Pega Platform Reviews

Our company is the service provider for Pega BPM; we act as the IACs for three products from Pega. We recommend a product to our company's customers based on the requirement and their budget. 

If a customer is looking for a platform at the enterprise level, which comprises customer service, case management, BPM, and mobile features, our company recommends Pega BPM to them. 

When customers look for standalone applications, not at the enterprise level but a quick local platform they want to build some applications with, such as a leave management system or an attendance system, then we recommend other solutions than Pega. 

When an enterprise-level platform is required, which is Pro Code, our company recommends Comodo. If someone is looking for a case management platform to perform the BPM and native operations using native mobile apps but not the front-end processes, this is where our company will always recommend Comodo.  

The UI cannot be customized in the solution. 

I have been using Pega BPM for ten years. 

Our company is an Elite partner of Pega; there are only six to seven Elite partners of the vendor, which include TCS, Infosys, and Accenture. Thus, our company has a strong relationship with Pega, and we receive a response within an hour from the tech support team when an issue occurs. Our company's CEO was the technical director of Pega for fourteen years. 

For small and medium-scale requirements, the solution can be deployed within a week. But for large organizations the deployment time would vary depending on the requirement volume. The largest systems in Saudi Arabia are running on Pega. The solutions from the vendor handle the process of commercial registration, compliance metrics, investment management, citi management and integrations with IoT solutions. 

Pega is usually not recommended for developing small-scale applications; rather, Comodo or OutSystems can be used. Pega CRM is one of the most robust applications in the market, offering a private cloud, unlike Salesforce.

Some customers in the Middle Eastern countries, India, and other APAC countries don't want the cloud to be hosted outside their native countries. Vendors like Salesforce don't have a cloud server available in the Middle Eastern countries. Pega now offers integrated customer service, 360° customer view, and additional services as per customer needs. 

For one of our customers for Pega, their revenue escalated from 300 million a year to 600 million Saudi riyal in a quarter. There are multiple Pega licensing models, including outcome- and revenue-based licensing models. Financial institutions usually prefer Pega's revenue licensing model. 

For instance, a loan-based financial institute will have to pay X amount as the cost once they can cater one billion loans. As a thumb rule for price calculation, if you are availing a limited number of licenses for a small entity, it's going to cost you a dollar for each case or end-to-end workflow. 

From creating a Pega account to purchasing the solution, all the processes in between, including the KYC and customer role management process, are considered a single case. If there is a huge volume requirement of ten million cases in India, the same price will come down to 50 cents per case; with negotiation, it might also come down to 33 cents a case. 

Pega BPM and other solutions from the vendor are all low-code solutions. Especially in the Middle East and African markets, our company has noticed that they are more focused on front-end development; therefore, often, a customized UI is required, which cannot be implemented with Pega due to low code functionality and standard principles defined in the platform. But Pega BPM offers an integrated case flow and customer service, which contributes to the vendor becoming a world leader. 

There are AI-driven business process management features being incorporated in the solution. For instance, if you mention the vendor about your plan to develop a loan application, they build the entire case flow for you and make the application available within an extremely short span, after which the connectors and APIs need to be set up and integrated. Pega BPM is a highly advanced solution. 

At our company, we also evaluate if a customer actually needs Pega solutions before recommending it. For instance, if Pega is considered the Ferrari of the industry and the customer is willing to drive at a speed of 10 to 20 Km/h, then it's not worth the cost. For basic requirements, a customer can choose Comodo when only the BPM layer and custom UI are needed to build native mobile apps, while the workflow remains on Comodo. 

Pega is the leader in business process management solutions. Pega creates market trends across the globe. If you check Forrester or Gartner reports, Pega has always been rated as the top BPM solution provider. Other competitor companies learn from Pega and implement improvements in their products. Pega is not considered a front-end portal platform. The limitations of Pega are quite logical. The product owner of Pega mentioned that to build a low-code rapid development platform, it is mandatory to provide templates.

