What needs improvement with Appian?

From a product perspective, it's good. There are some restrictions with respect to using external components within Appian. So, for example, if we do not have a particular feature available, there's a long cycle of getting approvals and all of that. That does not offer flexibility, which definitely can be improved on. Another area of improvement is pricing.

The product’s pricing could be improved from the developers' perspective.

One of the areas that Appian is working on is to improve its UI capabilities and give more flexibility to the UI.

There needs some improvement related to the chatbot features. The performance could improve. If we could calculate the amount of data that will be realized, it would help us a lot.

There is no UI customization possible. We'd like it to be more flexible for branding purposes.

The solution needs more features. For example, a way to connect to our viewing database, to record, and more interface and component design. The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

Appian has a few areas for improvement, which my organization raised with the Appian team. One is the Excel output which is limited to fifty columns when it should be up to two hundred or three hundred columns. Fixing this limitation will make the solution better. What I want to see in the next release of Appian is on the interface side, where the current square-shaped buttons should be round. Having available buttons for the different functions of Appian will also help enrich the UI.

In terms of what could be improved, there is nothing worth mentioning.

The tool itself is pretty good, but the main area that we struggled with was the backend. The frontend development is really good, but the backend modeling can be streamlined a little bit. There are good integrations, but tying them through the data layer and then up into the frontend could be improved a little bit. It does read/write on the data source, and you can configure it to just write or just read, but there is a little bit of work involved.

The ability of the interface to load automatic data is not great.

We are anticipating a few improvements from Appian. The product competes well with peer platforms, however, when you compare past that scale, there is room for improvement. I would like to see more features for enterprises. They would also benefit from adding documentation and training on their site.

Appian could be be further improved by making it a strict, no-code platform with in-built process packs.

While Appian is generally flexible, it's rigid in some ways, doesn't allow you lot of options to cutomize. It takes longer to do something that isn't available out of the box.

I cannot speak to any missing features. The UI of Appian is more internal. Recently, there has been an addition of an external user portal for the customer-facing stuff. It's still coming out. There will be more features for external users.

We have a partnership with Appian. We have worked with Appian to deal with issues. They have already incorporated many things into their platform. One of the things we have discussed, which I can highlight, is related to Excel manipulations. They have incorporated their Excel manipulations so it's far better than the earlier version. Earlier, we had to go with a plugin for even a simple Excel or spreadsheet calculation. Now, they have included all those things in their own out-of-the-box functionality. It's definitely a tool and does not require high code language. There could be a scope of enhancement for capturing the variety of use cases. One thing, for example, is Excel manipulation, which they now provide in their out of box functionality, however, that can still be improved.

There have been a lot of improvements, and Appian is now claiming to be a low-code platform with other market leaders, like OutSystems and Mendix. One room for improvement is the ease of UI UX development, like in OutSystems and Mendix. I'd like to see Appian develop some kind of interface in their platform where the wireframes can be developed. If Appian could have a partnership with leading platforms like Salesforce or Oracle, I think that would be beneficial for them. I would also like to see Appian develop an interface to speed up development for business analysts. That sort of an interface is lagging in Appian right now.

The solution needs to have more features. If you compare it to, for example, Katalon, Katalon had more features. We'd like improved functionality for testing new devices. For example, the last Apple phone is always a pain. The CEO of the bank has it, however, he wants the application running there. The testing of the latest models needs to be possible.

Appian could improve their customer-facing initiatives.

Appian could include other applications that we could reuse for other customers, CRM for example. This would make implementation quicker.

What could be improved is more on the front end perspective, like the user interface and the mobile application aspect. It could be tweaked to make it more sexy or more appealing from business to consumer. Appian has a good lineup of features already. Upfront, I believe there is also RPA intelligent document processing. We need to fully maximize those features with our customers, like how they can be focusing on the artificial intelligence or machine learning perspective, and the detailed or more advanced intelligent document processing. I believe right now they can only cater to PDF files, so maybe in the future other types of files can be processed.

In terms of usability, there is a learning curve. Licensing fees could be reduced.

