Appian Reviews

We use Appian for HR onboarding and a couple other places in the company.

In particular we use it for workflows in HR onboarding. Any time that we're hiring new people, we have an application that assigns different tasks for computers, for making sure they're set up on insurance, their emails; all of that stuff is assigned to them prior to starting to work.

Accountability is probably the most affected. Knowing that a task has been assigned, that you're following a specific process, and that the task has been completed, gives you that accountability throughout the organization. It enables us to know that, when we bring new people on, they're ready to start right away.

It's being able to manage the workflow, to assign tasks, to have notification that a task has been completed. It's basically what any BPM solution is going to provide.

What stands out are the 

• speed of the product
• quick, easy development 
• visual diagramming. 

Those are the features that really stand out.

I don't know that I would have any specific areas for improvement.

It's very stable. We have not experienced any problems with it.

Considering that organizations like the US Army use it, worldwide, globally, it's able to scale up from supporting an organization of 50 to an organization of thousands. There is no issue with scalability.

I have not had any reason to call tech support, but my peers that I've talked with, who have interfaced with tech support, say it's fast, it's responsive. They get the issues resolved immediately.

Again, we haven't had any problems with tech support whatsoever.

We had used a homegrown solution. We do custom development, software development work, or that was our legacy. Maintaining that homegrown solution over time just proved to be ineffective. Appian provided a much better solution at a lower overall cost.

It's very straightforward. If you've got somebody who comes from a workflow background they're going to understand it, and find it very simple. It's very intuitive. We didn't have any issues in setting it up or getting started with it.

I think that most companies do not do a good job of really looking at the return on investment. They typically do not have a good feel for what their costs are, going in, of manual processes or of a homegrown solution they've developed.

Being able to calculate an ROI, I've seen that to be very difficult for most clients that I've dealt with. I think that's an element that's missing a lot in technology today. Make sure you evaluate your total cost before you're ready to make a decision.

I think that if somebody is really serious at looking at business value, then by all means, the product is well worth the value. You get representative business value for the price that you pay for the product, and for the implementation of the product.

We evaluated several different options. Pegasystems is one. I'm not sure about K2, but there were multiple options available. If you look at the industry reports there are numerous solutions listed. We felt that Appian, for the value and for the ease of use, and for the mobile capability, was the best solution.

I would give it a nine out 10. I don't think any product is ever perfect, but I think that Appian is one of them that comes closest to that mark. When you consider the capability, what it can do, consider the price, consider the different advantages that it has, I think it's a superior product. It's one that we use. We're very pleased with it. Most customers that I've talked to have been very, very pleased with their selection.

I understand that you can go with an off-the-shelf product that's going to get you 70%, maybe 75% of the capability you want. You're going to have to tweak it and do some elements of custom work that are most likely going to drive the cost up. You need to consider that, versus a product like Appian that allows you to really tailor the solution to fit your particular environment. I think that's the best advice I would give somebody, is to make sure that you're looking at it honestly before you go down that road.

The most valuable features of Appian are:

1. Rapid development with low-code makes it easier to quickly get apps implemented and the time to break-even and ROI is much faster.
2. Easy to build case management, with Records and Related Actions facilitates case or document-based applications instead of, or along with, process-based applications, opening up whole new types of applications for Appian development.
3. Built from the ground up with a cohesive architecture to be the leading social, collaborative, most usable BPM platform. This makes the product feel integrated and intuitive to use, rather than having to seemingly (or actually, in the case of some competitors) go to a separate product to do certain things. In the end, it shortens implementation time and opens up the product to less technical designers because it's easy to use.

Most notably, it allows us to quickly automate processes and case management work, often cutting the manual time required in half or more. End to end time is also noticeably improved, as is the user experience of the people using the new applications.

The biggest areas of improvement would be in facilitating team development, DevOps, and integration with typical tools used in enterprise development (Jenkins, Subversion, etc.)

More than four years.

Stability problems are usually only experienced when architecture and development are done by people who don't know the tool and its best practices very well.

Scalability problems are usually only experienced when architecture and development are done by people who don't know the tool and its best practices very well.

Technical support is usually pretty good for the easier problems.