For example, in MS Word, you can use the numerous templates or start from a blank template. The templates in Pega are pre-defined; they cannot be customized; when starting from scratch in a solution, it won't be considered as a low-code solution. Pega needs to find a way to implement low code even with a blank template. Pega is working on a new product line called Constellation in which the aforementioned issue will probably get resolved. 

I would overall rate Pega BPM an eight out of ten. There are still some challenges with the front-end aspect of the solution, but the product is best when it comes to business processes and customer service management. 

The European and American customers of our company are more keen on the process flow rather than the application appearance at the front-end. But for customers who are focused on the front-end more than what's underneath the Pega product, it becomes very difficult to make them understand the value of Pega. I expect the vendor to implement improvements on the front-end. 

We primarily utilize it for automating a multitude of business operations, including finance, accounting, manufacturing, and product development. These processes play a crucial role in managing our day-to-day operations and we find that the automation provided by our use of this technology streamlines and simplifies these processes greatly.

The most valuable feature of Pega BPMI would be the academy courses, specifically the Product Development Network (PDN). Additionally, our organization has a dedicated Customer Engagement Team that we work closely with to achieve our goals.

The training aspect of Pega BPM requires significant enhancement. There should be more opportunities for third-party training and engaging events, such as hackathons where individuals can share their expertise. Additionally, the training structure itself should be more organized, as I have received feedback from my colleagues in the COE that the current training approach is overwhelming and requires excessive referencing to obtain accurate information. Another area for improvement would be the user experience with regard to RPA. Simplifying the IDA for citizen developers would make it easier for them to adopt the RPA tool.

I have been using Pega BPM for approximately five years.

I rate the stability of Pega BPM an eight out of ten.

I rate the scalability of Pega BPM a nine out of ten.

The setup of Pega BPM is not complex.

I rate the initial setup of Pega BPM a six out of ten.

I rate Pega BPM a seven out of ten.

In conducting our evaluations and comparisons between UiPath and Pega BPM, we found that both systems hold a comparable standing. Although, it is evident that UiPath outperforms in certain aspects such as user experience and ease of use in the development process. On the other hand, Pega BPM excels in addressing complex customization needs and offers more cost-effective solutions. Ultimately, our assessment concluded that both systems score equally in terms of their capabilities and effectiveness.

UiPath is best suited for smaller-sized companies. Pega BPM is better suited for large-sized businesses. 

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Pega BPM a seven out of ten.

We use the solution basically to run any custom process that the client wants to have, or needs to run their business on. For example, the approval process or any kind of business process that can be run using the Pega Platform.

It's low code. That is very useful. A business value architect will have zero coding to do, and he can create a business flow on top of that. The technical developer can handle further things. 

Apart from that, the kind of APIs that they support is also very nice. It also has a lot of APIs out of the box. It can directly connect to Fitbit, it can directly connect to Google Maps, et cetera. That API exposure is also a good thing. They are very easy and very reliable to use, the APIs.

The setup was simple. 

It's a stable solution.

The solution has very helpful technical support.

It can scale pretty well.

A few things I would like them to improve include, first of all, that they don't have any open-source learning platform. To learn Pega, you need to be a partner. If someone just wants to learn Pega for the sake of learning, they won't be able to do so as they don't give access to that.

I would like to have an integrated process mining capability inside Pega. It will be like an entire digital transformation thing then. You don't need two or three sources. Similar to Signavio. Signavio runs BPM, it does modeling, and it is having process mining as well. In Pega, we have modeling, we have RPA, and we have BPM, however, we don't have process mining right now.

I've been using the solution for three years.

It's quite stable. This means we haven't encountered any issues. And even if there are issues, their support is very responsive.

The product is quite scalable as it's a low-code platform. 

The solution adjusts well to different devices. They have this adaptation that if you open it on a tablet, then the screen will adjust accordingly. If you open it on a PC, the screen adjusts it accordingly in Pega. Android as well.

There are more than 25,000 people on the solution.

We've worked with technical support in the past. Whenever there's downtime or whenever something is not working, we need to get in touch with the Pega technical team.

