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 use OutSystems in my company to develop web applications and mobile applications to be released by an insurance company.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it allows users to easily build applications.

I want OutSystems to provide some service that allows its users to see the overall features and components that the tool offers for projects, especially when you build many applications. It is hard to find the logic in OutSystems. From an improvement perspective, I want to be able to properly use logic in OutSystems.

I have experience with OutSystems. My company has a partnership with OutSystems.

It is a stable solution. I have not had any issues with bugs or the product breaking down.

I have experience with Mendix, PowerApps, and Power Automate. The UI and UX of OutSystems are better than Mendix. The UI of OutSystems is easy to understand.

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The solution can be deployed in a week or two.

It is not an expensive product, especially if you have access to more features and deal with more projects.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

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.

One of our clients is a union, like a labor union, and therefore they're using it to develop an engagement-type app, for member engagement applications.

Overall, it's a very nice solution.

The fact that you can run it on a lot of platforms is great. The client's goal is to create a mobile application that a lot of platforms, a lot of the old enterprise type platforms cannot do. The client wants to create something that you can put in every member's hand to engage with that member. The platform they were using before, for sure, cannot do that. This solution is very versatile in that sense.

There is literally a ton of stuff it can do. It's very flexible.

The scalability is very good.

The stability is great.

They have very good technical support.

You can run it on their cloud platform or you can run it on your own cloud platform. It's your choice where you run it. If you don't like their cloud, then you can go to somebody else's cloud and run it there and they will install it on there for you.

The solution is costly.

The solution is still very new to me, and it's therefore hard for me to discuss missing features. I'm still learning and discovering.

I haven't been using the solution for that long. It's very new to me. It's likely been about two short months.

The stability is very good. I haven't run into any issues at all. The performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's great.

The solution is much better suited to enterprise-level organizations.

The product is definitely scalable. You can go from, for example, 10 users to a million users. It's just a matter of how much hardware you put behind it. Everything runs on the cloud. Therefore, you just keep throwing more memory, more disc space, more processing power, et cetera. It's not a problem.

Tech support is very good. They have online support and they have a support number as well that you can call. You can initiate a support case and they usually get back to you probably within three to four hours, maximum. They are very, very helpful and responsive. We are quite satisfied with the level of service.

I didn't do the setup myself. That was actually done by OutSystems. I can't speak to how easy or difficult the process is, or how long the deployment takes. I don't have any insights in that sense.

We had OutSystems handle the installation for us. We did not handle the process on our own.

The cost of the product is very high and would price out smaller organizations.

My client pays for the solution. Therefore, I have no visibility of the cost. I can't speak to the licensing or the pricing, or the terms of use.

We've also looked at Mendix and Vinyl. We looked at Gartner and compared them with this product.

I'm an external consultant. I have a few different clients. I have no relationship OutSystems directly.

I played a little bit with OutSystems. I have one of my other clients on an OutSystems user. I'm in the process of just learning. I am trying it out. I have a computer consultant that is helping me. There are certain things that I'm looking at, in general. 

The OutSystems platform is really nice, however, it's very expensive for small to medium-sized businesses. I have one customer that's an enterprise-sized organization that can afford OutSystems, however, there are a lot of my other clients that are not that large. Vinyl might be a better solution for them.

I'd recommend the solution, however, I would suggest those considering the solution to do their homework first. Look at Gartner and other opinions. Understand what you are getting into, and then decide.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

In the last months, OutSystems has become our primary development tool. Grendene is a huge producer of footwear and our development in OutSystems is supporting the construction of a large set of applications in these areas:

Factory and production-level systems (industrial apps)

There are already many applications built to provide information to our offices and for production control of factory processes, simulation, and machine setup. In addition to the already running analytics apps, we are in the process of integrating OutSystems with machines' programmable logic controllers (PLCs). We believe that OutSystems can support factory-level systems that respond quickly. Beginning with the less critical processes, we have already started to build web/mobile applications to be used on the assembly lines and loading docks in the distribution center.

Integration and ETL

There are many APIs built in OutSystems to provide process automation and information to internal and partner systems. An example is the Melissa branch website that is sustained by a third-party and the product profile is provided by OutSystems APIs. ETL architecture is also developed to synchronize data among some SQL databases and the company’s units. 

Business and ERP Apps

Apps for business and ERPs are a fast-growing set of applications developed in OutSystems, accessed within the ERP portal. New developments are made in OutSystems using the ERP’s database as the information source and connections to many other specialized systems.

Corporative Apps

In addition to the above, there are many office processes, human resources, and product development/design teams that use OutSystems. Our "Careers" website was built in OutSystems with a dynamic approach that allows the human resource team to create and upload their own pages as a self-service website builder.

