Mendix Reviews

Rapid development

Prototyping

The ability to deploy functionality daily, weekly, or monthly has greatly increased our competitive advantage in the market.

More than 3 years

No

No

No

Enterprise level customer support, with strong user community

Good

Yes, traditional development methodologies were found to be too slow and cumbersome

No, there is alot of support for getting started, from videos to tutorials.

in-house

Mendix has a unique place in the market and is a great tool. Ensure that you are using it for the correct product/project -- one size doesn't fit all.

Mendix provides the big-picture to the detail and the detail to the big-picture and they do that well. The tool chain allows one to model the business in the easy-to-use Business Modeller, then to deploy the app server with the model, deploy the DB schema to the database and have it running with : One click. They wrap all of this detail, in a big picture platform by integrating everything into the software development life cycle that provides the techies with the detail of what to do next and the business owner with where things are and how long they will take. The most valuable feature is being fast without painting yourself into a corner.

Mendix has helped to dissolve the divide between “business” and “IT”, between business speak and technical jargon, between classical project management and disciplined agile delivery. It reduces friction to deliver projects iteratively and reduce time to market and helps change the organisational culture, if the culture is open to this. In short, Mendix has improved our ability to delight our customers.

We need better support for master data management, consuming corporate dictionaries and exporting the models to others. We also need better reporting and visualisation as this is a critical part of each app and currently the reporting side has to rely on external BI tools. Additionally, we need better support for quickly integrating with external data sources without writing code or reliance on ETL tools. A Mendix profiler will also help and lastly, a multi window business Modeller so that one can use the Modeller more productively on two monitors.

We've used it for six years, since 2010.

There are very rarely issues with the deployment.

We have had Mendix apps that were not maintained properly and left to tick over that were difficult to keep stable and upgrade due to large databases and insufficient resources : This is more due to a lack of engineering than anything related to Mendix. But because Mendix makes things easy, clients often feel like it does not require the same engineering disciplines and this sets up a client for deployment, stability and scalability issues.

Generally there have been no issues scaling. Keep in mind that Mendix runs on a RDBMS as its main persistent store and as such will scale with the data base. We find that the Mendix App server is only the bottle neck on tight loops over LOTS of data and when using dynamically calculated values. However, this is not typical use cases for Mendix and can be avoided by using microservices that do tight loop/ETL, simulation etc. work loads and leave complex business processes to Mendix.

At times when we hit a serious bug, Mendix has always been quick to respond and fix the issue. The user forums are active and Mendix staff is encouraged to provide answers. In general, quite good. Can always be better but in comparison to other large tech companies, they like to please and help.

We evaluated a number of tools that claimed to offer productivity platforms and model driven development. The success of Mendix is of course using it where it is strong. Mendix is not an BI or ETL tool and we rather use Mendix in collaboration with a number of tools like Blaze, Talend, YellowFin etc. Why Mendix? Its model driven approach is superior rather than a code generator as used by many other productivity platforms. This keeps you fast rather than being fast in the start of the project. A model driven approach makes it possible to focus on solving the problem at hand rather than tinkering with code that has to be maintained in three months.

Mendix is not a "RAD" tool and there really is nothing like it, similar tools have started appearing and the approach is catching on. Model Driven tools differ in philosophy and implementation and needs a different mind set to leverage optimally.

Mendix presents a deceptively simple environment that seems too shallow for many techies, but is not. It does present a completely different paradigm and team culture and to leverage Mendix a change in corporate culture might be required. From us and them, to a integrated innovative whole where technologists can focus on delivering value to the rhythm of business demands. Convincing classical techies might be a challenge and this often limits the success of implementations.

We started off by seeding our team culture the Mendix culture by working with them on a number of projects. Since then we have grown a number of teams for ourselves and our clients. Advice: Get a Mendix Engineer to seed the different culture and flourish from there, it will put your investment on a faster benefit-track. However, this is not required and growing organically might work depending on your lead Mendix engineers’ propensity to innovate, integrate and deliver business value.

ROI is dependent on the importance of a “fast time to market”. If a fast time to market is not a determinant, then write assembly or C, else Mendix might have a part to play.

Mendix can be expensive if you stare at the bottom line and compare it to traditional tech - which is flawed. Think big picture and time to market with a few bright resources rather than micromanagement and a army of developers and it might lead one to realise that saving a number of salaries, training, career building and hand holding might be a bigger saving than your average capex/opex watching manager can see. Mendix is negotiable on licensing and will try to make the project where possible.

We had a look at OutSystems, some open source initiatives and BPM tools.