Neutral

I'm also aware of Appian. Even if Pega says that it's a low-code platform, when I compare it to Appian, Appian is more low code when compared to Pega.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. 

You need to pay for licensing. It was quite expensive. I'd rate it four and a half out of five in terms of how expensive it is. 

My organization is a service provider for Pega. We're implementation partners. If we use it completely depends on what the client wants and needs.

If you are using it for the first time, you probably should have a consulted implementation partner as well. That said, it is easy to use. It shouldn't be a problem. It's very flexible.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. We generally don't encounter any issues as far as Pega is concerned. Whenever there's an issue, there's a quick resolution. 

The solution is basically a quoting application. When insurance brokers or internal users have to call or do insurance quotes for commercial insurance, we use Pega. The insurance we cover is for outdoor coverage and for a casualty to property, as well as casualty insurance.

The solution's case management is its most valuable aspect. 

It's basically an open architecture based software, which means the main aim of the software is to provide a low-code application development environment. It has several authoring tools on the UI flow and makes sure that you can put in a lot of gadgets and create the screen very quickly using those gadgets.

Right now, it has a pretty good feature set. It has case management and BPM workflow as well as robotic automation. It has decisioning. It has chat and virtual assistant support, and we just implement it on the cloud, therefore it's a pretty robust feature set.

They use something called a unique model-based architecture. During development, where the database and the UI, everything comes from one single piece of architecture. Due to that sometimes the enterprise architecture teams do not like it due to the fact that it forces them to use just one piece of architecture. If these could be more modularized, then it can be easily deployable in different kinds of scenarios in organizations, it would be much better.

However, they are kind of tightly coupled and it's difficult to separate everything out. Still, I would say it is an improvement to consider for the future. Id they could decouple the various components so that it gives flexibility to enterprise architects to deploy what is most needed as part of their enterprise architecture strategy, rather than getting kind of, looking at the only way the product handles, it would be a stronger product.

They are currently spending some time on improving the product with respect to machine learning, especially related to robotic automation. They probably could be a little more adept on that area would help.

It's very difficult to change many things unless somebody puts in the time to figure everything out. However, Pega could learn from all the customer service calls they get and categorize them in order to do an automatic form-based or customer service based response. If they could set it up to everything automatically, then that would save a lot of time and headaches for companies and help them troubleshoot and work through issues faster.

We've been using the solution for almost ten years. We haven't used in the last 12 months too much, however.

We have found a few issues on the solution and we work closely with technical support to help fix them. While it is largely stable, we do find we need to keep up with problems and work closely with Pega directly to address and fix them when they arise.

In terms of scalability, provided you throw hardware at it and you do a proper production implementation approach and alignment strategy, it's scalable. 

You can go up to 2000 to 3000 users pretty easily. It's just that you need to throw a lot of hardware at it and make sure that you manage and create the web servers required. You need to create various pieces such as database servers and things like that, to make sure that you get the performance you need for those 2000, 3000 users.

The solution is being used continuously. I'm not sure about the increase in the usage, but at least it's serving the purpose as needed for the brokers.

It's a complex piece of software. For that reason, we did find some issues and I was kind of instrumental in working with Pega on their global support model. We had weekly calls to review. They have a process to track issues that are unique. Sometimes it's handled by their support network, and sometimes the issue is taken up to be dealt with by working on the next version. For us, triage calls are made every week.

The initial setup is never straightforward. It's always complex. Organizations deploying the solution will need a Pega admin and experts. It's not like anybody can just walk in and install it onto a PC. It needs a lot more performance concentrations and much more integration considerations. Therefore, it's a little complex.

In terms of deployment times, on-premise, it takes a little more time, and I would say it would take maybe about a month. However, now, cloud implementations are pretty quick and go much faster.

In terms of maintenance, we do need someone from the company to help us manage the solution.

We did solicit outside assistance for the implementation. We actually used both the Pega professional services in the beginning for a short time and then a subsequent implementation was done by an integrator.

