The tool's weakness is its focus on the solution only. Other than that, it's pretty easy to use for both technical and non-technical people. However, the tool lags in automation. For instance, we've used Python for scraping and other automated tasks. So, I believe automation is an area where it could improve.
While I can't speak to the market impact, as a developer, I've seen significant reductions in development time across different versions of our applications. One area for improvement would be the UI controls in Service Studio. Sometimes, controls don't appear in the IDE, requiring us to check them in the web browser instead. Overall, our experience with OutSystems has been positive, though improvements in UI development would be welcomed.
The solution's testing framework needs to be improved, and the workflow should be slightly more mature. The solution should use generative AI capabilities.
Project Manager at a program development consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Top 10
2024-02-16T04:19:14Z
Feb 16, 2024
I would like to see improvements in versioning. It can be challenging to keep track of what changes should be committed, especially when many developers are working in one environment. So, I would like to see support for different version models especially when multiple developers are working on the same module, it can be confusing to know which changes need to be deployed when comparing and merging codes. In future releases, A built-in chart feature would be useful. We had to use Google Charts plugin for dashboards. Native support for charts, like bar and pie charts, would be beneficial.
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.
OutSystems is already on the right track for improvements. They plan to transition from their cloud platform to a cloud-native architecture, emphasizing infrastructure scalability and the integration of Docker containers, which is a positive step forward. I would also like to see OutSystems improve its integration capabilities, especially with emerging technologies like AI and GPT. Integrating with AI and GPT models could enhance OutSystems' functionality and help it easily adapt to new trends and concepts in connectivity and artificial intelligence in future releases.
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.
Business Unit Head - Government Business at YASH Technologies
Real User
Top 10
2023-09-12T11:21:00Z
Sep 12, 2023
I'm genuinely content with the fact that all my goals and objectives have been successfully achieved in everything we've undertaken. As I mentioned previously, we found this especially valuable in terms of engagement for mobile apps. Surprisingly, we didn't encounter any notable challenges or areas where implementation was problematic. As a sales professional, I also received minimal customer feedback regarding any issues during meetings, which led me to believe that everything was going smoothly from a technical perspective. However, the initial setup can be made a little easier.
There are very few resources available to learn OutSystems. If someone is utterly new to OutSystems and is trying to understand this technology by searching on platforms like YouTube, Udemy and Coursera, they won't find anything. It has negligible resources. In the next release of OutSystems, I would like to see a few more customizations in the front end.
Areas of improvement include: * Offering workflow solutions * Adding event-driven architecture * Usage of PWA, Responsive, and SPA architecture for front-ends. * Better documentation and deployment tools. The packaging features need to be standardized using DevOps. * Vertical Tabs (there is a Vertical Tabs problem: Entities.Orientation) * Data Grid improvements and UI improvements * There are performance issues in table data using React * They need to make improvements in various UI assets. * There should be automation of logs * We have performance issues while fetching bulk data * Need integration with core systems and integration with Outlook email
I like the OutSystems platform. I am working on integrating it with another platform using APIs, however, it has proven to be difficult. The main issue I am facing is obtaining authorization tokens as well as access and refresh tokens. It may be due to my lack of knowledge of APIs as it is new to me. The documentation could improve. The reason I am having many problems with the APIs is that there is not a comprehensive piece of documentation that I can read that explains exactly how to do what I'm doing. I've tried the forum, I've tried the Forge, and downloading other components, trying to look at that. However, there isn't a good simple explanation of how to do it.
The solution is ground up, it follows exactly what the developer does. The product could be improved if there was a shortcut, or predefined, predictable templates provided. Infusing AI that would automate the process would be game-changing. On a logical level, if data on a form is automated, it would be great if when required, the developer can then go and look for it.
Director, Research & Advisory, Applications Development at Deloitte
Real User
2022-09-22T21:31:43Z
Sep 22, 2022
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.
The PDD framework can't be used for the behavioral-driven development way of working. They're working on improving that, but it's taking a long time. OutSystems also doesn't have branching, which means if there's a production issue, it's not so easy to fix.
Technical Lead at Netlink Software Group America Inc
Real User
2022-06-24T13:36:00Z
Jun 24, 2022
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.
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.
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.
