Mendix Reviews

In our biggest project to date, we replicated with somebody else. It took three years to do uncompleted, and we replicated it in about six months, to build an end-to-end application for customer use.

Traditionally, it's basically used for anything where there's not an out-of-the-box solution available. We don't recommend people use it for out-of-box solutions, as you're typically going to get better support and value by using something else. This, on the other hand, is something you can customize as you desire. 

The solution is just very quick and responsive. 

The initial setup is very straightforward, and those implementing the product do not have to be very technologically advanced in order to manage the process.

Their app store has been revamped in the last year, and it allows basically anybody who creates a widget or a module inside of it, to share it with the whole community. It's got a very, very robust shared community, which is amazing.

There are free online learning and certifications if a user would like to learn more and better understand the solution.

There's a new update coming soon, and that will be full of great items.

It's not so much that there's room for improvement on the product. They're creating some custom or some out-of-the-box modules that are going to be a part of it. In particular, they've got a workflow module that we could replicate-build ourselves, so to speak. It's probably a module that would take a couple of months, and then you can tweak it. To have that out-of-the-box potential for certain aspects is going to be really good. Having all that workflow prebuilt will be amazing.

There's no direct tech support. However, it's not the type of product you really would get tech support on. 

I've been dealing with the solution for two years at this point.

We haven't had any issues with it. Internally, we support a very large infrastructure and haven't headed any issues, and our three larger clients haven't had any issues at this point. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

It's only scalable vertically until you get to an enterprise license. Then, you have horizontal and vertical scalability. I'd recommend in general that people get an enterprise license.

We use it internally for maybe 400 of our employees, however, depending on what its use case is, it could be everybody. My largest one has 4,000 people they supply using it.

The solution doesn't offer technical support at all. There is a community around it, however, and it is quite robust. That's where we do most of our learning. 

The solution is very straightforward, due to the fact that it's all cloud-based infrastructure, and there's low-end stuff that a citizen developer could do pretty easily. For our onboarding, if we have new developers, people who were actually back with their schooling, compared to some other products, and typically they're on their own doing development within one month of starting training. This is compared to some of our more complex solutions. They may be shadowing and have oversight for six to seven months. The onboarding process to learn it is very, very quick. Therefore, a company shouldn't have any issues with the initial setup.

In terms of maintenance, we have a person on the team that creates a backlog of small work to do once a month, and that's it. There are no updates, or new deploying, or anything like that that is necessary.

In terms of ROI, the results totally depend on the client. With one particular client, it was much more about time. They had 4,000 people that have to submit documents, and they were submitting them in PDF, and having people transcribe them. They had no digital, and so they're changing everything. One of our other big ones, which is a public use case on Mendix's site, called Zmac, was shown last year, while the trucking industry was in decline, to have experienced over 20% growth. They had ROI in year one, for five years worth of costs.

Their licensing costs are on their website. It's easy to find out the overall costs. That being said, I'm under the impression they're getting ready to have a massive overhaul to that, which is going to be a really good thing for the customers. 

From what I understand, they're getting ready to move to a lower platform cost, and it's going to be more focused on the users in terms of how the cost is. That should offer a lower entry threshold than it is currently. It may be as much as 50% lower, and the user base is what their charge will be based on.

I work post-sales doing basically project management and solution design before it hits my developers.

We use a variety of different versions of the solution which we use. Mostly, it's version 8.3 on. That being said, if it's a new customer, they're going to have the most recent. If it's not, we update them as appropriate depending on how it's going to affect the existing environment. We're looking forward to 9.0, coming out this month actually. They're discussing a lot of good, new features we're excited about.

I'd recommend those considering the solution to take the classes, as they're worth it to make sure you understand the solution. It is all online learning. The other program we use with it has been extremely effective for us. There's a program called Datadog and it helps us monitor any kind of error logging at a much more granular level, which has been helpful in pinpointing anything that potentially comes up.

In general, on the platform overall, I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten, and on the pricing model, as it is now, at an eight out of ten. In general, for me, it falls currently at a nine out of ten. That may change once the pricing is adjusted in the near future.

One use case which we're thinking about at the moment is for a clearing platform for security clearing for risk assessment on margin accounts. It happens from time to time that there is a situation called margin call, which is basically a process where one of our operators from the risk unit behind securities needs to get more money or more assets from the client who owns the margin account. 

At the moment, the process is that they have a spreadsheet or checklist in digital form and they go through a highly governed process. They follow a printed-out or virtual copy step-by-step. At each step, they're getting a sign-off and a peer review of each step by a peer in the risk department and it takes forever. It's a lot of admin.

