Mendix Reviews

Built-in security, easy of use, support and available examples of how to use it.

The built-in security makes security-by-design from the start possible. The local modeler is easy to use. For the few occasions that I need support, after a beginner's fault, it's available, as is the cloud solution. The many available Mendix software examples make it possible to develop using of existing solutions.

I use it to learn how to program Mendix.

Indeed nothing is 100% perfect. But who am I to say what should be better? Nevertheless, I think Mendix is very strong if you want to store and retrieve something in a database. My personal experience with connecting the LoRa device (which itself is not fully developed yet, so the interface requirements are not fully known) is that it has been a hard job to get done. Be aware that I’m a Java developer so loading the encryption, hashing and decryption libraries was hard for me to find. On the other hand, interfacing with new Internet of Things (IoT) devices creates endless possibilities.

A half year.

It is very stable and there is 24/7 support.

No.

Very good support if you have a problem.

No.

Simple, and there is a free course which shows all the in and outs of how to use the modeler to design and develop a solution. It helps, but it's not necessary if you have Java experience, for those cases where you want to go further than the standard.

No.

Developing standardized programs even with a custom design interface is possible. Such easy Java interface possibilities make it possible for me to realize a secure, remote, two-way interface with a LoRa device, even with very little Java knowledge.

The primary use case is for agile development using low-code and no-code tools.

This solution has allowed us to reduce the time required for building applications.

The workflow and automation features are quite good and valuable.

Overall, integration with the enterprise ecosystem needs improvement.

I would like to see the inclusion of APIs that can help with the interoperability.

Stability is ok. It is a bit stable, but we are seeing an increase in workload complexity, so they'll have to figure out a scaler.

I think that right now, the scale-out is quite ok. It is scalable.

We have more than twenty users including developers, system handlers, business analysts, testers, and DevOps. The DevOps team is really what really takes it ahead.

In terms of usage, there is a lot of interest in low-code and no-code tools. There are even other tools like OutSystems and others. There are also automation tools, such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) tools. It is still an evolving market.

Technical support is quite okay, although as they expand they will probably have to increase their global support.

Before Mendix, we were looking at some open source solutions.

The initial setup was not too complex, but it took some time. I would say that it was mid-difficulty.

Our deployment took about four to six weeks, and then we used it for some of our application development builds. We took some of the agile projects and aligned them to that.

We used a system integrator for the implementation.

In terms of ROI, we have seen an approximate 30%-40% reduction in time that we require for building applications.

Initially, we started with a year for approximately $25,000, and if we need to expand the number of seats then we will increase it. There are no additional costs for us at the moment, but I think that if you need any professional services then they charge for them.

We evaluated OutSystems, Pega Platform, Google App Builder, and a few others.

This solution has good coverage, but I think that their roadmap still needs more features and functions. It also needs better integration with the current stack.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Mendix provides the big-picture to the detail and the detail to the big-picture and they do that well. The tool chain allows one to model the business in the easy-to-use Business Modeller, then to deploy the app server with the model, deploy the DB schema to the database and have it running with : One click. They wrap all of this detail, in a big picture platform by integrating everything into the software development life cycle that provides the techies with the detail of what to do next and the business owner with where things are and how long they will take. The most valuable feature is being fast without painting yourself into a corner.

Mendix has helped to dissolve the divide between “business” and “IT”, between business speak and technical jargon, between classical project management and disciplined agile delivery. It reduces friction to deliver projects iteratively and reduce time to market and helps change the organisational culture, if the culture is open to this. In short, Mendix has improved our ability to delight our customers.

We need better support for master data management, consuming corporate dictionaries and exporting the models to others. We also need better reporting and visualisation as this is a critical part of each app and currently the reporting side has to rely on external BI tools. Additionally, we need better support for quickly integrating with external data sources without writing code or reliance on ETL tools. A Mendix profiler will also help and lastly, a multi window business Modeller so that one can use the Modeller more productively on two monitors.

We've used it for six years, since 2010.

There are very rarely issues with the deployment.

We have had Mendix apps that were not maintained properly and left to tick over that were difficult to keep stable and upgrade due to large databases and insufficient resources : This is more due to a lack of engineering than anything related to Mendix. But because Mendix makes things easy, clients often feel like it does not require the same engineering disciplines and this sets up a client for deployment, stability and scalability issues.

