OutSystems Reviews

My company uses OutSystems for developing mobile applications and web applications.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a low-code tool with which it becomes very fast for users to create something and to show the creation to the customer much faster than any other technology.

In OutSystems, cloud management is an area of concern where improvements are required. Searching through the logs is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required in OutSystems.

I have been using OutSystems for half a year. My company has a partnership with OutSystems, and we have a lot of certified engineers.

OutSystems has some issues with stability. When OutSystems is used as an enterprise solution or has millions of users, then there are some stability problems with your stability. When millions of users use your application, the management of the databases and caching systems is sometimes not that efficient in OutSystems.

It is a scalable solution.

My company deals with small and medium-sized businesses.

The solution's technical support is good, especially owing to its documentation part. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of OutSystems is easy.

The solution can be deployed in a few hours.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. A user gets access to the user interface and some applications that you can install on Windows, making it a process that one person can do.

OutSystems is an expensive product. My company has to make monthly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution. I am unsure about how much my company spends towards the solution's costs, but its cost runs into thousands of euros. There are some additional costs towards which certain payments are to be made, considering that one needs to pay for the end user who uses the solution.

I know about the competitors of OutSystems. I didn't choose any of the competitors of OutSystems since it was a product that already existed in my company.

A person is required to maintain the solution.

If someone needs to show their customers really fast results of the development phase of an application, OutSystems is a very good solution that is expensive at the same time.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I have used it for a company in Saudi Arabia. The application was mainly focused on transportation. The other application is a recent upgrade.

I love OutSystems because, as a manager and someone who has experience with various traditional development technologies (approximately 20 technologies), it provides a standard approach. Unlike other companies where there is no development standard, with OutSystems, we have our own standard. This makes it easier when transitioning between developers or onboarding new team members.

It's not easy to master OutSystems within the first month. Even if you have ten years of experience, like me, it will take about two to three months to explore everything. For example, customizing a header or integrating a video is not easy. 

Many people assume that mastering OutSystems is as simple as drag and drop, but for specific tasks, you need someone with development experience, preferably a senior or expert with over five years of experience. 

Sometimes it requires both skills, someone who knows how to develop and add script code or extensions to our system. However, there are also times when it is easy. Let's say around seventy percent of the time; it's easy. Customizing the user interface, aside from the header, is relatively straightforward, although I did encounter difficulties with the header. 

Another example is working with live video, which is also not easy.

I have been using OutSystems for one year.

It is very stable. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

The scalability of OutSystems is not bad. I know someone who conducted a scalability test. They used SCC Solutions, a telecom company with a great team of developers. They encountered some issues compared to what OutSystems claimed. However, I believe you always need to have a package that can handle more users than OutSystems recommends. 

If they suggest an eight-gigahertz processor, you should go for a better specification. But overall, it's not a major problem. Just make sure to exceed the recommended specifications. OutSystems is widely used in many regions. It's extensively utilized in the UK and Australia, as I have experience working with these countries. However, in some countries, traffic and other factors can make it more challenging.

I did contact the customer service and support team, but they mostly provide general IT support.

I believe there is room for improvement in technical support. However, they are good and responsible in terms of providing documentation and guidance to help you.

I believe you would need someone who is already good in development or has a logical understanding of development. OutSystems has four layers: the timers and processes layer, the interface layer, the version layer, and the database layer. 

Sometimes, when you add a module from the first layer, it doesn't work because it needs to be compatible and supported by the OutSystems platform. Many components or modules from the first layer are often incomplete or non-functional when compared to the later layers. 

Therefore, you need to comprehend the logic and then integrate it. It's not always straightforward. There are challenges involved. 

If you don't have someone who is already skilled in development, most of the time, you won't succeed. I believe you need a certain level of intelligence to excel in OutSystems. You have to be intelligent, like in development. 

I've brought in many developers who weren't skilled in development and put them in our system. They excelled at all the traditional tasks but when I asked for any custom work, it took them around one month to finish.

The deployment process is very easy. It involves just one publish button. They call it the "one publish" button.

In our system, there are always many challenges in development. For example, you don't need an administrator or a developer because we have something called architecture AI. It can evaluate your application and determine if it follows the best practices or not. We already have a baseline of good practice cases or standards for our system, so we're not far from the best practices. There are certain things you can't do directly, like calling a server action. Instead, you need to use client actions. 