The Mendix base automation is basically replacing this document, this checklist. It just makes it much more helpful as all this has to happen within an hour, that call and getting assets, for example. 

The company is massive and each use case is very different, however, at the moment, those tend to be small processes and trying to cut down the administration, which normally means writing documents, archiving files, scanning documents, that kind of thing, which people currently do manually.

We like Mendix a lot. In terms of technology, it is really good. 

We find it intuitive and easy to use. 

We are quite happy with the solution and look forward to moving to the cloud. We have it hosted in the Docker systems on-prem. When we move to the cloud, we can see that it will be simple. 

We specifically want version control of whatever we deploy in the production. However, with Mendix, unfortunately, storing things in binary is quite a lot. If you put it into Github and stuff like that, we'd like it to be a text type of source code rather than binary. 

There are not enough developers who are using Mendix. The knowledge base available online and in the market is not as rich as other competitors. 

In terms of workflow automation, local automation, they should focus on integrating AI modules. Many companies are trying to build their own models, however, if you compare with how much learning Google has done on their Google models, it makes sense to go for integrations rather than starting from scratch with teaching your AI. That's roughly how we see the domain of RPA and local automation platforms.

The integration or making use of some artificial intelligence and models which are out there could be a lot better. There should be some kind of marketplace. 

The user interface styling is a bit tricky. It's got a restrictive and highly sophisticated styling which could be better.

We put the solution into production about a year ago now.

We have a new platform, which we put into production about half a year ago, and we had an initial 10 sort-of automated processes on top of it at the moment. It's going to grow, obviously. That's the idea.

So far, we are happy with the potential it has for scaling, although in practice we have not yet tried.

We haven't yet had to reach out to technical support and therefore I can't speak to how responsive or knowledgeable they are at this time.

For Mendix, we're not using any kind of collaboration tools or deployment which Mendix provides as we have our own tools and deployment and task management and risk management right inside our organization. We're not going to jump from one tool to another. Just because we have Mendix code, we're not going to use its deployment. We are using current tools, which are established in the enterprise.

It's important that Mendix stays flexible in terms of source code, in terms of deployment, and that it doesn't lock things down. If, for example, there would be a restriction suddenly on which kind of deployment mechanism can be used, then that would cut some customers out. That goes through the approval of risk management. Risk management is very important when you're deploying to production.

We use our own in-house team and tools for implementation purposes.

At the moment, we are using Blue Prism for RPA. We are using also Mendix for the workflow, which is not quite RPA. We're combining those two. We do have an eye on UiPath due to the fact that, in the last year, we're feeling that Blue Prism is falling behind the competition at the moment.

We did look at other tools, however, it wasn't me who did that. It was about two and a half years ago. There was a lot of research on everything on the market. Honestly, I don't know why they picked Mendix, however, they were clearly a strong candidate. Looking at Gartner shows it's a very strong candidate. I was quite surprised that it doesn't have a bigger clientele. 

We are just a customer and end-user.

We're not using the latest version of the solution, however, we're going to upgrade to the latest one. In Mendix, we're using 8.9, however, we're now going to upgrade soon as some of our teams have just started using later libraries, and obviously, that needs upgrading.

We're heavily governed and our governance processes and approvals for cloud take forever. We have these automations deployed on-premise. Both Blue Prism and Mendix are hosted internally and will be for a number of years. We want to go cloud, however, first, we need to get our internal approvals in order.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's one of the best which we touched and we're still happy with it. However, dealing in binary makes me deduct a few points. 

Immediately after my Mendix training, I helped my company develop an online trading platform prototype. The client gave the signal for my colleagues and me to set up the online trading platform, so even if I wasn't the lead programmer and even if I were a citizen programmer or developer, I was able to help the company develop a commercially productive app, which I'm proud of.

The most intensive use case I saw from Mendix was that it was being used to track buses in the Netherlands, which I found impressive. In my company, as I mentioned, Mendix was used to develop an online trading platform. I also heard from a colleague who's now working in another company that his company is using Mendix to track Covid-19 incidents within the company, for example, tracking which staff has Covid-19, how Covid-19 affects productivity, etc.

I love that Mendix is a low-code programming platform, so within two days of completing the training, I could build an application that works. Though the application wasn't commercial, I found it encouraging that I didn't need to put in a single line of TeX coding to get it up and running. Mendix is fantastic.

What I like best about Mendix is that it's leading the way for low-code, no-code platforms compared to other solutions in the market.

