Pega Platform Reviews

The workflows are the most valuable features, particularly for us, because we were attempting to automate processes by utilizing workflows to provide a hands-off comparison between the bot and the human.

Also, the out-of-the-box reporting, visibility, and dashboards are extremely useful. 

There was a lot of room for improvement on the RPA front because the product was still in its journey for more than one year. The product was still in its early stages of development. We spoke with the Pega team and provided our feedback.

On the BPM front, I believe it is pretty standard and an industry leader. 

We have experienced a few technical challenges, particularly triggering the workflow through file drops and accessing files. Those difficulties are more of a cloud versus on-premises issue because everything was on the cloud, and they were unable to retrieve files from on-premises folders. As a result, we had to resort to workarounds.

I believe they could work on more integration of their RPA and BPM so that it becomes seamless for anyone, and then it becomes easier for a human versus machine interaction using the same BPM. They said at the time that it's on their roadmap and should be coming soon if it hasn't already. But those are the things that, in my opinion, would make a better BPM, where it would function as an enterprise orchestration layer, collaborating with humans and bots in the same way and delivering the business process.

We completed a couple of BPM projects using Pega BPM.

I have been working with Pega BPM on and off for the last two years, and I have completed two BPM implementations in the last three.

It's a scalable product. There are no challenges with the scalability of Pega BPM.

Technical support was good. Especially for us, their product team was with us, as was their support team, and all of these workarounds were only possible with their assistance.

I worked on Newgen BPM two years ago.

We work mostly with BPM but we did a PoC on RPA. The RPA was unable to work.

The initial setup is simple because it is in the cloud. We haven't spent much time setting it up, it was up and running for a few weeks.

In terms of business flows, our implementations were not overly complex. We were able to launch it in an Agile mode, and we were able to deliver, in two or three sprints spanning four months. Every four to five weeks, we were able to release small flows to enable certain business functionality.

Pricing is a little on the high side. One of the challenges where a certain lower level of cases was unable to justify the cost. If your process is not that complex, and it is very simple, then the implementation timeline is obviously short, but licensing becomes a little costly, and it sometimes does not cross the business use case. 

The benefits you receive are not worth the price. 

They should have a solid foundation of business processes in place before embarking on this journey. If the case is small or the process is not complex, they should use a smaller and simpler BPMS. The primary reason is the cost. However, if they are considering it at the enterprise level or for a more complicated process, Pega is, in my opinion, the best option.

I would rate Pega BPM an eight out of ten.

My primary use case is for process modeling.

There are several areas for improvement with this product. The performance of the application is very slow, the UI needs improvement, and the architecture needs to be simplified. In addition, it's impossible to know what's going on behind the scenes of this solution, and there's no tech support or useful documentation, so I have been forced to do my own troubleshooting.

I have been using this solution for two years.

The stability's ok once the solution is set up properly.

The solution is scalable in terms of load but not operation-wide.

The technical support has been disappointing - we don't get the support we need from it.

The initial setup was pretty complex.

The pricing is good.

Before choosing, I evaluated Colfax, Oracle, and IBM.

The platform as a whole is very rich - you can do a lot of things with it with minimum time and cost. I would recommend Pega as a BPM solution but make sure that your contract states you will receive support, otherwise you may not get any. I would rate this solution as seven out of ten.

It is a multi-tenant offering for developing applications. We have its latest version.

Generically, at the moment, it can take things that were non-functioning processes and crossing stovepipes and make them function.

I have found a lot of features valuable. The ability to define processes, build reports, and get insights or analytics on data is most valuable. It is a powerful platform.

The way the IDE works with the chatbox and the taxonomy imports could be a little smoother.

There should be quicker approvals for CDH. It is a bureaucratic approval process to be able to get those particular licenses.

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

It is stable. Like everything, it depends on the quality of the knowledge of the people who are using it.

I like it. It allows for a lot of multi-tenancy.

In terms of usage, it is in its initial use areas, but it is rapidly being adopted.

I have interacted with them. Our overall experience is positive. They have some good folks there. Occasionally, their system doesn't realize the urgency of a problem if the problem isn't in production. If your problem isn't currently causing production failures, the turnaround time can be slower than expected.