Generally there have been no issues scaling. Keep in mind that Mendix runs on a RDBMS as its main persistent store and as such will scale with the data base. We find that the Mendix App server is only the bottle neck on tight loops over LOTS of data and when using dynamically calculated values. However, this is not typical use cases for Mendix and can be avoided by using microservices that do tight loop/ETL, simulation etc. work loads and leave complex business processes to Mendix.

At times when we hit a serious bug, Mendix has always been quick to respond and fix the issue. The user forums are active and Mendix staff is encouraged to provide answers. In general, quite good. Can always be better but in comparison to other large tech companies, they like to please and help.

We evaluated a number of tools that claimed to offer productivity platforms and model driven development. The success of Mendix is of course using it where it is strong. Mendix is not an BI or ETL tool and we rather use Mendix in collaboration with a number of tools like Blaze, Talend, YellowFin etc. Why Mendix? Its model driven approach is superior rather than a code generator as used by many other productivity platforms. This keeps you fast rather than being fast in the start of the project. A model driven approach makes it possible to focus on solving the problem at hand rather than tinkering with code that has to be maintained in three months.

Mendix is not a "RAD" tool and there really is nothing like it, similar tools have started appearing and the approach is catching on. Model Driven tools differ in philosophy and implementation and needs a different mind set to leverage optimally.

Mendix presents a deceptively simple environment that seems too shallow for many techies, but is not. It does present a completely different paradigm and team culture and to leverage Mendix a change in corporate culture might be required. From us and them, to a integrated innovative whole where technologists can focus on delivering value to the rhythm of business demands. Convincing classical techies might be a challenge and this often limits the success of implementations.

We started off by seeding our team culture the Mendix culture by working with them on a number of projects. Since then we have grown a number of teams for ourselves and our clients. Advice: Get a Mendix Engineer to seed the different culture and flourish from there, it will put your investment on a faster benefit-track. However, this is not required and growing organically might work depending on your lead Mendix engineers’ propensity to innovate, integrate and deliver business value.

ROI is dependent on the importance of a “fast time to market”. If a fast time to market is not a determinant, then write assembly or C, else Mendix might have a part to play.

Mendix can be expensive if you stare at the bottom line and compare it to traditional tech - which is flawed. Think big picture and time to market with a few bright resources rather than micromanagement and a army of developers and it might lead one to realise that saving a number of salaries, training, career building and hand holding might be a bigger saving than your average capex/opex watching manager can see. Mendix is negotiable on licensing and will try to make the project where possible.

We had a look at OutSystems, some open source initiatives and BPM tools.

Mendix requires adoption from the top and support for the teams that implement it to not be ham strung by IT. Do not approach Mendix like a “traditional” IT shop will : It requires a close integration with business, driven by Business for Business by IT rather than by IT for for business. It requires a model driven approach to solving problems that provides speed gains when describing solutions in its language rather than designing everything from scratch, think different, leverage models, accelerate delivery, speak business.

They have good attention to detail and keep things simple and clean.

The single most beneficial feature is the rapid development and prototyping of the product. I was able to construct real demoable software in a very short time and show the client. The technology is a no-brainer and allows me to focus on the business of the client over mastering or wrestling with the software. Not only do I create workable software, but due to the high-level nature of how logic is written (using Microflows akin to Business Processing Models), a business person can clearly understand the code itself.

Their attention to detail and resistance to feature bloat to maintain the platform’s elegance and simplicity drives the platform’s success in integrating business an IT. They have implemented the right features, like easy integration mechanisms, robust configurable security, database and client device portability, a project and team work portal and much more to deliver valuable solutions, fast.

During an implementation of a Rules Engine for Credit Risk and Loan Eligibility which integrates various Credit Bureaux data systems for online loan applications, we experienced some performance issues. We then broke out into four teams to find optimizations of which three teams were technical and one was business analysis. The team who came up with the best solution, was the business analysis team. Since they could understand the flow of logic in the microflows, they could reorganize certain calls and optimize the process to gain the few milliseconds we needed to bring the application inside it's non-functional performance requirements.

This example shows that something that used to be confined to hidden alleys of the IT department was solved by business people with knowledge of the business process : Mendix enables a frictionless interaction between the business and IT domains to produce integrated solutions rather than point optimisations.