In the 21st century, innovation is not easy without IT support. With this low-code platform, we deliver more quickly and it allows innovation to occur fast. It reduces the risks associated with functional changes and these can be produced rapidly to meet deadlines.

• Easy and low-code web/mobile development: Reduces the manual labor in compiling and deploying applications and generating procedural code (by reducing development bureaucracy/processes, resulting in real gains). The LifeTime Server approach, requiring just a few steps to publish applications in production environments, is fantastic.
• High reuse of components and business logic: Once built, web/mobile components can be reused in all new developments. In addition, the OutSystems Forge is very useful. We can exchange components and even already-built applications, reducing costs to build specific solutions.

• Build-logic becomes simple with a graphic interface: Developers work better with visual support. In a related vein, we are currently studying if, in the near future, an OutSystems environment could be provisioned to non-technical areas to allow them to construct their own applications (supervised by IT, and with good governance and security assessments).
• Stakeholder engagement and satisfaction: In the past, it was difficult to keep our clients (employees and partners) up to date on the development process. There were many promises of application delivery dates which were often not met. With OutSystems, we can develop and share progress and functionalities.
• Integration: With the SOAP and REST APIs and the database connections allowing communication with different data sources, it’s simple and quick to fulfill requirements which demand resources from multiple sources. In this way, the platform provides opportunities for innovative ideas. A simple example is to check transportation costs against rotes using maps and GPS technologies to measure accurate distances.

There are some features expected in the future that may speed up some processes. But there is a lack of development resources that need implementing. For example, OutSystems does not provide any native reporting resources. All reports must be created with other tools or as a webpage. 

Another issue is the asynchronous processing and multithreading tasks for which the current resources of the platform are very generic and not built for the end-user. Any asynchronous jobs have to be constructed with an end-user dashboard to allow inspection of the status of the activities.

We have basically not encountered any issues with stability. There was only one situation, when we first started using the environments, that a security policy conflicted with the installation of OutSystems or Microsoft IIS server. We had to gather a team to solve the problem by removing security baselines until we found the conflict and fixed it. At that time, it took four days to resolve this conflict. Since then, the servers have never had a single instability. 

As a very scalable solution, OutSystems does not provide an already-built infrastructure of modules. Companies should follow OutSystems tips on growing their environments using the concepts of Canvas Architecture.

Canvas Architecture is a very scalable, sustainable, and feasible approach. Companies should use these layouts, but not follow it to the letter. It should be changed according to the company's strategies, depending on the kind of applications they are developing. 

On the other hand, some effort should be made to regularly maintain the norms and standards of the environments. Even with good governance in software development, due to the power and agility of the platform, it is not too easy to keep track of the development team; hence, the importance of a periodic reviews and standard, documented processes.

Technical support is qualified and proactive but not very specialized. OutSystems always fixes all bug reports within the expected timeframe.

The team is very proactive. When we had that situation with the security baselines that conflicted with the platform, late at night Brazil time, I received a call from OutSystems support in Portugal right way, willing to help solve the problem. However, when it became more technical they helped only up to a certain point, and only our team could ultimately fix it.

I would give OutSystems support a six out of 10. I understand that a more specialized level of support (with software engineers) is needed sometimes when the operational team cannot resolve.

We did not use another low-code platform before, although many of the traditional development technologies were widely tested (Java, .NET/C#, OpenEdge, etc.). OutSystems was the first which provided a complete, easy, and effective platform.

We have been using OutSystems since the middle of 2016. In the implementation phase of OutSystems, we had formal training and hired a third-party (Sispro S/A) with years of experience in the technology, for consulting and to design our environment correctly.

The setup itself was straightforward. Our company chose a local installation of the platform server in virtualized machines, instead of on the cloud (there were internal reasons for this choice, such as the need for prompt responses in production systems, which are not achievable over the WAN network). The setup was very simple, however, due to our very high-security scope, some difficulties with security policies had to be overcome. I would recommend choosing the cloud platform whenever possible, as it is much simpler to start with.

OutSystems was open to a deal that worked for both sides. It’s not ethical to give more specifics about the pricing and licensing.

We evaluated many solutions in the market. Some companies in Brazil were visited with a view to finding a more agile solution for the development of applications. Among those solutions were Zoho and Tibco. However, OutSystems stood out.

We find in OutSystems a great platform that enables extraction of data from multiple sources, and working with business logic to access essential information and produce process-automation at the highest level.