We don't use Pega exclusively. We've got other stuff in there. There are some things for which one solution is good, and for another set of things, another one fits very well.  It just depends on the application, the tendency, and the purpose.

We brought in experts. Our experience with them was positive.

The advice that I would give is that when spinning, think about if you're setting up a private one. You should also think about your tenant or your organizational control structure for multi-tenancy so that you can have a mix of licenses for tenants while not overly complicating and having to maintain tons of different work control layers. 

Before you start up an app, take a look, run the wizards, and see what you can reuse from the structure. Its wizards are very good to use when starting up. There are a lot of powerful data models and workflows that you can use as starting points. You can also simply reuse and rename them. 

Whenever you're building things, work with your team regularly on the data model supporting it so that you have a lot of reusable capability. So, you enhance it. It is worth the time to meet weekly with your team over your data architecture.

I would rate Pega BPM an eight out of 10. There is a bit of a learning curve, but it is extremely powerful. When you get into it, then you realize that it is far more powerful.

We are developing campaigns and business solutions on top of Pega. It is a part of the campaign management solution that we have. We are also using it for the core business. We are offering personalized content, personalized product, and personalized information for each of our customers. Pega is one of the main products for us for pricing, catalog, and content. It is being used for everything.

I have a lot of experience in this kind of industry, and Pega is one of the best solutions in terms of performance, capabilities, and the way we develop. 

It should have integration with non-relational databases. A lot of databases are non-relational, and as a company, we are planning to move to NoSQL or open-source databases. It would be good if we are able to install and use Pega on a NoSQL database. 

They can also try to tailor or organize the company a bit differently and go more towards the microservice concept.

I would like Pega to develop machine learning and intelligent AI algorithms. They have a good foundation in terms of the model and the stuff that we are using for some customers, and it will be good to onboard as many machine learning algorithms as possible.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

It is one of the most stable solutions, but you need professional expertise. If you are working in a professional way, you won't have issues. If you install it on top of any provider as a database and you are not able to tune the database, you will have issues. Every product has bugs, but it is a more stable one.

We have 25 to 30 customers who use this solution.

Their technical support is fine. There is always room for improvement, but overall, it is fine.

I have used different products and shifted to Pega. In the past ten years, I developed an in-house solution, and I also hired a company to develop it for me, but that was not enough. Now I am relying on Pega in Google Cloud, and it is running my business strategy and everything else. It is one of the best solutions in this category. I can't even compare it with other products. Based on Gartner's ratings, Pega is one of the top ones.

Its installation is straightforward. I don't see any big issue. We are using it on Google Cloud VMs. We are not using Pega container, but I know another company that is using it fully in a container.

For its deployment and maintenance, you need highly skilled people.

We mostly have a yearly license. 

I would recommend this solution. I have been recommending it to different customers across Europe. It is a professional product, but you should know what you are doing. If you don't know what you are doing, you might think it does nothing, but if you are mature enough to understand the power and potential of Pega, you can do magic with it. You should have the know-how, and you should know a customer's expectations. 

One of the reasons why some customers are getting a lot of success is because we have Pega and Data Lake or big data platforms close to each other. Data Science runs the algorithm on the Data Lake, and we propagate the data and the segment to Pega. This way the customer gets a high value. They are doing a great business because they have the potential data, and they can combine and build campaigns and segment customers on an individual basis. After that, your big data is in real-time, and you have real-time notifications. You are doing everything in real-time.

I would rate Pega BPM a nine out of ten.

The solution can be used to quickly manage and monitor processes in your organization. 

I have found the solution to be flexible and they provide good support. 

In general, we use web services to integrate this solution with our other tools. It is the main approach we use with this solution and it integrates with all tools that we need. If you want to integrate with other solutions such ThreatFire or similar, it is possible as well. 

The previous versions had good training documents but the updated versions need to improve the documentation.

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

We have a customer that has over 6,000 users using the solution.

The solution provides very good support. They have the experience, knowledge, and are always helpful. 

I have used previously used Camunda, jBPM, and IBM solutions.