Reporting isn't Mendix' strong suite. The Business Modeler is amazing for rapid application development but the Reporting lags behind. Mendix relies on third party products who specialize in reporting to supplement their product. Other areas where they could improve are already on the roadmap, for instance clustering and NoSQL databases. Generally speaking the community and R&D are on the ball when it comes to features that their client base desire.

I've used this product since 2010, that is six years.

Deployment is straightforward and very solid.

Stability is not a problem, although you might have to tune your environment for its use cases since the out-of-the-box configuration, like any app, is for general use cases, but there is no real problem here.

Scalability requires a bit more expertise but is not insurmountable, at least not for any of the products we have developed, which includes Big Data climate sensor systems, GIS, Risk Decisioning, Lead/Queue Management, Loan Origination/Loan Applications both online- and agent-based channels like phone/email/web/mobile etc.

Generally support is friendly, helpful and professional. There are two channels of support, the Forum and the Support Portal.

The community is very active over the Forums and included the participation of the Core R&D team.

The support portal does have a few minor problems but when you make Mendix aware of this, they strive to accommodate the pain-points. In no way do these pain-points prevent Mendix from finding a temporary workable solution. For instance, if I am unable to log a bug for a client because of an account restriction, they would log bugs on my behalf. After that communication is followed up on properly and I'm pretty happy with the process, except that their support portal is in the Netherlands, so there is a slight time difference if you are working in the Americas.

Mendix is a first-rate business modeling solution. We have evaluated other solutions which focus more on the technology and gives developers too much flexibility with which they could hang themselves. This sounds counter-intuitive, but in real fact Mendix is a modeling solution that evolves upward in the software evolutionary chain, in that it is business-centric instead of being tech-centric; you model instead of code. We've been stuck in the code-mode for decades. Modeling isn't a new concept but it is hard to craft a first-rate modeling solution which Mendix has done a great job at.

Using the modeler frees you from technological burden and gives you more space to focus on mastering the business of the client.

Setup is an easy wizard installation process. It is straightforward and downloads and installs missing dependencies like the Java Runtime and SDK.

We have done both in the past, but mostly it is done in-house. As the product matured over the past few years, we became completely independent of vendors, since everything required is well documented and supported. In cases of emergencies, a quick forum post is enough to fill missing gaps.

Despite high licensing costs, the time and cost of development is dramatically reduced. On average our timelines are in the range of five to 10 times faster than choosing a more traditional software approach. Licensing costs are on negotiation basis, and this works for countries with weaker currencies and global economic disadvantages, like countries in Africa.

Find people who are willing to try something different, people with a teachable attitude. Mendix is a paradigm-shift and might not appeal to ego-centric developers in their comfort zone who want under-the-hood control. Instead they should be business orientated, concerned with delivering working software fast and interacting with clients.

Mendix has a variety of usages, and its bottom line is to deliver a continuous integration system that will make your life easier during development, deployment, and testing of your apps. I primarily use it to develop large data systems and user-friendly applications that scale easily.

It's amazing that you can build web apps and mobile (hybrid) apps with one code base in a few clicks. It's a full continuous integration environment. Full focus on the business case needs and not on implementation.

Speeds up the development by a factor of several times over regular development.

Mendix has made a great deal of effort to provide its developers a healthy, modern environment for developing. First of all, it adopts Agile methodology by creating a SCRUM-based app where you can handle your user stories. Next comes version control, which really allows multiple team members to collaborate quite easily. And last but not least, Mendix modeler, which is your IDE for developing Mendix apps. Speed and rapid software development within Mendix is a breeze. We at Intonovi absolutely love it.

• Overview of model versioning control for the sake of the review process
• Better SCRUM board
• Provide an overview of model changes from the repository through Sprintr (SCRUM board)
• A choice between versioning control system would be nice

Most valuable is the fact that the Mendix platform provides all the tools for creating and deploying business applications in one complete package. You do not have to understand all the "nitty-gritty" technical details that lie underneath.

This allows for a developer like me, who is most interested in designing the process, to realize the technical solution from start to finish.

Since Mendix requires less deep technical knowledge, it allows more business and process minded developers to become really successful Mendix developers/consultants.

This allows for a different way of working in my organization, where there is no longer a gap between the business and technical oriented professionals.

Pricing: Development is free, but deploying applications in production requires a monthly fee, based on the amount of users.

