OutSystems Reviews

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.

OutSystems could improve by being more like GitHub. It would be more helpful for us for division management and version control for our application.

I have been using OutSystems for approximately five years.

The scalability of OutSystems is very good, it scales automatically very useful for us.

We are satisfied with the support but it could be better. We are the product provider and sometimes we contact the support for our customers and we have to escalate our issue most of the time for the correct answer.

I rate the support from OutSystems a four out of five.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate OutSystems a nine out of ten.

One thing I like about OutSystems is that there's no lock-in. You can keep running your applications because it's on .NET and hosted centrally. That's one of the advantages I see there in terms of not having an IT strategy that has a dependency on a particular platform.

The integration points need to be increased. People have also started to adopt this solution for their regular needs. That means it's not only the big enterprises that are adopting this solution. There are also small and medium enterprises that are adopting it. 

I've read that where you have large deployments, OutSystems starts to crumble a bit. That is the idea that no customer would know at the beginning and would also not like to hit the wall there. When it is on the client, there are a lot of applications already on low-code, and then suddenly you realize that you want to do some big applications, and you face hurdles. This is the general feedback for all such platforms.

We have been there with OutSystems for two and a half years to three years now. 

Stability could be from multiple perspectives. From an enterprise perspective, it is the stability of the company. For example, most of the enterprise ERPs are SAP, so I don't have to check twice if a product is okay. 

It's the IT strategy a company is taking, which is effectively what they're going to do for the next five years. They're going to onboard a lot of applications onto this platform. So stability-wise, of course, the scale of the company is not so big, whereas large enterprises could say that it's stable as an organization.

Coming to the other part of the stability which is at the platform-stability level, I think that the features and the support that they provide are quite good, and because it is horizontally scalable, so it doesn't matter there.

It has good scalability in terms of the target platforms, multi-tenancy, or hosting on multiple clouds.

My team has been interacting with technical support and their feedback is good. Their training is good. I think OutSystems provides one of the best trainings out of all similar platforms.

The development environment is quite easy. You install it out of the box, and it works. It's a one-click install there. I have not been involved with Enterprise setup, so I do not have any comments on that.

We primarily suggest the IT and OutSystems work together for the setup.

If I talk about enterprise-level implementation, we work very closely with Siemens, which is where Mendix comes from. We are partners with Siemens, and that's where it helps us in developing applications on Mendix because we get good community support there. I'm not sure how things are otherwise. 

For OutSystems, it is more of community support and a kind of library they have, in terms of the reference implementation of libraries, which can be applied.

For the industrial and enterprise nature of work, that is, for B2B scenarios, Mendix fares well. OutSystems might have a slight advantage for B2C scenarios. I would say that they are equivalent in most of the aspects. There are certain features that Mendix provides which OutSystems does not provide. Similarly, there are areas where OutSystems fares good but Mendix does not. I would rate Mendix and OutSystems the same. 

The initial adoption of Microsoft PowerApps is a little bit of a hurdle. If that's overcome, then other things would be reliant. When we talk about PowerApps, we talk about the whole Microsoft ecosystem, that is, Microsoft Flow, Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Power Automate, which effectively brings a lot of power in terms of an ecosystem. 

If I have to go with applications related to Microsoft Office 365, I might go for PowerApps. If I need external integrations and things, where they provide premium APIs and things, it becomes a little bit of a challenge. 

Development-wise, PowerApps could provide a free version. They always have but it's quite restricted. If you download OutSystems or Mendix, you could do anything with the free version. That's where, in terms of acceptance, PowerApps gets a little restrictive because you need a license to evaluate it. If it is not restricted, there'll be more adoption. Of course, you can restrict deployment, the size, and all that, but development capabilities should not be restricted.

The value proposition is not clearly visible out of these platforms as yet. Your penetration level will be decided based on if you are able to reach small and medium enterprises. If I compare something like Zoho with OutSystems, Zoho is getting good traction by purely focusing on the small and medium enterprises. These kinds of things could be game-changers in the future. 

That's where the licensing model becomes a little cryptic. Of course, for enterprise, it makes sense at certain times, and it does not at certain times. The licensing models are one of the things that could be improved there and changed in terms of adaptability.

OutSystems is quite a mature platform. OutSystems provides a lot of capabilities as such. However, it's not a one-size-fits-all kind of solution. Based on the needs, the platform that would be the most suitable one should be decided. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

We are a reseller and OutSystems is one of the products that we provide to our customers.

OutSystems allows you to do things really quickly.

This product requires very little maintenance, and it is easy to do as compared to traditional programming solutions.

The prices should be lower. It is a little bit too high for a small market.

I began working with OutSystems in 2014.

The stability of this product has been incredible. I would rate it a ten out of ten in this aspect.

We are in a small country and although this is a scalable product, that is not usually an issue for us.

The technical support is perfect.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

The pricing is an area that needs to be improved.

The subscription is billed on a yearly basis.

This is a product that I recommend for anybody who is digitalizing things. It's an incredible tool and you can do things very quickly. Certainly, you should look into it if you are going to implement any kind of application. Whether it is field service, internal applications, external websites, or something else that is related to the digitalization of processes, and where you have to interact with many systems for integration purposes, this is a good tool.

I would rate this solution a ten 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.

OutSystems is easy to use. 

I have been using OutSystems for six months.

OutSystems support is okay. 

Setting up OutSystems is easy. It take one or two hours. 

The price is okay. OutSystems isn't expensive. It's a mid-range solution.

I rate OutSystems nine out of 10. I recommend evaluating it as a POC first. If everything is okay, you can start.

I use OutSystems' platform to build mobile apps for our customers as well as good old-fashioned web applications.

Before using Outsystems to develop a client's reporting systems, the process would take six months to complete a report. After using Outsystems, and building a custom application, report-building is one click away - and it only took us three months to build the custom application using OutSystems.

For me, the most valuable feature is the flexibility the tools give us to change as customer requirements change, on the fly, when we are in a meeting. I also like how easy it is to deploy the code between environments and how easy it is to integrate OutSystems with other systems.

The latest version of the app generation tools could be more user-friendly.

You can have your solution on the cloud or on-premise, it all depends how you develop your code. But from my 11 years experience, well-developed solutions don't have stability issues.

All platforms and languages have their limitations. If the solution is designed, from the beginning, to scale properly, there will be no problem at all with OutSystems. The way OutSytems works, it is not too hard to scale.

Technical support is good, always able to help.

Setup is not complex at all.

You should contact OutSystems for more details but my opinion is that it is not for small business budgets.

The conventional coding rules don't apply here. You need to have an open mind and let the platform take control from you at times.