Technology Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-01-25T15:57:56Z
Jan 25, 2021
We're still pretty new to OutSystems, though it has become apparent to us that, even though it's a so-called low-code platform, there are still some things that require a programmer. For example, you don't really need a lot of programming skill to work with OutSystems, but if you want to do something that's a bit more 'feature-ish', then you still need some programming experience. Since we first started using OutSystems, they switched their language support from Java and .NET to .NET only, which was a bit of a surprise. Their language support could be better in this sense, although on our resource side it is now a bit more flexible. On the whole, most of the features that we've required are all there. But there are some upcoming features that we are looking forward to. For example, the AI modules. They also have third-party vendors that produce different connectors, but I am hoping that OutSystems itself will start to create more innovative connectors or complementary solutions that we will find of use.
Head of Technology & Governance at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
2020-09-29T05:58:00Z
Sep 29, 2020
The biggest challenge for us is the licensing model and the cost of OutSystems. The apps that we are interested in have a very large user-base and OutSystems drastically ramps those costs up.
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.
Something that can be improved is that I would like them to be a little more flexible in the area of containerization. They're currently running on Docker on Windows, but I think they should also support Docker on Linus too. Needs a little more effort.
IT Application Developer at a hospitality company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
2018-05-23T10:30:00Z
May 23, 2018
* Writing custom code still needs to be done via Integration Studio. This might have been added to the IDE. * When shared extensions are updated, all the applications are redeployed. * Mobile apps should have been fully native.
System Analyst at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2018-05-17T07:35:00Z
May 17, 2018
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.
Associate Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2018-05-17T07:35:00Z
May 17, 2018
OutSystems is a great platform if used by those who are experienced. There are many tutorials available but they are very basic and good for learning the platform. To develop an enterprise-grade application, advanced tutorials need to be developed to help IT professionals design/develop high-quality/performance applications.
The integration Studio could be improved. It needs a tool in which we could develop C# code and then integrate into OutSystems. The application could have a better UI.
OutSystems is a platform for low-code application development that unites design, code, and deployment to simplify development so any business can create innovative solutions in a timely manner. There are various use cases an organization can employ with OutSystems, including:
Customer portals: Through OutSystems, companies can easily create customer portals and mobile applications and deploy them faster in comparison to manual coding. The platform offers businesses the opportunity to...
The product could benefit from improved connectors to integrate with outside platforms.
The tool's weakness is its focus on the solution only. Other than that, it's pretty easy to use for both technical and non-technical people. However, the tool lags in automation. For instance, we've used Python for scraping and other automated tasks. So, I believe automation is an area where it could improve.
I'd like to see AI features integrated into the solution.
While I can't speak to the market impact, as a developer, I've seen significant reductions in development time across different versions of our applications. One area for improvement would be the UI controls in Service Studio. Sometimes, controls don't appear in the IDE, requiring us to check them in the web browser instead. Overall, our experience with OutSystems has been positive, though improvements in UI development would be welcomed.
The solution's testing framework needs to be improved, and the workflow should be slightly more mature. The solution should use generative AI capabilities.
I would like to see improvements in versioning. It can be challenging to keep track of what changes should be committed, especially when many developers are working in one environment. So, I would like to see support for different version models especially when multiple developers are working on the same module, it can be confusing to know which changes need to be deployed when comparing and merging codes. In future releases, A built-in chart feature would be useful. We had to use Google Charts plugin for dashboards. Native support for charts, like bar and pie charts, would be beneficial.
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.
OutSystems is creating a new platform on the cloud called ODC. The new version could be improved.
OutSystems is already on the right track for improvements. They plan to transition from their cloud platform to a cloud-native architecture, emphasizing infrastructure scalability and the integration of Docker containers, which is a positive step forward. I would also like to see OutSystems improve its integration capabilities, especially with emerging technologies like AI and GPT. Integrating with AI and GPT models could enhance OutSystems' functionality and help it easily adapt to new trends and concepts in connectivity and artificial intelligence in future releases.
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'm genuinely content with the fact that all my goals and objectives have been successfully achieved in everything we've undertaken. As I mentioned previously, we found this especially valuable in terms of engagement for mobile apps. Surprisingly, we didn't encounter any notable challenges or areas where implementation was problematic. As a sales professional, I also received minimal customer feedback regarding any issues during meetings, which led me to believe that everything was going smoothly from a technical perspective. However, the initial setup can be made a little easier.