The version for private use on your workstation is easy to install. However, if you want to prepare a platform, it is not easy. All good solutions are not easy to install and tend to be complex and because of this, I would not say this solution is any more complex than any other good solution.

The amount of technical team needed depends on the project. For small implementations, we use one to two people and for big projects, we can have over 30 developers.

The solution could be less expensive according to my customers. However, I think the price of the solution is fair.

This solution is one of the best tools on the market right now. I would recommend it to others.

I rate Pega BPM a ten out of ten.

We use this solution for HR automation or HR service delivery.

It is quite configurable, which is the most exciting feature. We can easily configure it as per our needs. 

Reporting is not so clear and not so great. We really struggle to get the right reporting. When we need reporting based on the content of the tickets, we are not able to get it. The MIS reporting is not great. That's one of the reasons why we are switching to ServiceNow.

Its compatibility with the higher versions of Internet Explorer should be improved. It really works well in Mozilla Firefox or any other browser, but when it comes to Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer, sometimes, the layout gets disturbed. The positioning of the buttons changes, and there is some distortion in the layout. I am not sure whether it is our configuration problem or Pega's, but when it is working in Mozilla Firefox, it should also work in Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer.

I have been using this solution for almost three years now. We started using it in late 2017.

It is stable. We haven't faced any downtime or any other issues.

It is quite scalable.

My team would know about it, and I personally don't really get into those details. After the implementation, our teams are on their own. I don't think they are reaching out to Pega support frequently because I don't see any product issues as such. Everything is configurable, and it is running daily.

It is not so complex, but it needs an intermediate level of skill set. It is not so complex, but it is also not so easy.

It is cost-effective for medium enterprises. It is cheaper than ServiceNow.

I would definitely recommend this solution. It is more cost-effective as compared to other products. It is the right product for medium enterprises rather than a highly-expensive solution such as ServiceNow, to which we are switching. When you're implementing it, you should configure it in the right way with all categories, subcategories, and other things.

I would rate Pega BPM a seven out of ten.

Our customer base is varied, ranging from insurance to banking to government. In the insurance domain Pega is used for things like policy, as middleman management, policy administration and claims administration. In the banking realm, it's used across multiple areas from CRM systems, customer service, sales automation, and things like loan origination, payment investigations and payment arrangement management. In the government sector, it's used particularly as a case management software to manage processes.

Most of our customers are enterprise businesses, we are partners of Pega and our company functions as a system integrator. I am co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. 

One of the valuable things in the solution is that Pega offers a unique environment where its entire architecture is very unified, meaning it's used free across multiple areas. In other products, say IBM, and other solutions, the products range across several solutions and include separate components for analytics, separate components for the UI and a separate component for business roles. Pega, on the other hand, is one unified architecture and that is very valuable. The second thing is that Pega is model driven architecture so building something up on it from models is very quick. 

From a room for improvement point of view, what I've seen is that many customers want solutions that directly meet their requirements so while Pega has somewhat vertical solutions on Pega customer service and sales automation, industry and customer experts expect more out-of-box solutions to be readily available on Pega.

It is the same for additional features - the customer expects more business solutions to be directly available on Pega. For example, when I say business solutions, Pega could have a business solution on customer service, a business solution on sales automation. Pega may not have a proper business solution for LOS, or Loan Origination System. These are common business solutions which could be made available in the solution, it would be very good if they could focus on the direct business solutions which customers expect over here.

I've been using this solution since 2003, so 17 or 18 years. 

As enterprise customers are using it, you can tell it's stable. It's one solution which we've basically used and worked both on-prem as well as on cloud and it's one of the other unique value aspects of Pega, that the same solution can work on cloud as well as on-prem. 

From a scalability perspective, it's scalable. In terms of high volume, we have some applications based out of Vietnam which have millions of cases, so in terms of the number of cases, it's highly scalable. We have other customers who also have a high volume of users. 

Because I've been working with Pega since 2003, I can see the improvements that have been made in terms of how they go about establishing contact with customers. These days, it's pretty easy and accessible.

Initial setup is quite straightforward. Deployment time is based on the actual size of the project. On average, it can take anywhere from three to five months to build. Usually, the team servicing from our side is around five to seven people and from the client side it's usually a project manager and a couple of others. 