Really complex issues tend to take too long to resolve, but many times that's only because there isn't the experienced person to take it from providing information to actually closing out the fix. If a problem results in a development fix, that is typically pretty quick, too.

I personally used Lombardi and IBM BPM prior to Appian.

The main reasons for switching were:

1. Too many off-shore consultants taking all the consulting work, developing shoddy apps while driving down the rates, and generally giving BPM and the product a bad name.
2. IBM steadily providing release after release that introduced more bugs and making the tool itself less usable.
3. Appian was clearly becoming the better product and their market share was on the hockey stick slope up, whereas IBM's was falling quickly.

I don't typically get involved in the server setup, but my understanding is that it's relatively easy, especially compared to IBM's.

I'd advise to not just look at the cost, but the overall value of BPM and of Appian specifically.

BPM done right is a huge value proposition for almost any company, and with Appian's low code rapid development model, the ROI can be huge, while the break-even point should be accelerated tremendously.

This assumes that you use qualified and knowledgeable resources to do the work, and they don't come cheap either, but in the end, they are less expensive and provide more value than cheaper resources who are not qualified.

See above regarding Lombardi/IBM BPM. They are the other market leader, but while Appian is trending upwards, IBM is on its way down.

See above under the pricing/licensing advice, but I can't emphasize enough to make sure you get quality resources who really know the product well. They will understand how to best use Appian to drive the huge ROI that should come from a successful implementation. I also recommend that all technical resources, from the Architect/Team Lead down to the most junior, have a business focus along with their technical knowledge. Only by understanding how the business wants to use the technology can they make good on the promise of BPM and Appian

We use this solution for the integration of systems and data in our organization.

Development time is much faster than traditional coding solutions, and it is more robust.

The Cloud offering is a nice feature.

The process models provide self-documenting systems.

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.

This is a great product.

Robust forms builder that allows a developer to build once and the deploy to all browser & native iOS and Android apps automatically.

The UI of the application has been completely overhauled within the past couple years, but the tools for developing the new interface have not yet been updated.

4 years

Excellent. Smaller companies like Appian tend to value customer service as a competitive advantage.

Excellent.

This solution is for process management, automation, insurance claim processing, those kinds of things. I'm the CTO and a reseller of this product. 

This is the most complete solution of its kind, dealing with BPM and RPA, AI, case management, and document processing. It's a complete platform which is what makes it so good.

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

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Appian provides great technical support. 

The initial setup is very easy. 

The product offers flexible licensing options.

I recommend Appian because I've had experience with other solutions and I know this is the best. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

I mainly use Appian for business process automation and robotic process automation initiatives.

The most valuable feature is business automation.

Appian could improve their customer-facing initiatives.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

This is a stable solution.

Appian is scalable.

Appian has good support.

Appian is easy to set up.

I would give Appian a rating of eight out of ten.

We used this solution for the digitalization of all our legal processes. It has very flexible adaptation and the ability to save and automate processes. In addition, it is easy to change the user interface and improve it, make reports, and obtain information copies.

The most valuable feature is trustability. The preparation, reports, information, and data model are also valuable.

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

We've used Appian in the last year.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution, and we have about 30 to 40 people using it in our company.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten. They are very good.

The setup was not difficult. It requires a technical profile, but it's a low-cost application.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. I would recommend taking the tutorials and courses. There is a lot of material available to learn how to use and take maximum advantage of the application.

SAIL (Self-Assembling Interface Layer), a scripting language provided by Appian. It is the equivalent of JS and CSS. It allows creation of complex UIs which are also responsive. With SAIL, we have a single language for both the UI logic and its appearance. UI components can be built as reusable components and used in multiple UI interfaces.

Process Modeling enables creation of business process workflows. You can create complex business workflows in a visual manner, and it is also easy to debug/monitor.

Offline capabilities and responsive capabilities could be better. The mobility features of Appian platform are still evolving.

Native mobile capabilities or hybrid mobile app capabilities are very limited. Things like offline sync, offline storage, access to smartphone device features, etc. are not supported by the Appian platform yet.

Excellent.

It is Java based, can be deployed in JBoss or WebSphere container.

I would rate it eight out of 10. It certainly is the best for enterprise application development.