The certification is pretty expensive, and it doesn't allow for a tailored UI. I'm a little bit disappointed with the exam. It's different from the preparation, training, and sample exam. One of my lead developers failed to pass this morning. I'm a bit sad because it's $200. If I ask 10 of my developers to get a certificate, it's $2,000. It's a scaleup company, so we have more than 60 people at the moment, but I can't ask most of my developers to get the certificate. From a developer point of view, I can't try this in the free version because you can't buy one or two subscriptions. You need to get the minimum package for premium, which is about one hundred seats. From the first day, I wanted to see the capability of reaching other functions, Google Cloud services, and cognitive services. There is already an OCR, intelligent document that comes in the My Cloud and which Appian gave me as a sample. I can't build it because it uses the Google cognitive services as a backend, and this is the thing that we couldn't try. You can't really test the software properly without actually buying the license first. Something I would like to see improved is an SQL database connection.

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.

I'd like to see business rules management included as part of the solution.

The solution could improve by being more responsive when dealing with large quantities of data. Additionally, they can make the decision or rules engine better. It cannot handle too many rules or too many decisions at once.

The solution could improve robotic process automation.

The graphical user interface could be easier to use. It should be simplified. When we're dealing with a large number of complex applications, the user interface is not the best. There could be a simpler design especially when it comes to providing a view on handling large users/user groups.

We've had some issues in regards to functionality. We are currently facing some challenges regarding the potential of using more advanced instruction in order to compare items. We'd like to have more modules so that we can understand the solution a bit better. I would like to see more complete university tools. For example, with UiPath, I have had a good experience related to a free course in order to provide some users some different levels of knowledge. This extra training helps users not only use the solution but to develop further within the tool.

We have clients that want to use Office 365, Microsoft Analytics, and Power Apps. Appian just isn't the same as using something specifically designed to cater to the Microsoft Suite. The solution used to be a bit more difficult to use, but we've added Tempo and now everything is much easier. We can do things very quickly.

It is very expensive. It is also not easy to learn. Training tutorials could be improved.

We'd like to see the employee experience improved, something we can integrate with SharePoint. Right now we're looking at the Power BI which belongs to Microsoft. It has a lot of good features for low-code no-code development kinds of things. I'd like to see the ability of the software itself to integrate with the core systems. It's a gap that Appian hasn't fulfilled. I'd like to see integration with Microsoft products as an additional feature. Microsoft Team, or something like that. It's not there or if it is, it requires some work to enable easy integration with SharePoint.

The user interface is good, but it's not perfect. They should provide more flexibility so designers can create a more picture-perfect device. There should be more features on mobile UX development as well. Currently, it's easy to use and It gets the job done, but it's not flexible in regards to creating the mobile application from scratch. You have to play within the framework and the rules of the UX; however, that's something that not many customers like. Customers want a flexible mobile application development platform. I think Appian should make a lot of improvements with respect to their mobile application development by providing more flexibility for designers in order to allow them to create their own UX components and control the display of the data onscreen. I would like to see more flexibility in terms of the UI. I know that it's not designed to be a big application that allows you to do multiple things, like creating the second year stream of the pie, for example. I feel like Appian has been so instrumental in making their entire product local, and have really improved the user interface design, but the user interface design is limited to authenticated users only — although there are some limited pieces available on the login page. I would like Appian to extend their local capabilities to the login page as well so that we could create an available application that can be targeted to any customer. For example, if you flipped it, you would see information about various products and other information, something that could be very realistic if only Appian would allow these capabilities to be extended to the login page.

We're still researching the platform. I don't have a strong opinion on what might be missing. They seem to be constantly upgrading their products. The solution could use some more tutorials to help brand new users figure out how to use the product effectively.

They are continuously improving the platform. Three months ago I would have suggested they make smart service creation easier (using their API to create components), but they have done that. My only request is that they decrease the license costs.

We've used a good number of Business Process Automation tools in the past and none of them have given the value for money we are seeing with Appian. Appian enables us spend the least time designing beautiful and robust interfaces that automatically render in Web browsers and native mobile apps securely without any additional effort. With very little learning curve, an Appian designer will start designing very complex and dynamic interfaces that consume data from everywhere. We would however like to have more granular control for interface styling in future releases. Appian releases updates to the platform every quarter.

I would like to see better monitoring for business events in synchronization with business rules. There should be a better development for Cases, because it is not really a capability of the product. You have to develop the behavior. The documentation needs to be improved.

Support for complex models really needs significant improvement Flexibility in the architecture is not there Management or reusable assets is extremely limited and poorly designed Business rules are not aligned to industry best practices Authoring tool slow to use resulted in limitations on how quickly solutions can be built Integration to project SDLC (such as testing methods, build systems etc needs work)