The solution's ability to create and run automated tasks could be better. They should include data extracting and handling tools in the next release.
I have difficulty in using several new features. Some of the product's features are tricky to use as well.
There are very few resources available to learn OutSystems. If someone is utterly new to OutSystems and is trying to understand this technology by searching on platforms like YouTube, Udemy and Coursera, they won't find anything. It has negligible resources. In the next release of OutSystems, I would like to see a few more customizations in the front end.
Areas of improvement include: * Offering workflow solutions * Adding event-driven architecture * Usage of PWA, Responsive, and SPA architecture for front-ends. * Better documentation and deployment tools. The packaging features need to be standardized using DevOps. * Vertical Tabs (there is a Vertical Tabs problem: Entities.Orientation) * Data Grid improvements and UI improvements * There are performance issues in table data using React * They need to make improvements in various UI assets. * There should be automation of logs * We have performance issues while fetching bulk data * Need integration with core systems and integration with Outlook email
The tool needs to improve the efficiency of its widgets.
I like the OutSystems platform. I am working on integrating it with another platform using APIs, however, it has proven to be difficult. The main issue I am facing is obtaining authorization tokens as well as access and refresh tokens. It may be due to my lack of knowledge of APIs as it is new to me. The documentation could improve. The reason I am having many problems with the APIs is that there is not a comprehensive piece of documentation that I can read that explains exactly how to do what I'm doing. I've tried the forum, I've tried the Forge, and downloading other components, trying to look at that. However, there isn't a good simple explanation of how to do it.
The dashboards in OutSystems could improve. There are a lot of tabs in the service center that can be confusing.
The solution is ground up, it follows exactly what the developer does. The product could be improved if there was a shortcut, or predefined, predictable templates provided. Infusing AI that would automate the process would be game-changing. On a logical level, if data on a form is automated, it would be great if when required, the developer can then go and look for it.
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.
The PDD framework can't be used for the behavioral-driven development way of working. They're working on improving that, but it's taking a long time. OutSystems also doesn't have branching, which means if there's a production issue, it's not so easy to fix.
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.
We'd like OutSystems to add stronger workflow-based automation similar to what Appian offers. It needs more workflow modeling and RPA features.
Technical support could be better, and out-of-the-box performance could be improved.
It's difficult to do the component version control. I would like them to add more studying materials.
OutSystems could improve by being more like GitHub. It would be more helpful for us for division management and version control for our application.
In my opinion, the support and the pricing could be better.
The prices should be lower. It is a little bit too high for a small market.
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.
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.
We're still pretty new to OutSystems, though it has become apparent to us that, even though it's a so-called low-code platform, there are still some things that require a programmer. For example, you don't really need a lot of programming skill to work with OutSystems, but if you want to do something that's a bit more 'feature-ish', then you still need some programming experience. Since we first started using OutSystems, they switched their language support from Java and .NET to .NET only, which was a bit of a surprise. Their language support could be better in this sense, although on our resource side it is now a bit more flexible. On the whole, most of the features that we've required are all there. But there are some upcoming features that we are looking forward to. For example, the AI modules. They also have third-party vendors that produce different connectors, but I am hoping that OutSystems itself will start to create more innovative connectors or complementary solutions that we will find of use.
The biggest challenge for us is the licensing model and the cost of OutSystems. The apps that we are interested in have a very large user-base and OutSystems drastically ramps those costs up.
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.
Something that can be improved is that I would like them to be a little more flexible in the area of containerization. They're currently running on Docker on Windows, but I think they should also support Docker on Linus too. Needs a little more effort.
* You need jQuery/CSS skills for customization of the GUI. * Reporting is very light. * No built-in BI.
* Writing custom code still needs to be done via Integration Studio. This might have been added to the IDE. * When shared extensions are updated, all the applications are redeployed. * Mobile apps should have been fully native.
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.
OutSystems is a great platform if used by those who are experienced. There are many tutorials available but they are very basic and good for learning the platform. To develop an enterprise-grade application, advanced tutorials need to be developed to help IT professionals design/develop high-quality/performance applications.
The latest version of the app generation tools could be more user-friendly.
The integration Studio could be improved. It needs a tool in which we could develop C# code and then integrate into OutSystems. The application could have a better UI.
Mobile apps need improvement.