I also like that the platform subscribes to the HL methodology and works within the HL workspace. I'm a firm believer in HL.

Feature-wise and in terms of technical aspects, Mendix is excellent, but its pricing is steep.

I received my basic certification for Mendix last year, so I have recent experience with the solution.

In terms of stability, Mendix is an eight out of ten.

My colleagues contacted the technical support for Mendix, not me, but I didn't receive any negative feedback from my colleagues, so the support is adequate.

You don't need to do any setup for Mendix because it's on the cloud, but you need to install the studio version, which took only five minutes to get the platform up and running.

Mendix licensing cost is based on the number of apps you have on the server. At the basic level, it is free of charge, so that seems reasonable, but once you go beyond that and when it comes to the number of users on the app, that basic structure doesn't work, and the pricing tends to get a little bit steep in comparison with other low-code, no-code platforms. For example, there's a solution called Joget, which is relatively cheaper for a professional developer to promote or use as a platform for the apps.

I evaluated Joget.

I used version 9.0 of Mendix.

Mendix is suitable for entry-level to enterprise-level companies. I have yet to work with it on the enterprise level. Still, I have seen what the platform can do because, during the training, the Mendix team showed use cases in the Netherlands for tracking the buses, including Mendix integration with ERP products, such as SAP, Oracle, Fusion, and Sage. Mendix was built to manage up to the enterprise level, covering small, medium, and large companies.

More than twenty people use the platform within the company of my customer.

I'd tell anyone looking into implementing Mendix that as a tool, it's easy to learn and use because it's low-code, so a developer could make use of it and deploy the apps much faster.

My rating for Mendix is high. It's a nine out of ten. If it had lower pricing, then I'd give it a ten. I love Mendix, but I haven't worked with any of its top competitors.

My company is a partner and reseller of Mendix.

I built prototypes with it.

We did not really deploy anything for real clients. We only build prototypes in our local environment, and so far, we do not have any engagements with this platform. It was only for proof of concept projects, and we are still trying to gather engagements to work on if there are existing clients that would provide us with something to use.

The ability to model data and relationships between entities is easy, and the ability to write microflows and nanoflows is great. By that, I mean flows, in general, that achieve something which will function. Those are things I really like. On top of that, they are fast to learn and put into practice after a bit of experience. 

Overall the platform is really good. I like it. I wish I was better at it, as there are plenty of things to learn, especially on the front-end side. I like the fact that you can integrate react widgets. It's really cool. The integration is really good.

The debugger is perfect. It's the best I've ever seen. 

Technical support is great.

You can scale the solution.

It's easy to maintain. 

In the beginning, it is difficult to learn and work with. I have to say it was difficult in the beginning to understand best practices.

Once I got the best practices for the back end part, for manipulating data, it was easier to use. For the front end, it was a bit more difficult. For the front end part, I don't like that it's not fully drag and drop there, and I have to know a bit of CSS, which I don't really know.

It would be cool if it could be completely drag and drop, and you could do it like other products, like PowerApps. With PowerApps, you can move it pixel by pixel. It's like PowerPoint.

I've experienced a few bugs. Sometimes it was really tiny things - not something big. There are issues with the versioning systems, et cetera.

It had errors deploying in the public cloud to publish a solution just for the sake of testing it. 

I had an issue with a message definition. When you create a message definition and save it, and then close the project and open it again, the message definition did not save. I had to do it again. This has happened a lot.

I've used the solution for one year. I used it until last week. 

The solution is stable. 

If you establish best practices at the beginning, it's good. There were some bugs here and there I had to deal with. However, they were small. 

It's a scalable product.

I didn't really build something big by myself on it. I've seen with some applications if you respect good practices, if you don't overwhelm, if you put 100 entities in a module or something, and if you separate things properly, you can scale.

Technical support is great. They are very helpful and responsive. 

Positive

I did previously use the Microsoft Power Apps Platform. That's more like a system of services. It's not an on-in-one product.

The initial setup is more complex. I've also noticed that people that have a first-time interaction with it find it more difficult to grasp. It is very difficult to do in the beginning. You need three to six months to start building something which is not breaking.

Of course, that's way better than trying to program, since that's even more difficult.

My previous experience with some automotive company. They had real-world projects that they were using, and they were deploying to the cloud. I don't know exactly how long it took to set up for them. I remember that the deployment was really fast, like a few minutes. They had a medium type of setup. 

Maintenance and bug fixing is really easy. One person can handle it.

