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. 

We use Mendix for client projects in the retail, e-commerce, and banking industry.

My team has ten developers, and for one solution, we require three to five developers.

Mendix is useful for various industries, such as retail, e-commerce, and banking. For example, we're currently using the solution for a payment app for retail. It can also be used to create a mobile banking app.

Mendix is a low-code platform, which means that it allows us to build applications quickly and with less coding. It also has various pre-built components and integrations, which can speed up the development process.

Furthermore, one of my team members has Mendix certification and uses it for marketing and sales purposes. The team is learning about how Mendix can be used for queries, which are currently at an intermediate level. Additionally, I have completed 55 queries in Mendix.

I find the fast development speed and low cost to be very valuable features of Mendix. It's a smart solution for busy developers when we need to apply new changes or fixes quickly. Mendix helps to save time and meet project deadlines faster.

One thing I would like to improve is the support system offered by Mendix. It can sometimes take a while to get the help I need when I'm using Mendix.

I've been working with Mendix for a bit more than one year. We're using Mendix Eco System version.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I am satisfied with Mendix customer service and support. Although, sometimes, it takes a long time to respond.

Positive

We had Mendix support, with a cycle of five deployments per night. Setting up the infrastructure took us about a week the first time, but it became easier and quicker afterwards. When we deploy for the second time, it only takes a fraction of the time compared to the initial deployment.

We did not need any consistent support in deployment.

I would definitely recommend it to others who are looking to start using it. Mendix is a great platform to use. The calls in Mendix are currently of high quality, and there are even some free apps available. I have used it in my previous projects, and it has been a reliable tool for development.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Currently, we are testing this solution for application development.

You need experienced programmers and developers to understand this solution. We had a very experienced developer use the solution and they had difficulties, the training for developers could be better.

We have used the solution in the past 12 months.

The solution is stable.

We have tried to contact commercial support by phone and email but they never responded to any of our attempts. Their support is currently not good.

The solution was good in our tests but we could not get a hold of the company for further inquiries. This is the reason I gave such a low score below.

I rate Mendix a five out of ten.

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.

I have been using this solution for customer authentication, as well as scientific applications. It has performed brilliantly so far. 

It has quick response times.

It is a fast and agile solution. 

I would like it to help us be more productive.

Also, while the documentation is good, the development box could be better.

It is exceptional.

It is very good.

Mendix was the only solution that had a paradigm to allow us to do what we wanted to do with development.

It was straightforward.

I think the ROI is the:

• Skill 
• Execution 
• Vision

Developing applications that focus on the business instead of just focusing on the technology. And by doing to achieving a short time to market and quick ROI.

It gave the organizations I worked for the ability to create far more complex applications with a smaller team and in a shorter time frame. When we brought in external auditors they even confirmed the fact that what we build would take at least 50% more resources to develop in for example Java or .Net. Also, the fact that we don't have to take care of the basics during development, means we can focus on the actual business process and how to make the product work for the business.

• The speed and agility with which you can develop solutions with the Mendix platform
• It is possible to create the same applications that more traditional platforms offer in a fraction of the time
• You don't need to worry about the basics surrounding security, CRUD actions, integration, UX and many other things you need to create the same basics for when developing with traditional platforms

The document templates definitely need some love, they have been around for a while but no actual improvement have been done since they were released. At least not in terms of additional options like the web counterparts of the elements you have available have. Also, Mendix is even easy for non-developers to start developing apps with, however when the applications grows and gets more complex these type of users are not fully guided in making it as secure and performance as it should.

It would be great if the modeler could also start pointing in the right direction when it comes to that. Although Mendix did introduce the Mendix Application Quality Monitor which could help with this issue.

In the past, I encountered scalability issues that caused stability issues. Mendix can scale to multiple application servers but at the time it could not scale to more database servers, the only solution was, to add more resources to the single available database server.

I do believe that Mendix is trying to solve this with HP Helion and Cloud Foundry solutions which are horizontal and vertical scalable. I however haven't had any experience with these platforms in combination with Mendix yet.

In the past, I encountered scalability issues that caused stability issues. Mendix can scale to multiple application servers but at the time it could not scale to more database servers, the only solution was, to add more resources to the single available database server.

I do believe that Mendix is trying to solve this with HP Helion and Cloud Foundry solutions which are horizontal and vertical scalable. I however haven't had any experience with these platforms in combination with Mendix yet.

The level of direct customer service and technical support is great when you are a paying customer or a Mendix partner, if you are not the support is limited to the forum which is mostly run by community members, however even Mendix personnel will answer your questions.

So I would say it is alright. They have improved it a lot the last couple of years, and they continue to improve as their user base grows.

I've developed applications with numerous products combined or stand alone: PHP, ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript (jQuery, Prototype, Vanilla), CSS2/3 and HTML4/5.

However not a specific platform like Mendix, the major difference is as I mentioned before the fact that you can fully focus on business process development instead of all the basic stuff like login, CRUD, etc. That's why my primary platform to develop with is currently Mendix.

The initial setup is really easy all you need to do is create a Mendix account, create a project, fill in some basics for the project like the name, choose a base theme and then you are good to go. You will automatically get a sandbox environment connected to it, which is basically a free node in the cloud environment from Mendix to test and share your application with others. Using the Mendix Sprint environment you can also easily share the Mendix model with others to either develop or just review the application.

I've worked at employers that where both the vendor partner team and client which used a vendor partner, currently I'm working on a project in which I'm the third party expert hired to implement the solution. My advice would be to always hire a Mendix partner or freelancer with a couple of years experience before you take over development. Starting the project is easy but it still takes some experience to really set a solid foundry if you look at the architecture of your application. This is something that Mendix Customer Satisfaction Managers can guide any new client with.

The fact that your development resources can be greatly reduced compared to those platforms will give you a better ROI.

I have personally not been directly involved with pricing/licensing for any of the projects I worked on. However, judging based on experience, I can say that Mendix is not more expensive than any serious competitor solution.

Contact a Mendix partner or Mendix for an initial POC this can usually be done within a couple of days to see the power of the rapid development with the Mendix platform. If you are still not convinced or are a developer yourself check out the developer.mendix.com community and training options that are freely available to anyone that registers for free.

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.