We have future projects in mind to build factory production process with this technology. New developers were recently hired to support the industrial development team and they are being progressively coached in OutSystems development, using an internal training program to reach this goal.

We rate OutSystems an eight out of 10. It is the best platform we have found. However, it’s not perfect.

In terms of advice:

• When possible, use a cloud environment option rather than a local installation.
• Negotiate a suitable license with OutSystems, taking into account that the application objects grow quickly.
• Hire trainers and make sure the development team sets up a proper architecture. If you choose the wrong approach or do not plan appropriate architecture, in a short time you will certainly have a very large rework. 
• It is essential to build an appropriate Canvas.
• Sometimes, junior developers will perform better with OutSystems, since senior developers often do not adapt to the graphical structural programming. It is not a rule, but some resistance and difficulty of adaptation were noticed.
• A good practice is to hire an expert consulting company, for a couple weeks, which already uses OutSystems. They will help your development team with basic questions, increasing the pace of learning and making it more effective. 
• OutSystems has a set of metadata and any kind of control is possible, but these structures should be practiced with the developers.
• OutSystems Forge is a very useful place, when starting out, to download components to adapt to your needs.
• SQL Server is a good default database option for OutSystems. We have never had a problem with it. We recommend using only a single database catalog instead of many.
• Another suggestion is to plan an approach for the REST/SOAP APIs with more security implementations. As a default, it provides NTLM authentication or basic authentication to SOAP API and a custom strategy for REST. We have built a complete architecture with client authorization, IP control, and cryptography over the exposed services. The OutSystems User Provider module can be customized with the company’s default authentication method, however, it is quite simple to maintain the standard module and just push data into the Users and Roles tables. Otherwise, it will take some time to understand how everything works underneath.
• Finally, perhaps the most important tip is regarding development governance. Not only for OutSystems but for all types of development, it is very important to maintain normalized and standardized environments. In a chaotic scene with no effort to have periodic reviews, a low-code platform could create a huge mess and the cost will be paid in the near future.

We are a financial institution, and our primary credit solution is developed in OutSystems. We have several small apps, not for mobiles, but apps that are developed to support our core business, which is factoring and credit.

It is easy to use.

In my opinion, the support and the pricing could be better.

I have been working with OutSystems for seven or eight years.

OutSystems is a stable solution.

OutSystems is scalable.

In terms of the solution, we went through some minor escalations. It was simple to manage. We have also added some redundancy to our app server, which was simple to set up.

Our company is still small, with a staff of about 50 people. I believe ten of them are developers. They develop, operate, administrate all systems platforms and deployed applications. The remainder, are business units.

The SLA should be improved. The response time could be improved.

I can't say for certain that it was simple. It was simple for us. Because I have an experienced manager who manages our team, it was simple for him to set that up.

It took some time because we were building a core banking service system from scratch. What we did in OutSystems, aside from setting up all of the licenses and the platform itself, was that we had help because it was the early days of the company. OutSystems in Portugal assisted us with this. However, because the solution was created from scratch, it takes a long time to deploy it with the business solution.

I manage a development team that develops and maintains DevOps. Within that team of developers, I add one who leads the team that also handles all of the tool's administration.

I believe they are very strict with their pricing platforms, or the pricing policies, and it changes. They have changed it from software units to application objects in recent years, and now it's all free, but you pay for the users. 

I believe they should have a better scheme for companies like ours, which are small and could benefit from the platform without paying too much.

The fees are approximately €150,000, €170,000 per year, which is excessive for a company of our size.

We don't have any additional costs, but we did have, within this price we had some, I believe we have some agreements regarding accelerator, to be honest, I don't know off the top of my head.

They should have OutSystems support with the setup and structuring of the best pricing for the goal that they want to assign to the solutions. Because of the pricing, if you want to use OutSystems for self or internal solutions, it would be very different, but it could be very expensive if you want to develop things for the outside, which would require users and business management. I believe they should receive support directly from OutSystems or through a vendor. I'm not sure which is preferable. However, OutSystems support is required for installation.

I would rate OutSystems a seven 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.

The solution helps to build mobile and web applications on SOAP and REST. You can integrate it with backend systems by submitting a code.

The tool needs to improve the efficiency of its widgets.

I have been working with the solution since 2017.

The tool is very stable due to its strong architecture. The solution’s downtime is also very less. We have hardly had any issues. The product is able to route the traffic to another place if there are any issues.

The tool is scalable. It can accommodate changes in business requirements. My company has around 1000 users for the tool.

The product’s deployment is simple. The tool is a cloud solution. You need to setup an account and access its packages. You just need to download and install it.

The tool’s licensing is based on the user’s usage.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.