Mendix requires adoption from the top and support for the teams that implement it to not be ham strung by IT. Do not approach Mendix like a “traditional” IT shop will : It requires a close integration with business, driven by Business for Business by IT rather than by IT for for business. It requires a model driven approach to solving problems that provides speed gains when describing solutions in its language rather than designing everything from scratch, think different, leverage models, accelerate delivery, speak business.

They have good attention to detail and keep things simple and clean.

• Excel Importer : seamless to map data from a raw excel sheet into a structured database
• Community common library : Useful java method to add powerfull functionality to your application with just a few clicks
• Excel Exporter : Exporting data to Excel is a breeze
• AvayaDialer: Integrating your application with avaya telephony suite is power and extremely useful especially for call center applications
• Rest Service : Integration to rest services is now quick and easy with Mendix ( can take some time to configure but once you done it, it’s so simple)
• FusionCharts : Reporting in ,Mendix is awesome and extremely useful with fusion charts module. Very powerful indeed

In the next version I would like the Rest Service Module to be incorporated into Mendix, similar to the way web services work.

Over the last four and half years I've used versions 3.2.1, 4.8.10, 5.13, and 5.14.1.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

With v3.2.1 we had some scalability issues which we resolved by upgrading to a later. This upgrade made our application a lot more scalable.

10/10

10/10

Expect to half your delivery time for new products/services to business. Mendix beats any other technology out there.

• Micro flows, because of the ease of use for complex development structures
• Wide variety of in app store Widgets such as Deep Link, Active Directory integration, graphs (bar/spider charts), and geo location functionality
• Ability to customize the style sheets 
• Mobile development framework
• Java integration with Mendix
• Remote debugging
• The ease of use for complex development structures
• SAP integration 

We developed a tool/product called Survey Quest. The tool enable the user to do perform surveys and  improveme them as well as its functionality.

The out of the box crud screens can be made more user friendly, but then again it is a business application tool to quickly generate crud screens for enterprise application, not focused on public facing/entertainment values.

I've used it for two years.

There were no deployment issues.

The system was performing not as quick/fast as it should have.  

There were memory leaks after a week of it being live. We need to clear the memory once a week.

It was straightforward.

We developed a solution in house.

ROIs at this stage is not good because of the high license fees.

We also looked at Microsoft/Java options. We initially thought the license fees and speed of development was too slow.

I was involved developing a solution.  We also did a site for skillsmap in mendix that was live for one and a half years. 

Mendix is an excellent tool to put the business in charge again for realizing IT projects. In the pension project we worked in sprints of two weeks in which we created functionality which was going to be tested by the business instantly. In this way the business stayed connected with the IT solution and was in charge of the project. Mendix is an excellent tool to execute the scrum way of working in a successful way.

Often the business comes to the conclusion that it is not working as they had thought it would after they have seen a first version. In Mendix it is really easy to show this first version and to change it according to the business needs.

After two weeks the business will be able to  see what they had in mind and will be able to validate whether the IT people have understood what they meant but also whether the solution is going to work as they had in mind.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

The most valuable features of Mendix includes the most vital logic building component called the microflows which cuts down the need to write code and instead using logic blocks to interpret the way the function should work. As part of microflows, there are ways which gives the developer flexibility by writing code using Java actions. There also other vital features like the ability to easily use web services and export and import files of different kinds.

The main way in which this product has improved my organisations functions is the ability to promote agile methodology and rapid development. It also allows users see what has been developed quicker than writing physical code. This means it allows us to test out different scenarios with ease and also changing entities and attributes are easier than ever. Another way this system has helped is the ease of releasing the product we are developing on different platforms whether it be desktops, tablets or phones. Being built using bootstrap also helps with the responsiveness of the system.

The area of this product that needs improving is the templates in which the user uses to create documents. As it stands it is not very intuitive and not pleasing to the eye.

I have been using Mendix as a system for almost nine months.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There are a few bugs when new versions are released which sometimes affects the program when it is run.

I have had no issues scaling it for my needs.

7/10 - I haven't needed to ask them for much but the Mendix community which also includes some developers in Mendix help to solve issues in less than 24 hours which I was impressed with.

The Mendix developers and community continues to add useful features and add ons to the system which makes it better in every iteration.

Modeling application and generating code in stead of manual coding.

The software is mainly designed and built by business engineers instead of software engineers. This leads to an immediate fit between delivered software and what the users really wants.

User experience and performance with large datasets.

We've used it for 10 years.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

When you restrict yourself to the native functionality the Mendix platform offers you great stability.

When using custom build widget, Javascript and Java Action, stability depends more on using the correct versions of SDK's, libraries etc.

