OutSystems Reviews

One thing I like about OutSystems is that there's no lock-in. You can keep running your applications because it's on .NET and hosted centrally. That's one of the advantages I see there in terms of not having an IT strategy that has a dependency on a particular platform.

The integration points need to be increased. People have also started to adopt this solution for their regular needs. That means it's not only the big enterprises that are adopting this solution. There are also small and medium enterprises that are adopting it. 

I've read that where you have large deployments, OutSystems starts to crumble a bit. That is the idea that no customer would know at the beginning and would also not like to hit the wall there. When it is on the client, there are a lot of applications already on low-code, and then suddenly you realize that you want to do some big applications, and you face hurdles. This is the general feedback for all such platforms.

We have been there with OutSystems for two and a half years to three years now. 

Stability could be from multiple perspectives. From an enterprise perspective, it is the stability of the company. For example, most of the enterprise ERPs are SAP, so I don't have to check twice if a product is okay. 

It's the IT strategy a company is taking, which is effectively what they're going to do for the next five years. They're going to onboard a lot of applications onto this platform. So stability-wise, of course, the scale of the company is not so big, whereas large enterprises could say that it's stable as an organization.

Coming to the other part of the stability which is at the platform-stability level, I think that the features and the support that they provide are quite good, and because it is horizontally scalable, so it doesn't matter there.

It has good scalability in terms of the target platforms, multi-tenancy, or hosting on multiple clouds.

My team has been interacting with technical support and their feedback is good. Their training is good. I think OutSystems provides one of the best trainings out of all similar platforms.

The development environment is quite easy. You install it out of the box, and it works. It's a one-click install there. I have not been involved with Enterprise setup, so I do not have any comments on that.

We primarily suggest the IT and OutSystems work together for the setup.

If I talk about enterprise-level implementation, we work very closely with Siemens, which is where Mendix comes from. We are partners with Siemens, and that's where it helps us in developing applications on Mendix because we get good community support there. I'm not sure how things are otherwise. 

For OutSystems, it is more of community support and a kind of library they have, in terms of the reference implementation of libraries, which can be applied.

For the industrial and enterprise nature of work, that is, for B2B scenarios, Mendix fares well. OutSystems might have a slight advantage for B2C scenarios. I would say that they are equivalent in most of the aspects. There are certain features that Mendix provides which OutSystems does not provide. Similarly, there are areas where OutSystems fares good but Mendix does not. I would rate Mendix and OutSystems the same. 

The initial adoption of Microsoft PowerApps is a little bit of a hurdle. If that's overcome, then other things would be reliant. When we talk about PowerApps, we talk about the whole Microsoft ecosystem, that is, Microsoft Flow, Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Power Automate, which effectively brings a lot of power in terms of an ecosystem. 

If I have to go with applications related to Microsoft Office 365, I might go for PowerApps. If I need external integrations and things, where they provide premium APIs and things, it becomes a little bit of a challenge. 

Development-wise, PowerApps could provide a free version. They always have but it's quite restricted. If you download OutSystems or Mendix, you could do anything with the free version. That's where, in terms of acceptance, PowerApps gets a little restrictive because you need a license to evaluate it. If it is not restricted, there'll be more adoption. Of course, you can restrict deployment, the size, and all that, but development capabilities should not be restricted.

The value proposition is not clearly visible out of these platforms as yet. Your penetration level will be decided based on if you are able to reach small and medium enterprises. If I compare something like Zoho with OutSystems, Zoho is getting good traction by purely focusing on the small and medium enterprises. These kinds of things could be game-changers in the future. 

That's where the licensing model becomes a little cryptic. Of course, for enterprise, it makes sense at certain times, and it does not at certain times. The licensing models are one of the things that could be improved there and changed in terms of adaptability.

OutSystems is quite a mature platform. OutSystems provides a lot of capabilities as such. However, it's not a one-size-fits-all kind of solution. Based on the needs, the platform that would be the most suitable one should be decided. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

One of our clients is a union, like a labor union, and therefore they're using it to develop an engagement-type app, for member engagement applications.

Overall, it's a very nice solution.

The fact that you can run it on a lot of platforms is great. The client's goal is to create a mobile application that a lot of platforms, a lot of the old enterprise type platforms cannot do. The client wants to create something that you can put in every member's hand to engage with that member. The platform they were using before, for sure, cannot do that. This solution is very versatile in that sense.

There is literally a ton of stuff it can do. It's very flexible.

The scalability is very good.

The stability is great.

They have very good technical support.

You can run it on their cloud platform or you can run it on your own cloud platform. It's your choice where you run it. If you don't like their cloud, then you can go to somebody else's cloud and run it there and they will install it on there for you.

The solution is costly.

The solution is still very new to me, and it's therefore hard for me to discuss missing features. I'm still learning and discovering.

I haven't been using the solution for that long. It's very new to me. It's likely been about two short months.

The stability is very good. I haven't run into any issues at all. The performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's great.

The solution is much better suited to enterprise-level organizations.

The product is definitely scalable. You can go from, for example, 10 users to a million users. It's just a matter of how much hardware you put behind it. Everything runs on the cloud. Therefore, you just keep throwing more memory, more disc space, more processing power, et cetera. It's not a problem.

Tech support is very good. They have online support and they have a support number as well that you can call. You can initiate a support case and they usually get back to you probably within three to four hours, maximum. They are very, very helpful and responsive. We are quite satisfied with the level of service.

I didn't do the setup myself. That was actually done by OutSystems. I can't speak to how easy or difficult the process is, or how long the deployment takes. I don't have any insights in that sense.

We had OutSystems handle the installation for us. We did not handle the process on our own.

The cost of the product is very high and would price out smaller organizations.