I am able to deploy the solution myself. I did not use any consultants or integrators. 

I'm not in charge of licensing costs. 

That said, my understanding is the product is very expensive, and Microsoft's offering is much cheaper. 

We build solutions and sell them to clients. We are intermediaries. We use this tool to deliver products. 

I only use it for web applications and very rarely for the hybrid web. I never use it for the hybrid web. Mostly, I use it only on desktop web.

I would recommend this solution and encourage people to learn it. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's very top-notch as a product. It's one of the best.

I'm using the solution for assignments with my students. I give little projects to my students and I want them to use the free version of Mendix to solve the problem.

Usually, my class is around 30 students and we separate into ten groups. Each is comproised of three students and we give each group the task of building some small application using a local platform. 

There is a free version of the solution you can use. 

Mostly, the students are very excited about the product due to the fact that they can make applications without coding.

Students do have some difficulties translating the hard code. They are usually using code from a previous course.

My understanding is that, if you are not using the free version, it is very expensive. 

We'd like more support and more publication of use cases and examples so that students can more easily study the product and better understand how it works and its applications. 

I've used the solution for two or three years. 

The solution has been stable. We haven't had issues with it having bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good. 

The free version has some restricted functions. It doesn't give you access to the full solution. 

The only technical support is from the documentation and website, no more. If a customer has difficulty figuring out how to use it, they can start with the documentation and learn how to use it, how to set it up, et cetera. They can learn to build an application with restricted functionality from the free version and go from there. 

We use usually two platforms - Mendix and OutSystems. So we freely let the students make the choice as to whether they use Mendix or OutSystems and usually 50% use OutSystems and 50% use Mendix.

We take advantage of the free version of the product. 

Once you move away from the free version, it can get pricey.

We're just end-users. 

My students use it. I just view and am not involved intensively in using Mendix.

Coming from a developing country, Indonesia, we hope that Mendix continues to offer a free solution.

It's a very good solution. I'd rate it eight out of ten.

I used the solution to develop an application for a parking system. It manages everything from parking cards, payments, eGates, tickets, and more.

The most valuable features of the product are its ease of use and speed. My friend and I find it helpful as a team of just two developers.

One area for improvement is its integration capabilities. Creating a pluggable widget or integrating it with other systems is challenging.

In terms of features, it would be great to see advancements such as AI services and the integration of third-party services. Additionally, connecting external devices to the application requires multiple steps. Improving this will make it easier for the developers.

I have been using the solution for the past three years.

The product is stable and powerful.

The tool is scalable. We had a single application in development, and there were two developers with 15 end users.

Six or seven months ago, I interacted with the technical support team, but since then, they haven't reached out to me. I tried to get in touch with them by asking some questions, and they mentioned that someone would contact me, but unfortunately, no one has reached out yet.

I run my businesses and develop applications. My friends and I are a small group of developers. In the past, we worked with technologies like C# and React. However, we are now looking to take the next step using local platforms.

I switched to this solution because of its database handling. You can create and draw your structure. The UI has powerful microflow, workflow, and nanoflow capabilities. It has great speed. It is suitable for developers with varying levels of experience. You can achieve tasks with minimal coding. The CSS and paging capabilities are great.

The initial setup is not complex. The deployment process took two to three weeks.

I set up the solution on my own.

I would not recommend the solution to small and medium-sized businesses because it’s expensive. It’s great for big organizations. I rate the pricing as a three out of ten.

We have used React.js, JavaScript, C#, and Oracle Siebel. However, we strive to move to the next level for future projects.

Overall, I rate Mendix a six out of ten.

We're looking at the solution right now. We wanted to use it for mobile apps to implement workflows like e-services requests for users and backend approval for internal entities.

From a technical perspective, I can use Mendix to provide native mobile applications and an external web portal for external users. However, at this point, I haven't touched half the features on it.

It is easy to set up the product.

The solution is stable.

It can scale. 

Mendix Academy is quite helpful. 

The pricing is very clear, with no hidden fees. 

The product needs more connector integration with Microsoft products.

We'd like to be able to write in C Sharp to develop code for Mendix. However, that may be impossible. Still, we'd like to be able to modify the programming language. 

I've been using the solution for one month. I've just started using the product.

It is stable and reliable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten.

It is quite scalable. I'd rate the ability to expand eight out of ten. The connectors can enter various products in Microsoft, especially here in the Gulf.

I've only worked on a small project and therefore haven't had the need to reach out with technical support. 

The product does have Mendix Academy and that can be used to troubleshoot a lot of general issues. 