There are many perspectives like this that you need to consider. Otherwise, it won't work. For example, you can't simply drag and drop a client action inside a server action. 

I believe anyone would require about two to three months of training, and they would need to build their own application. The issue in our system is that sometimes developers are only skilled in either logic or UI. I think it's important to train people to be proficient in all aspects.

There is an annual cost of approximately 23k. So sometimes, you need to wait for a return on investment. It also requires skilled individuals who know how to utilize this technology and train others. Finding good developers isn't easy because most of the people who work with OutSystems come from Big Data or have multiple engineering backgrounds. We face difficulties in finding the right people, and I think this is a common issue across platforms. Nonetheless, I consider it a unique feature.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. I still believe in our system, despite some limitations in traditional development. There is always room for improvement. 

I think they are constantly making progress and adding new features. However, sometimes it's not easy to achieve customizations.

For some of the business processes, we want the process owners to be able to set up their own flow-throughs, process flows, workflows, etc. They don't need to have any kind of prior coding experience. They should be able to establish workflows for their respective processes by just dragging and dropping elements as part of self service without relying on IT (where possible).

OutSystems has really brought about citizen developers in my organization without any real coding experience to be able to develop their own work slows in their area of work.

The flow editor is the most valuable feature. It is simple and intuitive, and it can guide you step-by-step.

From an ecosystem perspective, it has a highly integrated flow editor, user interface, and data logic behind it. It has a very connected local ecosystem.

One of the biggest areas for improvement is that every time an existing data element is modified, it creates a new data element. It doesn't really modify that particular data element. So, a user has to follow an extra step of removing the existing data element and bringing in the new and modified data element that is being added, which sort of goes into negative productivity.

I have been using this solution for about four and a half years.

OutSystems' tech support is very good. They're fairly responsive.

It is one of the good solutions available in the market. I would rate OutSystems an eight out of 10.

I am using OutSystems in internal workflow processes for approving expenses.

The solution has helped us, but it's no longer a strategic choice for us. We are not investing anymore in this platform. We realized the value of using OutSystems if you have an internal development capability. We've been using the solution mostly in outsourcing for development tasks, and it doesn't make much sense to us, to pay the amount for the solution for the capital gains to go to the external provider we use for the development.

If I have a large team of developers, eventually using the solution would make sense. That's not the case. In my business model for IT, I do not have any internal development capability. I'd rather do it without a rapid development platform because the savings go to the provider. It doesn't go to me. I have to pay for the ticket and then I have to pay additional costs for the development. It doesn't make any sense. It is a good solution and technology, it only does not fit our use case.

The most valuable feature of OutSystems with discipline and the development processes. Instead of each developer doing tasks on their own with their own approach, et cetera, the solution would help bring some organization to the development process. 

I have been using OutSystems for approximately five years.

We did not experience a time when the solution did not perform, the solution is stable.

I rate the stability of OutSystems an eight out of ten.

The solution can scale. However, the catch is the pricing has become more and more expensive in the last few years. Consumption is increasing, and the price has increased a lot.

We have approximately 200 users using this solution in my company.

The support is not provided by OutSystems themselves. It's the service vendors, the integrators. There is a shortage of skilled workers that are knowledgeable of the tweaks of the platform and the shortcuts that can increase the productivity of using it.

We are using ServiceNow and it's depicted as a container for OutSystems. It's not the same, but it has the capability of doing some type of rapid development, and we are using it more and more.

The largest obstacle currently associated with OutSystems is its high cost and limited availability of skilled personnel. Despite being a rapid application development platform, having a highly skilled individual familiar with the platform can be much more beneficial than an inexperienced individual. Because there is a shortage of people with the necessary OutSystems skills, utilizing the platform can become expensive. This makes little sense, considering that a rapid application development platform should be accessible to the average person. However, having a highly skilled individual can greatly increase productivity, making the cost worthwhile.

I rate the initial setup of OutSystems a four out of ten.

I have not seen a return on investment using OutSystems.

OutSystems is expensive, and they changed the pricing model in the last couple of years.  It's changing too much and it's becoming unstable. They are constantly shifting their prices based on users, courses, and other factors.