PegaRules is a very powerful rule engine. It's a very powerful platform to build any sort of solution onto. Where a customer makes mistakes is when they underestimate the business expertise of a partner, so they really need to ensure that initial implementation is right. It is very important to understand who is implementing it on the ground. If they don't understand the business requirements and the required business outcome of management, it can be awkward, and not in line with expectations.

The main thing I have realized is that understanding the business problem and understanding the required outcome for the customer is very important. One of the biggest business areas is to focus on understanding problems and the kind of business outcome the customer requires. It's really about understanding the big picture. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement, but I've seen many customers getting very good value out of this solution.

In terms of features that I have found most valuable, there are lots of new things in Appian BPM, maybe six in this newer version. Earlier, what we needed to do if we wanted to deploy some code into the other environment was to upload it into the environment, take a patch from the other environment, patch it, and import it. Nowadays it is easier. There is a new feature in the Admin Console where I just need to click on that environment, pick a patch, and just select the environment. Then I see whether it is queuing in the scheduled environment or going for production. I select the environment and I can directly deploy that patch. This is a very good feature of the current version.

There is a very well implemented UI side - the front-end visibility. There is a new progress bar that allows you to see your progress. There is a very impressive UI design that they've embedded into the BPM tool.

In terms of areas that need to be improved, I would say the timeout. This is because sometimes when we are patching some data from the database, we are getting added as a timeout. I would like to build a solution for that or to improve that feature, because by doing so the process will be trimmed. Sometimes it gets stuck just due to taking so much time for the user in the back-end data from the database. I think all the other features are very good.

Additionally, I'd like to select the availabilities. I'm using the earlier version now because it is on-premise implementation. If I go on the newer PGi for a couple of days, the latest version, then I will able to see what other additional features we need to have in the BPM tool.

I've been working on Appian BPM tools for about three years.

I do not have an issue with stability. I'm completely fine with that.

It is definitely scalable and I know that is a very good feature of the Pega BPM and Appian BPM.

I have never contacted support. 

But we have one help ticket raised, so technically I do support the production.

I like Appian BPM. In Appian BPM I need to code for the components. If it's a bigger program, depending on the sizing, I read about using Pega BPM for that. But I'm working as an Appian Lead and working on Appian BPM tools for about three years.

About a year ago, I was working as a DOS developer and then I moved to Appian BPM and Pega BPM. I get feedback from the users. Based on the data from the POC, I present that to the user and if there is any implement I'll do it on the same day and avail it to the user. If they're okay with it, then I can go ahead and create the application and develop it for the solution.

Working as a DOS developer I'm coming from a different place. I came to know about this BPM tool from the website and learned that it has very good features. So that's the main attraction to BPM tools.

The initial setup is not complex, it is easy. For the first time user, we do have the trial version of it. Nowadays, as you are aware, we have data in the Cloud where it is like MySQL. It will take under 30 minutes. Not more than that.

We are working in Agile. So there is a sprint of two weeks. After each and every sprint we have to be looking forward to the after-sprint plans. So the solution has been deployed after each and every sprint to the queue and on the decided date, to the production.

I used a number of integrators for my current project that was as a re-seller. I don't have experience with implementing. On my current project, I do integrate with the re-seller that does business with Appian. We are just consulting for the solution at our end with an integrator at Appian by using the data authentication.

I would definitely let people know about it. Let me give you a scenario. Let's say there is a banking system. Generally, people come to the bank, fill out the form, and submit it. Then a record will be created in the system. So what happens by using the Pega BPM is that we can clearly identify the flow - how you do it by using the different user input tasks. This is appealing to the user, to the customers, to everyone. Definitely I would like to get a return on that and let them know that if they use this BPM tool, more than any other technology tool, it has the most complete set of tools for the system.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate it an eight. This is because it is easier to use than any other product and it is more secure. All of our software was developed in Java and as we know Java is a secure language. 

There are many more features. It is easy to use, easy to understand, easy to implement and easy to enhance and we can do it as a Cloud. Also, it is very user-friendly. Nowadays, it's on Cloud so we can access it from anywhere. There is no location per se or any system requirement.