Appian and Apache Airflow are prominent in the software development and data orchestration spaces respectively, with Appian dominating BPM and rapid application development while Apache Airflow excels in ETL processes. Appian's low-code approach gives it an edge in ease and speed of application delivery, but Apache Airflow's open-source flexibility is preferred for detailed data-driven tasks.
Features: Appian features robust low-code capabilities for rapid app development, support for complex workflows, and mobile readiness. Apache Airflow provides excellent data orchestration with Python scripting support, high programmability, and open-source adaptability.
Room for Improvement: Appian's limitations include restrictive UI customization, slow authoring tools, and DevOps integration challenges. Apache Airflow's drawbacks include a rigid DAG structure, limited real-time job support, and external state management reliance.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Appian offers varied cloud deployment options and exceptional customer service with 24/7 support teams. Apache Airflow provides flexible deployment but often requires in-house or third-party support, supplemented by an active community for troubleshooting.
Pricing and ROI: Appian is perceived as costly, yet offers strong ROI through its rapid development and low-code flexibility, with pricing based on deployment and usage. Apache Airflow, being open-source, incurs no licensing costs, appealing to budget-conscious operations, although infrastructure expenses are a factor.
They see return on investment in terms of cost savings, time savings, more efficient processes, and more efficient employees.
Appian is very efficient, allowing us to build a lot of applications within a financial year, making it cost-effective.
Forums and community resources like Stack Overflow are helpful.
There is enough documentation available, and the community support is good.
The technical support for Appian rates as 10 out of 10 because they have a great support team.
Their customer service is responsive, and the team is very prompt for support.
The technical support is generally good.
The solution is very scalable.
Apache Airflow scales well, especially when deployed in Kubernetes environments.
On a scale of one to 10, Appian rates as a nine for scalability.
Initially, without much coding, I can easily handle five thousand records.
Appian is scalable, but it depends on how you build your applications.
I would rate its stability at nine out of ten.
Apache Airflow is stable and I have not experienced significant issues.
I would rate the stability of the solution as ten out of ten.
It depends on how it has been designed and how it has been configured.
The stability of Appian would rate as nine, as it's a stable environment.
It is not suitable for real-time ETL tasks.
If we desire to add custom messengers or a rest API, those options are unavailable.
There is no dashboard for us to check all the Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs); a dashboard would help us analyze the work better.
It has room to improve for use cases where the users are public facing, where anonymous users could come to a site and run a business workflow or interact with some data.
I would like to see more enhancement in the user interface to allow more freedom in designing the sites and pages.
If there is a very complex process that includes a lot of data transitioning and memory-centric processes, it consumes a lot of memory.
It is a sub-feature and not an individual purchase.
I prefer using the open-source version rather than the enterprise version, which helps manage costs.
Apache Airflow is a community-based platform and is not a licensed product.
On the pricier side, both Appian and Pega are enterprise-level solutions, placing them on the slightly higher side.
The pricing of Appian is based on the number of users and generally ranges from 70 to 100 USD per user per month.
The price of Appian, on a competitive landscape, is a little bit on the higher side for companies, rating maybe a 6.5.
Apache Airflow is an open-source platform that allows easy integration with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Reliability is good, and when integrated with Kubernetes, it performs better compared to on-premises environments.
We can create notifications for successful or failed tasks, providing a practical way to monitor our workflows.
The zero-code integration feature is remarkable, allowing for ease of data transfer and workflow enhancement.
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.
I can create tables, perform database-related activities, and create multiple tables.
Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow management system (WMS) that is primarily used to programmatically author, orchestrate, schedule, and monitor data pipelines as well as workflows. The solution makes it possible for you to manage your data pipelines by authoring workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. By using Apache Airflow, you can orchestrate data pipelines over object stores and data warehouses, run workflows that are not data-related, and can also create and manage scripted data pipelines as code (Python).
Apache Airflow Features
Apache Airflow has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
Apache Airflow Benefits
There are many benefits to implementing Apache Airflow. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Apache Airflow solution.
A Senior Solutions Architect/Software Architect says, “The product integrates well with other pipelines and solutions. The ease of building different processes is very valuable to us. The difference between Kafka and Airflow, is that it's better for dealing with the specific flows that we want to do some transformation. It's very easy to create flows.”
An Assistant Manager at a comms service provider mentions, “The best part of Airflow is its direct support for Python, especially because Python is so important for data science, engineering, and design. This makes the programmatic aspect of our work easy for us, and it means we can automate a lot.”
A Senior Software Engineer at a pharma/biotech company comments that he likes Apache Airflow because it is “Feature rich, open-source, and good for building data pipelines.”
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:
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:
Appian Benefits
The benefits of using Appian include:
Reviews from Real Users
A practice leader - digital process automation at a computer software company values Appian highly because the product is easy to develop, low-code, and has a good user interface.
Alan G., an advisory board member at Codecon VR, Appian offers a clear application life cycle, easy to learn documentation, and comes with a fundamentals course.
We monitor all Business Process Management (BPM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