I'm also familiar with Microsoft. this product has a bit higher pricing in comparison; however, with Microsoft, you need some other components. Mendix is one easy price. 

The solution is very easy to set up the solution. I'd rate the ease of setup nine out of ten. 

It hardly takes a minute to deploy. I can't speak for complicated projects however, since I have yet to be a part of one. As per my current experience, it's very fast and takes minutes or less. 

You only need one person to handle maintenance tasks once it is set up. 

We handled the solution setup in-house. 

The pricing is very clear. It's easy to understand licensing. There are no hidden fees. It might show higher pricing. However, you know exactly what you are getting. 

We likely will become a Mendix partner. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. It seems like a great product, even though I have only worked with it for one month. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of functionality. 

We are an implementation partner with Mendix. We build both custom projects and solutions. One of the solutions that we have provided to our customers is an MDM solution that we were planning to set up as a semi-product which allows for some customization with each customer.

Mendix is a platform. All the solutions that we build, we build in the Mendix platform. We started using Mendix in 2012, and we founded our company in 2013. We are a very experienced Mendix team.

We have two use cases. 

1. To build complete back-end solutions for smaller companies. They are complete back-end solutions and custom built for smaller companies.
2. It is for larger enterprises and more for the innovative, differentiating application. So, custom built or semi-custom built innovative, differentiating capabilities on top of ERP and legacy systems. 

Both use cases are a used, and we also built solutions in different companies. So, we have some smaller customers where we do the entire IT with Mendix. In addition, we have some very large customers (enterprise customers), where Mendix is the preferred local platform for all custom tools and innovative applications.

We built our organization around its capability, so we saw the opportunity of Mendix. We saw how Mendix in the market at that time struggled with the right commercial model. So, we built our organization around the platform's capabilities. We have two business units:

1. One unit does projects. That is the unit that does end-to-end projects for the customer. The customer, in this case, is the business who wants a cloud-based solution and doesn't care how it is done.
2. The other service that we provide is in the Netherlands. Many customers who are adopting their own Mendix, low code teams. They need help and support with this. We provide, in a consulting services capacity, our experience to help them build their team. 

We do two things on this level. Many customers start with projects and end up building their own team. This is our progress as we see it right now in the market, at least in the Netherlands, as there is a huge demand for these type of services. It is actually more difficult to find qualified personnel than find customers at this point.

1. The complete stack: You have a complete cloud operations, and everything is included. For every customer, wherever we go, we can provide a solution within a few days with a complete data environment in a very stable, high performance cloud. 
2. The development environment is model-driven. We really like this because we can use the information from this for our business engineers to make the information models, and they can also execute the model.
3. We do not need programmers anymore, so it is a small team of business engineers who design and build the application without us needing to program. That makes our teams four to six times more productive, but also a lot smaller with no overhead and very flexible. It is something, and not every Mendix partner does this. A lot of them have still use analysts and programmers in different roles, but we do not do this. I like that we use the platform on this level. We stick within the core of the platform, so we don't do anything with custom Java or custom JavaScript. 
   

Mendix is right now focusing on developer features while we would like to have more features for the information analyst. Mendix is not going this route because they clearly see the developer as their target group, while we like to see it as more of a tool for information analysts. 

What is lacking is the support of higher level modeling features, like the modeling you do is relatively low level, yet it is still close to programming. We would like to see a more business-oriented modeling environment, like BPMN. However, that is not the direction Mendix is going. We are developing our own intellectual property in this direction. Thus, we are building it ourselves.

Stability is very good. The modeling environment has been very predictable since Mendix 5. Between versions 4 and 5, there was a big problem with them. Since Mendix 5 and Mendix 7, it has been very predictable. Every month, there is a new release and it has stable functionality, although it is not only the functionality. If you look at the cloud environment, it is very stable, especially since Mendix cloud is now run on Amazon. It has always been click and go, but it is even more impressive what they can do now. 

Their current announcement that they also run a SAP Cloud and IBM Cloud makes it even more powerful. 

We are able to run very high performance applications on very small Mendix app containers. That is because we design our solutions to be high performance from a design point of view. We have not used the Mendix horizontal and vertical scaling options that they provide. Therefore, I am not an experienced user with scalability, but I do know that we can make already quite high performance applications with a single app containers and they can be scaled vertically and horizontally. 