To ensure that we will be able to benefit from leveraging internal development capability, I would suggest using a tool, such as OutSystems. With this solution, it is possible to increase the average productivity of the existing team of developers. Even a small increase of two to three percent can lead to significant gains. However, if there is a limited number of developers, it may be difficult to realize substantial productivity gains from using OutSystems.

I rate OutSystems a seven out of ten.

We use it to help our clients generate certificates. They needed an app to help them record and have data. It allows them to take the certificate number, check if it is authentic and if the equipment that the ticket number is issued against is working perfectly.

The drag-and-drop feature is very valuable.

The tutorials for the solution should be updated.

We have been using this solution for about a month and are currently using version 11.

The solution is stable and doesn't require many server resources, so I don't think there are stability issues. They have enterprise and have been around for a long time. Some of the tutorials we use were created in 2014, and we still use them.

The initial setup was straightforward. Once we registered, we installed it and were able to start work immediately. It took approximately 24 hours to set up.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by updating the tutorials available. I advise people considering the product to ensure they have their data somewhere to generate a certificate. Additionally, I advise them to do their own research. The application makes life easier.

My engagement with the solution was primarily as a private contractor for our banks. We were doing several RPA developments for banks. So they had some processes whereby they wanted to use a low-code approach. They wanted to create workflows out of that. That's what I was focusing on.

Their drag-and-drop functionality is amazing. Their visual layout designers tend to be way better than the ones that I've seen - even compared to something as simple to use as Power Apps.

It's easy to set up the solution.

The product is mostly stable. 

One of the things that they could do a little better is the performance speed of the UI refresh. It sometimes seems a little choppy, depending on what sort of machine power we have. I have a moderately powered machine, and I still found that the reload of the UI was not the most accurate, and I would have to reload the same page a couple of times to get the reflection of the right information. 

It's frustrating in that if you forget to refresh, you're showing somebody the wrong thing, and your bosses aren't happy with you.

The documentation needs to be more robust.

Their UI reach refresh rates could be perhaps better. There's a lot of heavy focus on the client being able to create, to refresh quickly. I don't know what that mechanism looks like for them. 

The integrations that have been created for automated testing, et cetera, should be a big area of improvement for them. If they could think about creating better integrations or opening up the integration space to get more hooks into more automated testing frameworks and platforms, it would be a nice little addition to their whole arsenal.

OutSystems has an opinionated approach to how it will save the data in the back and how it will create application architecture. So they have components, and they have the ability to break things into smaller pieces, however, if I was ever to try and take the system that OutSystems created and try and replicate and take that code base, for example, and put it into a .NET IDE, it doesn't work. Ever. That was sort of a bummer for me.

One of the things that I keep hearing from people is, "We are going to use low-code applications of platforms to create a very basic proof of concept," and that is where their inclusions end. However, to use that proof of concept of complex work, we need to go back to the Javas, and the .NETs, and the C++ of the world. The ability to get that code over and make it work in these different IDEs was not well thought through.

I've used the solution for a year and a half. 

Except for the issues around screen refreshes, its stability is okay. It's fine. It's comparable to PowerApps.  

I've also used Microsoft PowerApps.

Clients were also using UiPath.

The initial setup was straightforward, however, initially getting my feet wet, and kicking it off, can be difficult. The documentation at that moment in time was lacking. It was a very basic, here's how you do a hello world kind of thing, and everything else that followed those instructions were based on the same simple idea. If they could just start making the documentation a bit more realistic with real-world situations, they'll definitely be helping their clients a lot.

There isn't a lot of maintenance needed. There only needs to be one person maintaining the product.

My advice would be more for OutSystems. They need to make documentation foolproof. They need to make it easy enough for anyone to read and get it up and running. From OutSystems's point of view, they would prefer not to have people struggle for installations, so they should make it really super quick. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

It is kind of used for reactive and web applications. We're also working on the mobile applications as well. I use it in a banking environment. 

I've been onboarded there and then I'm just doing the activities for both internet banking as well as mobile banking, handling both servers as well as the front end.