This makes Mendix unfit for small businesses, since they can rarely afford high monthly costs. Also, Mendix cloud charges ridiculous monthly fees for data storage.

We have used this solution for four and a half years.

When the design of a solution is sub-optimal, the service can get very slow or crash because of too many database calls, or too big Java heap sizes.

There have been scalability issues. Think about scalability early on, so you don't have to refactor your design when you are already in production.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10. Support is usually quite fast and bug fixes are quickly realized for paying customers.

We did not use anything previously.

The setup is very straightforward. Download the right modeler and start building apps!

Think about the amount of simultaneously used logged-in users the app should support. The more business apps you decide to realize in Mendix, the cheaper it gets.

Also, think about where you want to host your app (Mendix cloud or on-premise) and compare prices, especially if you want to store a lot of data.

We didn't look at other solutions.

Make sure you have capable people working on your product who understand your needs and have enough experience.

It is a tool that, when used correctly, can make app development very easy.

However, it is still important to make the right design decisions in order to get a stable, performing app that is maintainable and knowledge transferable.

Being a device agnostic solution and responsive design support are most valuable.

To market time has been reduced as development time has come down a lot.

Seamless integration with legacy application is what I would like to see the most.

I started with v5.7 approximately two and a half years ago.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

We initially faced issues with complex web services, but now Mendix have evolved and fix most of the major issues with web services.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Initially the support was very good and quick, but now it is taking more time and needs a few follow ups.

I have not used a different solution similar to Mendix. I started using Mendix since my organization wanted it.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward. Just an exe to run. Also they provide good 18 Hrs training for you to get started with the product.

We use the cloud option only for implementation, but In-house cloud deployment is also supported. You can chose your deployment option based on your need and type of application. They also provide third party cloud support like AWS, HP Helion etc.

As far as I know, the licence is costly.

Mendix is a good option for people looking for fast deployment and Multiple device support with single code. But they need to check if the licence cost fits to their budget. Other than that no issues. I have seen large scale applications also running in Mendix.

The best feature is that you can create applications real fast. Forget large software teams. Alone or with small teams one can accomplice products in days that would take other software development teams months. Key features are that the product is flexible can connect with other applications using standards like SOAP, REST or OData.

We use Mendix as our software platform for building our HR solution. For each client of ours we buy a Mendix license so our clients can use our HR solution. Our product runs in the Mendix cloud.

Clients are at first amazed that product feedback gets realized in days while other with other software vendors, things only get realized after months or never at all. Bugs are solved most of the time the next day.

Creating better document templates would be nice. You can achieve what you want but not a speedy as you can do everything else.

Since 2010

Deploying to the Mendix cloud are painless. And there are a lot of new option if you want to host your model in a different environment like Clound Foundry etc.

It is stil software that as all software can still have bugs. But Mendix responds very well in that area. They have a stable release management so bugs get solved quickly.

We have had no issues scaling it to our needs. You can either scale by using multi tenancy or as we did use the same model for multple customers.

The customer support is awesome. Of course they need to be able to reproduce the bug, but they are very helpful.

The best part of Mendix is the user forum. There you get answers in hours. Only in the rare case that no answer will be given you need to contact the support desk, but most of the time Mendix will answer the question in the forum. The developers are also there to provide knowledge. Even with the most difficult technological questions they will give their view on how to solve your problem.

The Cordis platform was used before we got to know Mendix. Cordis was just a failure that did cost us a lot of money with no result.

Even if you do not know the platform at all you can learn to build Mendix applications in hours even with no program experience. It is better to have a good knowledge of your business processes than knowing how to program. That last part is easier learned than the other way around.

If you use the cloud setup implementation is a breeze. All our clients use the cloud based solution. We can bring a client live in a day if we want to.

Since the developer version is free you do not need to invest to start working with the modeler. You can even deploy to a free slot where you can demo to a client the sollution you made. So you only start paying after you closed your first deal with a customer.

For small companies the pricing can be a bit steep. The gap between the free version and a paid version is to big in my opinion.

In the university world model driven development has been talked about a lot but never realized its potential. Mendix is, in my opinion, the first product that realized the potential of model driven development. More products are are coming but for me Mendix still has the edge in this field.

Just download Mendix and start playing with it. If you run in to trouble post your question in the forum and just check the product yourself if it is something for you.