Mendix is quite powerful. There are some limitations in Mendix. On the database level, there are still some layers between Mendix and the database. This means that some actions are not efficient, which might seem to be, and they have designed now a stateless architecture which also put some limitations of speed if you use a single instance. However, the stateless architecture allows you to spread horizontally your load. So, it has benefits and drawbacks. In general, it is good enough for what Mendix is supposed to be used for. There have not been any projects where we could not do them because of performance reasons.

We use technical support, for example, if there is a performance question, usually in the design phase. In the run time, we are so experienced in Mendix, having such high internal quality centers on what we want the applications to do when we stick within the core of the capabilities of Mendix, that we never contact support about this. In general, we are very infrequently calling support, maybe four times a year. So, we have some contact with support, but it is never about urgent issues. The experience that I have with that support is good, and usually the support engineers know what they are doing. So, no complaints about it.

Because we are an experienced partner, they know that question that we ask are relevant questions. I guess if you are an inexperienced user, and don't know how to ask questions to them, it could be different. However, we know exactly who to talk to and what to ask. As an experienced user, the experience might be different.

It is a little bit different because we have built our company around selling services from Mendix.

From a commercial point of view, we would like them to change that they currently sell it as a platform, but as a customer you have to decide upfront the usage of the platform. We would like to have Mendix sell it as a pay as you go model: You pay for what you use, and you don't pay for what you don't use. Mendix is currently refusing to do that, but their competition does not do it as well.

I understand that it is a risk for them. I told the commercial management about it, but there are several customers of ours who say, "We would like to adopt this platform, but we want to grow into the platform." Mendix does this, as they have a custom pricing if you buy the platform for multiple years, then you can get discounts in the first years to grow into the platform. However, I would really like them to have an Amazon model, where you can use it and pay per minute or hour, per user, etc. That is not available at this moment. I would like it, but their competition, like Salesforce, does not offer it either. Therefore, there is no real pressure on them to change.

1. When we found that we also had the option to choose OutSystems, we chose Mendix for the same reason I always advise my customers: the platforms. Mendix and OutSystems are basically the same, but there are some differences. The main difference for us was Mendix is a Dutch company and has a very large ecosystem of partners. So that there is something to choose from with healthy competition. 
2. Mendix has always been a more business-oriented platform than OutSystems. OutSystems is more targeted towards improving the developer productivity. Mendix is more about business IT alignment, and supporting the business. This is reflected in the functionality, and the way they build their solutions. Mendix is more like Apple. It is a one click, and everything worked, while OutSystems is more like Android. It is very competitive and great, but it has more technical capabilities and it is a little bit more complicated with too many features for business.

If you're looking for a model-driven low code platform, there are two worldwide leaders, like Mendix and OutSystems. You have some local products in the Netherlands, such as Betty Blocks, which are growing, but they are not as big as Mendix and OutSystems with national brand specific solutions. If you are looking for a global platform that is well established with the right reputation, Mendix and OutSystems are basically the ones to consider. If you are excluding model-driven as a criteria, then Salesforce is by far the largest. Salesforce is much larger than Mendix and OutSystems, but it is not model-driven. It depends whether you want model-driven or not.

Our shortlist was that it should be model-driven and provide all the infrastructure deployment, because we are not likely to hassle with the deployment, infrastructure, etc. Therefore, the main criteria were from a technical point of view:

• Is it model driven?
• Does it allow us to build like administrative applications based on databases?
• What does both the solution provider offer in terms of deployment options and what are all the systems which are available that we have to deploy ourselves? 
• Did we have to build our own cloud capabilities? We skipped this because it was too much work for us, and we did not want to build such an organization. Mendix provided us with the complete cloud, and we were happy with it.

The learning curve for an experienced software engineer or information analyst, it is quite steep. If you do not have any of these backgrounds, it will take you somewhere between five to eight months to master the platform. It depends on your experience in Java programming or database programming, if you will go fast. If you do have experience in making functional technical designs of software languages, like UML and BPMN, you will learn it quickly. Therefore, it depends on your track record.

If you want to see what it is capable of doing, you have to do a project with it, end-to-end and not just looking at the technology. 

• Do a project with the focus of learning, not the end result in mind, and learn from what you encounter. 
• Do a project, not a proof of concept, which does not help. It does not give you the insights you need. 
• Do a project, and it once you do the project, you have to do the second step, do multiple projects. If you have success with that, then go for platform. 
• Do a project, but start it with one end-to-end project, which should be small. It should not be too big, maybe between 20 to 50 business days of work. So, it is sort of manageable. If it fails, it does not cost you too much to do a project, that's what it magnifies. 
• If you have the resources to do a project with the two platforms, try them next to each other and see what the differences are.