ABBYY and Appian are both solutions in the Process Mining category. ABBYY is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.0, while Appian is
ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.1. Additionally, 100% of ABBYY users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Appian users who would recommend it.
Appian and ABBYY Timeline compete in the enterprise automation solutions category. Appian is favored for its robust support and pricing, while ABBYY Timeline stands out for its advanced features.
Features: Appian includes comprehensive low-code capabilities, fast application deployment, and extensive support. ABBYY Timeline offers advanced process intelligence, superior analytics, and enhanced operational insights.
Room for Improvement: Appian users suggest improvements in scalability, some integrations, and user interface customization. ABBYY Timeline users point to a complex initial setup, a steeper learning curve, and performance optimization.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Appian is praised for its relatively fast deployment process and responsive customer support. ABBYY Timeline is criticized for its complex deployment but commended for detailed guidance and documentation.
Pricing and ROI: Appian users are satisfied with its cost-effectiveness and good ROI, though it can be pricey initially. ABBYY Timeline's pricing is justified by the benefits derived, delivering substantial ROI for its price point.
The software is user-friendly, flexible, and can be used with various data sources. It provides various reports and charts that help organizations to identify areas for improvement and optimize their processes. ABBYY Timeline is a great choice for business process analysts, process owners, and IT professionals who are looking for a tool to help them analyze and optimize their processes. The process flow/diagram is the most valuable feature, as it offers a helpful visual simulation that allows users to see what's happening in the grand scheme of things and then drill down into specific tasks and processes to see where the bottlenecks are. For those companies that look for the low-hanging fruit in terms of process automation and operational excellence, this is the tool you need to succeed.
To determine whether a platform, such as Appian, is suitable for your domain industry, you must first assess whether it offers any out-of-the-box features relevant to your needs. If it does, utilizing that platform would be the best option since it already has the required functionalities. If the available features do not align with your requirements, consider choosing a platform that can easily build such services. Attempting to modify pre-existing features on a platform is a challenging task, and any upgrades to the platform could pose further issues for users. The solution has high performance but the main issue is the lack of customization after deploying it. I rate Appian an eight out of ten.
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"ABBYY Timeline provides various reports and charts that help us identify areas for improvement and optimize our business processes."
"It reduces development time in half making us more efficient."
"The initial setup was seamless. We didn't run into any hardships at all."
"Even with an on-premise implementation, the scalability is still high, so it is easy to scale up."
"The setup is easy."
"The most valuable features of Appian are the VPN engine, it is fast, lightweight, and easy to set up business rules. Business teams can do it by themselves. That is a very good feature."
"Write to Data Store Entity - Saving data in SQL databases is done easily using entities. Entities (CDTs in Appian terminology) define relationships and target schema tables via XSD files."
"It is really simple to create a new app, and I like the data-centric aspect of the BPM tool."
"There is no need to worry about vulnerabilities in the system, because Appian built a secure system."
"There are a couple of new features available in Timeline that still need more time to mature."
"Something I would like to see improved is an SQL database connection."
"We'd like improved functionality for testing new devices."
"There should be more flexibility for the developers to choose the look and feel of the UI. They should have a better ability to design their widgets and customize them with different colors, shapes, and sizes. That is a limitation that could be improved upon."
"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"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."
"Appian could be improved by making it a strict, no-code platform with free-built process packs."
"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."
"Appian could include other applications that we could reuse for other customers, CRM for example."
"The cost is calculated on a per-user basis. It might be expensive for small and mid-sized enterprises."
"If you're doing an enterprise-wide digital transformation, Appian is worthwhile, but not for just one or two use cases because the license costs are higher."
"The tool is quite costly."
"Licensing of Appian is less expensive when compared to other BPMs in the market."
"The price of this solution is a little high here in Mongolia."
"Appian is very flexible in their pricing. In general, Appian's pricing is much, much lower when compared to competition like Pega or other products. Appian also has a flexible licensing model across geographies. Pega usually goes with a single licensing cost—which is a US-based cost—for all global customers, and it's costly. Whereas Appian has a different regional licensing cost model and it can be cheaper, depending on geography. So Appian's licensing is very flexible, and cheaper when compared to other competition."
"The license is not very cheap. It's on the expensive side."
Integration with our system wasn't available out of the box. We built a custom solution that required some back and forth with the ABBYY team. Many popular ERP and CRMs are already offered out of t...
ABBYY Timeline is a very user-friendly and intuitive tool - even for people who are new to process mining, as the software has a simple interface that makes it easier to work with even for non-tech...
Appian is fast when building simple to medium solutions. This solution offers simple drag-and-drop functionality with easy plug-and-play options. The initial setup was seamless and very easy to imp...