There are multiple models. They have enterprise licenses for each server, for the product version. If you're doing it on-premise they also have per user basis on their cloud. 

It depends on what your specific need is. Those vary from customer to customer, depending on the number of users and the volume of business and things like that. There's no, set price, or a specific quote and everybody just follows it. It's more they work out the enterprise licensing agreements or per user basis with respect to each client.

I joined the company when those decisions were already made. I wasn't part of that decision. However, in a lot of places where I've consulted as a digital transformation consultant, we did definitely compare Pega with competition such as Appian and other BPM, and even Salesforce and other workflow systems as well.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Pega.

Pega BPM is definitely one of the topmost BPM packages out there. It hits all the right notes for a containerized implementation. The only thing you need to be careful is that you definitely need experts to help you along the way, in both the design and the requirements capture. They have an excellent requirements capture tool as well. However, if somebody needs to be trained on that, you need the help of experts, both on the software architecture as well as business architecture as well as the Pega admin. Eventually, these kinds of positions will either require a company to staff up or they will need to work with a system integrator. 

Most of the companies work with system integrators due to the fact that Pega professional services are definitely very expensive. Organizations will work with a company life Cognizant or Accenture or others to really help them out along the way.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Application development is very rapid. A lot of code gets reused while building the applications, which is something we highly appreciate. 

People are also very happy with the robotic process automation and the dashboards. They are very good.

Its implementation in the public sector was a bit complex. 

In terms of features, I have not come across any limitations in the last four or five years. I'm on the sales side. I work with customers, and my role involves reading a customer's mind and providing the best solution so that all pain areas are addressed. Pega has got very good features and tools. I didn't come across any limitation where a customer wanted something, and we were not able to provide that. Generally, whatever a customer demands, we are able to meet that demand. 

We have been using Pega since 2017 or 2018. It has been about four or five years.

Its stability is good.

I have not come across any scalability issues. The government customer has perpetual licenses. We are very populous in nature, and people come from the web as well from the mobile. They are able to process all those requests. I've not come across any issues.

Their support has been excellent because the person who heads the Pega practice is very senior. He was the sixth employee of Pega in the UK. He has an excellent relationship with the CEO, Mark Allison. Mark has been to our development centers because we have been expanding in the last three or four years. Our focus is banks. So, he has been visiting us. 

As an organization also, there has been tremendous support from Pega. We are a small but growing organization. We are not very big, but we are competing with the big brothers in the industry who have been there for over decades.

The finance part that people were doing was not too difficult. It was straightforward. However, when we implemented it in the public sector, it was a bit complex because of the disparities in the data structures and the maturity of the customer. They had different ERPs. So, it was a bit tough, but they appreciated it. We are a Commonwealth country. So, whatever works in India would work in any Commonwealth country. We have an education department here, and there are two categories: higher education and technical education. Based on merit and a lot of other parameters, such as caste, people have to be given subsidies, grants, and aid, which change with the political system. A new leader can announce that he wants to give laptops to all standard 12 students who have scored 90% marks. So, all such rules can be built very quickly. The SLA is for about five working days. We have to complete a new request in five working days. Most of the customers here want parallel development. Normally, we have six to eight teams working. Generally, we give a new Pega solution in about 100 days. After a solution is rolled out, we have a separate team with about 10 people, and they cater to 10 and 15 customers.

There is a team that looks into its cost. When it comes to licenses, we don't get involved with selling the licenses. We insist that Pega sells the licenses directly to the customer. This is the model we work with. We make money only through our implementation.

The licensing is on a yearly basis. Because of our special relationship, all the training certifications are free of cost. All our employees can do Pega certifications at zero cost. It is all on Pega.

We have a small team based out of London, UK. We have Pega and Appian. We don't have anything else. It is a very small team, and we only cater to financial institutions. We are trying to acquire a few Pega customers in the Middle East from the UK.

