appian can increase process speed and deliver applications considerably faster compared to conventional development.
The platform is easy to use and suitable for complete beginners to build applications and workflows.
Appian offers a variety of design tools that facilitate development and deployment.
Appian offers detailed real-time data insight which allows organizations to access relevant information about their processes as they are developing.
The solution offers clients the ability to move data between the cloud, on-premise, and hybrid configurations.
The platform is easy to optimize, which allows businesses to utilize it according to their personal needs.
Appian offers connectivity across web, mobile, email, voice, and chat, providing a multi-channel experience for companies and their clients.
Hansard Global plc, Punch Taverns, Pirelli, Crawford & Company, EDP Renewables, Queensland Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (, Bank of Tennessee
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