Currently, this banking application can consist of both mobile as well as internet banking. We have it for eight different countries. For mobile, we have eight different applications, and for internet banking, it is a single application, however, it'll support eight entities in eight countries including Bahrain, the UK, Iraq, et cetera.

Normally we use it in a banking setup. Usually, transfer payment and then the benefits pay gateway, are those kinds of integrations we are doing currently for mobile. The onboarding process we do, the login for that process, et cetera, offer good features. 

We have one feature called multiple payments where we're able to select multiple beneficiaries and we're able to create ad hoc beneficiaries. Ad hoc beneficiaries mean there's no need to add the benefits directly. We can enter the beneficiary upon the number and we can do the payment. We can add multiple beneficiaries in a single go and then we will do the validation. 

We have a back office application as well where we can configure based upon the user as well as based upon the segment. We can configure per day.

We're able to do transformations. We can do the validation before calling the API. Once validation is done, we will show the set of validation. Either it can be the OTP validation or it can be a token validation. Once that is done, we can call the final API, which calls the code banking system for doing the payments.

We've acquired a new bank and would like to integrate e-services into the offering. We'd like to be able to have an option for doing an activation directly from the internet banking area so that there is no need to contact the bank directly. Having e-services capabilities would be ideal. 

There are a lot of enhancements and new features coming.

Currently, in mobile applications, we don't have push notifications. We're hoping that will come in the new release. 

I've been using the solution for 3.5 years. 

It's stable enough. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. If I want to do any changes or anything, it has a one-click publish. There's no need to re-upload anything. We make changes, we expand, and it is a one-click deployment.

Currently, in Bahrain alone, there are 40,000 users on the app. We have the same for other countries as well. We have deployed more production for three entities - Bahrain, Egypt, and the UK. Currently, for the other three entities, it is in progress. We are planning to move those changes at the end of September.

We can add users as necessary. In LifeTime, we're able to handle user management. We're able to create a set of users and we can assign roles. It can be an admin role, like full control where it's able to do publishing, feedbacking, everything. We can receive a set of users and control access to certain areas. 

Technical support is very good. If there is any production issue or anything, we can raise the ticket and they're immediately helping. If there are any deployment changes that get affected, it means we have control of all directions also. Therefore, we can manage everything properly, without any effect, actually. Everything is completely handed down to OutSystems and it is more stable. If any deployment causes us an issue we can revert back to the older version and it'll work fine.

Before that, I used a server platform called Forti. It is similar to the OutSystems Platform. We were able to use mobile and web publications and able to create using that.

I worked on an AD platform as well. 

Comparatively, I'm able to see OutSystems is very easy to maintain and easily fulfills the business requirements. 

The deployment and process depends upon the model we are selecting. Normally consider if we are selecting big models, it'll take around 30 to 40 minutes for making a deployment to set up 15 applications. For example, if it is a mobile application, it means if we can select only the application, it will take a maximum of five to ten minutes for creating the solution and deploying in the UIT of production. For internet banking, we use Windows authentication, ID logins. For mobile banking, we used third-party APIs. We used common plugins for the camera location and everything. We integrated with Apple, Google, and Apple Wallet also.

Everything is completely handled in OutSystems, so we have a LifeTime available in OutSystems. Previously, we don't have LifeTime so we manually exported the solution and we deployed it in the UIT. With the help of LifeTime, we're able to see the versions and the differences. We can select the proper particular application and we can do the deployment. It is easy to maintain and easy to deploy as well.

For doing the deployments, any changes, are completely handled on our side.

I'm not sure how the licensing is set up. I don't handle that aspect.

However, I am able to see it s very costly as compared to other platforms. That said, we see the benefit of paying so much. They provide a lot of options. 

While we use version 11.10.20 for service, the service center for LifeTime is 11.0. Currently, we need to upgrade that. The upgrade plan is in progress. We have had to start recently.

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I would rate it eight out of ten.

Our use case is mainly for the manual control systems.

There are about 20 developers using this solution in my company.

The scratch coding is useful. The solution is easy to understand.

React is very easy to use for an experienced software developer.

It's difficult to do the component version control. I would like them to add more studying materials.

I have been using this solution for about six months.

Some systems have over 1,000 end users. It's very stable for heavy duty operation.

It's scalable.

Technical support is good.

For one developer to use, the cost is around $5,000.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.