I am based out of India, Bangalore, and in India, Pega is just coming in. There are not many installations in the government as well as enterprise sectors. There is a private sector bank that is trying to move to BPM. They have not yet made a decision about what they want to procure, but they have been talking to Appian and Pega teams.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. We have had a beautiful experience with them.

The rule engines work well.

It is a stable product.

The solution could be more scalable. 

It has some DevOps limitations.

The product could be more robust and faster compared to what they have right now.

Pega is also stable. It is also an old product. They have DevOps limitations if we compare it with Appian. That said, from the tool perspective, Pega is stable and reliable.

It is not as scalable, as, for example, Appian. However, I don't have extensive knowledge and therefore can't speak widely on the scaling process. 

I've never contacted technical support. I'm not sure if they are helpful and responsive. I've never talked directly with them. 

I've also used Appian.

I have limited experience with Pega. I don't have extensive knowledge about the Pega, however, there are a few things, which may be the reason to prefer Appian over the Pega. The engines, the rule engines, internally, on Appian or Pega work. However, in terms of how they process your request Appian is more scalable and more robust.

The setup is also good. It also provides the cloud, so it's not an issue from that perspective. I did not use it very extensively, however, they do have a cloud, so it's fine in terms of implementation.

I can't speak about the exact costs. I don't deal with that aspect of the solution. 

I don't have that much experience on the Pega, however, from what I have experienced, there's a little bit more that can be offered. I'd rate it a six out of ten.

We have two different projects right now using Pega BPM. In one we are doing a migration of applications regarding claims, and the process requires orchestration between different providers that this company needs to organize the work. When you have a claim and you need a repair for something, we need to organize the work that we send to the provider. One, for example, is doing water claims. Another one could be about car claims. These are our main processes right now for Pega BPM. 

The other project is regarding onboarding customers in a bank. We use Pega to orchestrate the different aspects we need to complete the onboarding for our customer.

One project is on-premise and another one is on cloud, but we started using the Pega cloud and right now we are migrating to Azure Cloud,

Yes it has improved the KPIs. For example, in the insurance project, the time required to complete the project with Appian was around a month and now with Pega it is around two weeks. We still have a lot that is manual, but we reduced the time of the process.

The best part of Pega, for me, is that they let you reuse a lot of the aspects in the product.

The main problem with Pega is that it is quite complex, so it is very difficult for the developer to learn. Sometimes it is like a black box where you can't develop other things. When you try to modify something on the product it is quite difficult. Also, when new people try to learn how to develop in Pega, it is quite difficult to learn, and it's a big product. I think that is the problem.

Maybe they could try to make an easier implementation. I don't know how. Maybe with more information on the Pega platform, in the Pega academy, or modifying the application to make it easier to implement. 

I started using Pega BPM 11 years ago.

Pega BPM is stable.

Pega BPM is more scalable than Appian. We can have more processes running, more data in the server, and the performance is better.

Both of our projects are in production right now, but in one of them the customer will require around 3,000 users. With the other project it will be around 300 people.

Right now, there are two or three people running this kind of project, so we will need more people for that.

The plan for Pega in both projects is to continue for around five years more - so we have a lot of work there.

We don't have too many problems. It's true that we have more ticket service requests with Pega, but they answer quickly, so I think that is good.

In one of our projects, we previously used an application called .NET by Microsoft and the solution was so slow. Well, I think it was created 20 years ago so the modification on that application was too slow because the code is much longer and you have to read more lines of code so it was not easy to modify the processes on that application. It was for that reason that we tended towards Pega, looking for more agility on the modifications and giving control to the business people to modify different business rules for themselves.

The initial setup is complex.

When you are doing a project in Pega, it is more complex than the processes that you are normally going to implement. When the product is complex to learn it's more complex to develop.

The deployment time is not too much. It is about the same as with Appian when you have the configuration down, no more than one or two hours.

Normally when we use Pega we are thinking about a more global application that you can use in different countries or for different areas.

It requires a Pega architect from the company.

The pricing with Pega BPM is a huge problem because it is quite expensive for the Spanish customers. It is higher than other BPMs.