5/10

5/10

It's straightforward. It depends on the choice of on-premise or cloud implementation as to how easy it is. For on-premise implementation you need some expertise, while the cloud implementation just needs you to follow the manuals or take a one day training course.

We did it in-house.

Mendix is not cheap. License fees go sky high when using it as a business to consumer platform. However, they change their pricing models frequently.

We also looked at OutSystems, Triggre, and Apex. We chose Mendix because of the learning curve.

Think about the type of product you want to develop. Mendix is great for internal software development or B2B SAAS solutions When working with large dataset or when userexperience is of great importance please rethink the use of this platform

The single most beneficial feature is the rapid development and prototyping of the product. I was able to construct real demoable software in a very short time and show the client. The technology is a no-brainer and allows me to focus on the business of the client over mastering or wrestling with the software. Not only do I create workable software, but due to the high-level nature of how logic is written (using Microflows akin to Business Processing Models), a business person can clearly understand the code itself.

Their attention to detail and resistance to feature bloat to maintain the platform’s elegance and simplicity drives the platform’s success in integrating business an IT. They have implemented the right features, like easy integration mechanisms, robust configurable security, database and client device portability, a project and team work portal and much more to deliver valuable solutions, fast.

During an implementation of a Rules Engine for Credit Risk and Loan Eligibility which integrates various Credit Bureaux data systems for online loan applications, we experienced some performance issues. We then broke out into four teams to find optimizations of which three teams were technical and one was business analysis. The team who came up with the best solution, was the business analysis team. Since they could understand the flow of logic in the microflows, they could reorganize certain calls and optimize the process to gain the few milliseconds we needed to bring the application inside it's non-functional performance requirements.

This example shows that something that used to be confined to hidden alleys of the IT department was solved by business people with knowledge of the business process : Mendix enables a frictionless interaction between the business and IT domains to produce integrated solutions rather than point optimisations.

Reporting isn't Mendix' strong suite. The Business Modeler is amazing for rapid application development but the Reporting lags behind. Mendix relies on third party products who specialize in reporting to supplement their product. Other areas where they could improve are already on the roadmap, for instance clustering and NoSQL databases. Generally speaking the community and R&D are on the ball when it comes to features that their client base desire.

I've used this product since 2010, that is six years.

Deployment is straightforward and very solid.

Stability is not a problem, although you might have to tune your environment for its use cases since the out-of-the-box configuration, like any app, is for general use cases, but there is no real problem here.

Scalability requires a bit more expertise but is not insurmountable, at least not for any of the products we have developed, which includes Big Data climate sensor systems, GIS, Risk Decisioning, Lead/Queue Management, Loan Origination/Loan Applications both online- and agent-based channels like phone/email/web/mobile etc.

Generally support is friendly, helpful and professional. There are two channels of support, the Forum and the Support Portal.

The community is very active over the Forums and included the participation of the Core R&D team.

The support portal does have a few minor problems but when you make Mendix aware of this, they strive to accommodate the pain-points. In no way do these pain-points prevent Mendix from finding a temporary workable solution. For instance, if I am unable to log a bug for a client because of an account restriction, they would log bugs on my behalf. After that communication is followed up on properly and I'm pretty happy with the process, except that their support portal is in the Netherlands, so there is a slight time difference if you are working in the Americas.

Mendix is a first-rate business modeling solution. We have evaluated other solutions which focus more on the technology and gives developers too much flexibility with which they could hang themselves. This sounds counter-intuitive, but in real fact Mendix is a modeling solution that evolves upward in the software evolutionary chain, in that it is business-centric instead of being tech-centric; you model instead of code. We've been stuck in the code-mode for decades. Modeling isn't a new concept but it is hard to craft a first-rate modeling solution which Mendix has done a great job at.

Using the modeler frees you from technological burden and gives you more space to focus on mastering the business of the client.

Setup is an easy wizard installation process. It is straightforward and downloads and installs missing dependencies like the Java Runtime and SDK.

We have done both in the past, but mostly it is done in-house. As the product matured over the past few years, we became completely independent of vendors, since everything required is well documented and supported. In cases of emergencies, a quick forum post is enough to fill missing gaps.

Despite high licensing costs, the time and cost of development is dramatically reduced. On average our timelines are in the range of five to 10 times faster than choosing a more traditional software approach. Licensing costs are on negotiation basis, and this works for countries with weaker currencies and global economic disadvantages, like countries in Africa.

Find people who are willing to try something different, people with a teachable attitude. Mendix is a paradigm-shift and might not appeal to ego-centric developers in their comfort zone who want under-the-hood control. Instead they should be business orientated, concerned with delivering working software fast and interacting with clients.