My client pays for the solution. Therefore, I have no visibility of the cost. I can't speak to the licensing or the pricing, or the terms of use.

We've also looked at Mendix and Vinyl. We looked at Gartner and compared them with this product.

I'm an external consultant. I have a few different clients. I have no relationship OutSystems directly.

I played a little bit with OutSystems. I have one of my other clients on an OutSystems user. I'm in the process of just learning. I am trying it out. I have a computer consultant that is helping me. There are certain things that I'm looking at, in general. 

The OutSystems platform is really nice, however, it's very expensive for small to medium-sized businesses. I have one customer that's an enterprise-sized organization that can afford OutSystems, however, there are a lot of my other clients that are not that large. Vinyl might be a better solution for them.

I'd recommend the solution, however, I would suggest those considering the solution to do their homework first. Look at Gartner and other opinions. Understand what you are getting into, and then decide.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We have used OutSystems to develop a simple portal in the cloud. This portal is mainly for internal use and not for actual customers or external users.

It's generally not for daily usage, so there's only a small team that uses OutSystems as their primary tool in their day-to-day work, but because it's open for any and all kinds of developers, there are probably hundreds of users throughout our organization.

I like the mobile features the most, and there are also various features around the portal we created that I enjoy.

We're still pretty new to OutSystems, though it has become apparent to us that, even though it's a so-called low-code platform, there are still some things that require a programmer. For example, you don't really need a lot of programming skill to work with OutSystems, but if you want to do something that's a bit more 'feature-ish', then you still need some programming experience.

Since we first started using OutSystems, they switched their language support from Java and .NET to .NET only, which was a bit of a surprise. Their language support could be better in this sense, although on our resource side it is now a bit more flexible.

On the whole, most of the features that we've required are all there. But there are some upcoming features that we are looking forward to. For example, the AI modules. They also have third-party vendors that produce different connectors, but I am hoping that OutSystems itself will start to create more innovative connectors or complementary solutions that we will find of use.

We have been using OutSystems in our organization for about one and a half years now.

So far there have been no major issues so I would say it's pretty stable. 

We haven't yet reached the level that we need to seriously consider scaling, but from my experience it isn't so easy to scale any kind of closed platform where you start without the source. They may offer you the source later when migrating, but it's generally not so easy to queue up onto another platform or move to another vendor, so I expect that the scalability in this respect might be lower than we would like.

So far, most of our support is coming from internal sectors of our organization. I think it's easy enough to resolve all the issues we come across within the company.

We do use another similar product which isn't very well-known. It's a product from Germany and we use it mainly for internal use in the same way that we use OutSystems.

Comparatively, as a low-code kind of platform, OutSystems is the most intuitive to use, but if you have an experienced programmer in Java and .NET like myself, then the other platform is probably a bit more flexible.

It's basically a simple portal that we developed in-house.

The implementation details really depend on the project and the type of organization. For example, because we are quite a sizeable organization, there are other processes that we need to fulfill in order to maintain compliance before we push our projects to go live. Thus, for us, the full implementation took about six months. Thankfully, the maintenance is pretty low.

I think the pricing for OutSystems is comparable with similar solutions. I would place it somewhere in the middle. We pay for the bundle and don't pay anything extra in terms of licensing and other fees.

I recommend OutSystems, but I would also point out to others that they're not the only product out there that deserves attention.

I would rate OutSystems an eight out of ten.

We use OutSystems to analyze disparate applications that are about to become obsolete.

As we currently can't afford it, we are still in the testing and evaluating phase.

You can use this solution to build applications very rapidly. It can also easily be deployed on mobile devices and applications as well.

The biggest challenge for us is the licensing model and the cost of OutSystems. The apps that we are interested in have a very large user-base and OutSystems drastically ramps those costs up.

I have dealt with this solution for roughly 18 months.

We have no complaints surrounding both the scalability and stability of this solution.

We use ServiceNow for CMDB and ITSM related needs; we don't use ServiceNow for application development, so for us, the two aren't comparable. I don't have any experience with SericveNow's capabilities in that space. 

Our team had no issues with the technical side of the initial setup. Ultimately, they were able to create prototypes and build apps really quickly. But I think where we failed was with the commercial side of it, in terms of the licenses and the costs surrounding deployment.

I believe our functional labs were up and running within a couple of days; however, we have not deployed it on a wider scale as we can't afford to.

Our in-house team of one or two people took care of everything.

OutSystems is a good solution, but it's not cheap. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of five. The technical features are good, but the actual commercialization is out of reach.

For some of the business processes, we want the process owners to be able to set up their own flow-throughs, process flows, workflows, etc. They don't need to have any kind of prior coding experience. They should be able to establish workflows for their respective processes by just dragging and dropping elements.

The flow editor is the most valuable feature. It is simple and intuitive, and it can guide you step-by-step.

From an ecosystem perspective, it has a highly integrated flow editor, user interface, and data logic behind it. It has a very connected local ecosystem.

One of the biggest areas for improvement is that every time an existing data element is modified, it creates a new data element. It doesn't really modify that particular data element. So, a user has to follow an extra step of removing the existing data element and bringing in the new and modified data element that is being added, which sort of goes into negative productivity.

I have been using this solution for about three and a half years.

OutSystems' tech support is very good. They're fairly responsive.

It is one of the good solutions available in the market. I would rate OutSystems an eight out of 10.

It is a stable solution, and the initial setup is straightforward.

I think the resource ecosystem could be improved. There are not enough resources on the market.

Multiple LDEV support would be great to have in the next release.

I've been using OutSystems for three months.

It has been stable so far.

It looks as though it will be a scalable solution.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I would suggest that you go for at least five or six environments. Typically, they provide three environments, and I think you should go for more, perhaps. six environments by default.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate OutSystems at eight.