My advice to anyone considering Pega BPM is that they have to think about that they want to do on it because not everything is possible. It is similar to Appian, so really think what you want do you in Pega. If you are thinking about moving an application towards innovation on Pega, it's not a big solution to do it. If you're thinking about something more, it's a good product. Don't spend money on that because Pega is more expensive than other products.

The main lessons regarding Pega are that you need people who know how to use it because it is a complex product. If you create the application from the beginning, you are going to need a lead system architect to do it, because if you don't do it correctly, the use and the good points that Pega has could be an issue for you. The main point here is that you need people who know Pega really well in your team.

As a product I have to say that I think Pega BPM is the best right now, and the only problem that we have with Pega is the people. So if I focus only on the product, on a scale of one to ten, I have to say Pega is a nine.

The product is so good. The only problem is that the people who work on it need more knowledge.

I help clients do digital transformations, so I've been consulting with CIOs, C-level executives, to implement solutions around Pega BPM. One example is for a commercial insurance company, it is a quoting system for their brokers. For a retail management company, it could be something like their human resources onboarding system.

It cuts down the time taken for coding. Earlier it used take for us four hours to do a particular code. Now this can be done in less than 30 minutes. That's the kind of productivity gains you can get.

I think it is the user interface and the ease of developing the workflow for an application. It has a lot of gadgets to just plug and play, and that cuts down your development time quite a bit.

The biggest thing I have seen is when going from one version to another and upgrading to the latest version, it takes a pretty long time for an organization to go through an upgrade process. I think that's an area where they can make it a little smoother.

Also they need to come up with licensing options. Right now they do have a cloud-based option, but the cloud prices I've seen are much more expensive compared to competing products.

Yes, we did in the sense there have been some performance scalability issues. Suppose you want to add more users. You go from, say, 800 users to 1,500 users, and sometimes that creates issues for which there is no clear explanation. To fix it you have to escalate it with customer service and sometimes the response is not up to the mark in resolving those issues.

It is scalable, but it also interacts with a lot of other systems. I think they thought that the interface to other systems, legacy systems, was its strength, but when problems do occur, quickly diagnosing those problems has been a challenge.

On a scale of one to 10 I would give them a seven. They're fairly knowledgeable and if they've seen a problem somewhere else, they have a knowledge base and they send out solutions. But if they haven't encountered a problem, if it's unique for a particular customer's situation, sometimes it's very hard for them to provide a solution. They say, "Hey, we will take care of this in our next version upgrade." For that you have to wait for a long time.

I was working with various other products like Savvion BPM and IBM VPN. Because some of the customer situations, we switched them from those applications to Pega, and I think customers have been happy with it.

There are two options. If you are doing on-premise, it's a little complicated because you need an admin-type person who can help with the installation. But if it is cloud-based, then it is easy. It's all done in the Pega cloud and you just have to get the user ID and password and you are in business.

It depends on which option the customer goes for. It is definitely complicated if it's on-premise.

They have both on-premise and cloud licensing. If you are a small to medium company, go for the cloud option because that eliminates a lot of the setting up of your DevTest and performance environments, multiple environments, because you can buy that from Pega with the cloud option. So your setup time really goes down.

If you're a large company, then you're better off putting it within your company. You have other skill resources within your company to create environments. Large companies have an option of either going for cloud or for on-premise.

We evaluated IBM BPM and Appian.

You really need to know how you are going to use this product. Is it for customer service? Is it for marketing? Is it for robotic automation? Is it for other things? You also need to work with your business partners to clearly define the processes a user goes through to achieve the desired end result. So you have to do some "pre-work" before you buy this product or before you install this product. Licenses are expensive. You cannot start the process after you buy because then you are wasting the license dollars. If you are using this product for business process management be aware that organizations a long time to make changes to those processes. You have to initiate those changes early so that you can take full advantage of this product.

I rate it nine out of 10 overall. I feel that they should consider making the licensing more flexible and more economical. The second issue is upgrades. They have to work on them to make them smoother.