Appian is actually pretty big on educating its users, including with courses that reward you with certifications. There is a whole section on their company’s website where you can check out the edu...
We had some issues when we were setting up Appian. It was quite surprising, since this is a low-code tool which, in its essence, means it is meant for business users and inexperienced beginners. So...
ABBYY Timeline is a cloud-based, AI-driven process mining tool. Using the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology, ABBYY Timeline automatically builds an interactive digital twin of your business processes, analyzes them in real time to identify bottlenecks, and predicts future outcomes to facilitate better decision-making.
Why use process mining & task mining?
✔ End-to-end process visualization: Visualize the flow of your work through the process stages and see the delays, bottlenecks, and outliers. Gain insight into your “as-is” customer processes to understand challenges.
✔ Compliance risk management: Simplify compliance by using audit trails to build a model of your process and reason against it. Receive alerts when rules set in place are broken and follow up immediately to ensure that it won’t happen again.
✔ Greater ROI from automation: Drive down the cost of process evaluation and make it easy to identify high-value improvement opportunities. Discover the most valuable opportunities to implement RPA or automatically monitor the performance of your existing RPA processes.
✔ Accurate, un-biased data: Before, process mining relied on subject matter experts. Now, process mining software gives decision-makers facts and figures from real-time event log data to back up their decisions by serving as an irrefutable source of truth.
How Timeline process mining works
In four steps, discover and visualize process execution details automatically by leveraging artificial intelligence to examine desktop user interaction (known as task mining) or by analyzing your existing data (known as process mining) to quickly identify opportunities for improvement, monitor ongoing performance in real-time, and predict future outcomes.
Appian is a unified low-code platform and solution used by businesses to build enterprise applications and workflows. This product adapts to the needs of clients and the technologies they are already using to combine their data in a single workflow and maximize resources. The platform has four main components through which it transforms the work process for companies of various sizes. They are:
Complete automation: Through complete automation, companies are able to coordinate and manage employees, existing systems, bots, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) in a single workflow. The solution offers a way to centrally manage all third-party automation vendors as well.
Low-code applications: Appian offers the ability to build applications faster with visual development and low-code tools. All applications are ready-made to be suitable for mobile.
Low-code data: Appian lets companies source data from multiple types of sources, eliminating the need for data migration. Through no-code and low-code solutions and industry-standard connectors, the platform also eliminates the need for data silos.
Enterprise ready: The platform offers options for companies to scale their businesses to an enterprise level without complications.
Appian is utilized across a diverse set of industries, including automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, education, financial services, telecom and media, transportation, retail, insurance, healthcare, and life sciences. The most frequent use cases of Appian are customer journey, governance, risk and compliance, operational efficiency, supply chain, distributed order management, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management.
Appian Features
Appian has various features that allow users to create solutions for their businesses. These features can be separated into a few groups according to function, including automation, low-code application development, and integrations and data. Some of the most frequently used features of Appian include:
Robotic process automation (RPA): Users of Appian can assign software bots to perform rules-based tasks that need to be repeated over a set course of time. This can improve efficiency and performance within an organization while saving human resources.
Intelligent document processing: The tool offers a feature for quick and accurate extraction and structuring of data. This can reduce time and costs for organizations because it eliminates the need for outsourcing such services.
AI: Appian utilizes artificial intelligence to enhance applications, workflows, and automation. AI is also used to address complex processes and unique situations.
Business rules: Organizations can automate and simplify work processes while adhering to their operating procedures.
Application development: Appian provides a low-code development feature that allows users to deploy applications over ten times faster than through conventional approaches. This feature not only allows for quick application building, but also applications that run on multiple types of platforms, seamless data integration, and business scalability.
Integrations and data: Appian allows for data integration from a wide array of sources without the need for migration. This contributes to easy access to data across systems, real-time data insights, improved user experience, and accelerated development.
Appian Benefits
The benefits of using Appian include:
The solution ensures seamless organization growth, as it supports various UX patterns, common data schemes, and upgrades, used to facilitate application development on a bigger scale.
Appian can increase process speed and deliver applications considerably faster compared to conventional development.
The platform is easy to use and suitable for complete beginners to build applications and workflows.
Appian offers a variety of design tools that facilitate development and deployment.
Appian offers detailed real-time data insight which allows organizations to access relevant information about their processes as they are developing.
The solution offers clients the ability to move data between the cloud, on-premise, and hybrid configurations.
The platform is easy to optimize, which allows businesses to utilize it according to their personal needs.
Appian offers connectivity across web, mobile, email, voice, and chat, providing a multi-channel experience for companies and their clients.
Hansard Global plc, Punch Taverns, Pirelli, Crawford & Company, EDP Renewables, Queensland Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (, Bank of Tennessee
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