OutSystems Reviews

As a cloud based program, Outsystems is definitely simple and easy to access from any location. It is relatively simple, and easy to use by anyone. It is good for businesses that need to manage process such as order processing, sales and marketing.

The pricing of the program is quite high that I hope the developers and tech team would consider reviewing.

Creating applications with such ease, modifying and republishing all the way to production has never been more easy.

The transparency on the ideas that are supposedly 'on their watchlist', I would like some more information/insight on this.

You don't need to be technically expert to work on this tool, its easy to learn, if you are logical & having development experience in any technology - all tutorials with practical implementation & study material are available online over the Outsystems Portal.
Easy to implement the responsive design with complex features using ready made template & tools available over the forge library.
Community with Outsystems experts is 24x7 is available to help you. You will always get best solutions through this community & expert advice's as well.
Development is fun with Outsystems, if you have ever worked in .Net or Java you can easily compare the features offered by this Tool like consuming & exposing API's, Integrating with Other systems, Asynchronous services like Timers to process the heavy job or large amount of data.
In terms of security, you don't need to take care mush about it, platform itself take care of most the things by simply enabling & disabling it at platform level.
In terms of performance, you can easily maintain the multi-tenant application with tons of records.
Flexible enough to customize and reuse.
Having the option to create your own component using .Net extensions and compile the same in your environment and use it in form of action/functions.
No need to have separate Dev-ops team, Outsytems provide the Lifetime Inbuilt tool to manage the release and deployment at single robust platform, also provide the concrete analytical report of production environment.

There are few restriction while using Outsystems Platform like you cannot play with systems entities or core platform components.
Sometimes, it become challenge to migrate data or application from one platform to Outsystems.
Performance & scaling can only be achieved only if you are expert in Outsystems otherwise it's difficult to achieve the bench mark for large application.

1) Learning curve is very quick - after watching the videos I was productive within two weeks.

2) DevOps is built-in - many developers never think about the additional issues and concerns related to deploying fixes and improvements to a working application. The DevOps capabilities of the Outsystems platform removes these concerns.

3) Extensibility is a huge issue with any platform and Outsystems delivers completely in this area. From the Forum components that are available to the ability to write your own extensions in .Net or Java, there is nothing you cannot do with the platform.

4) No lock-in - many enterprise customers are concerned with being committed to a platform 'forever'. The Outsystems no lock-in capability eliminates these concerns.

1) The built-in menu system is weak - while it's adequate for simple menus it can't do anything complicated. For example, implementing a Mega Menu type of menu is challenging though anything can be implemented with some work.

2) Outsystems is very receptive to ideas from the community but there's no way to know when/if those ideas will ever get implemented - some of the best ideas have been around for over 5 years with no feedback from Outsystems. A rough roadmap of what will be implemented in the future (with no guarantees) would help me plan work to take advantage of those features.

3) Pricing has been a sore point in the community for quite some time. While a base price is listed on their web site, the base price would rarely cover a full enterprise application. Also, pricing is geared to enterprise clients making it almost impossible to be used for small applications.

The Outsystems development environment it very easy to use for anyone with previous development experience as well as being a great place for those with little or no development experience to come up to speed quickly.
• Allows fast prototyping whilst keeping good consistency and a polished appearance
• Provides a good balance between continual deployment and traditional dev-qa-prod staging
• Enforces inter module dependency integrity
• Enabled good UI-Business-Data separation whilst still allowing for RAD
• Good merging and conflict detection when multiple devs are working within the same module
• Projects and applications are rock solid and stable once released
• Easy to bring non Outsystems developers up to speed
• Realy good certification and training material

• Priced at the high end and not cost effective for small scale development
• Shows some signs of instability in the publishing process with very large and complex projects
• On the PaaS version you are heavily restricted on access to the infrastructure and cannot get access to simple functions such as SQL replication or database maintenance options.
• Lack of skilled developers with pre existing Outsystems knowledge.

Is extreamly easy to: write or reuse code, integrate with different sort or services or platforms, develop a single mobile app and submit it to different platform stores, review Architecture and code best practices and.

Also, it has a wide learning portal in which you can find all the training courses COMPLETELY FREE. Because of that, is really easy to onboard rookie developers with not knowledge in Outsystems .

At the beginning, I did not feel very comfortable with Support team but, now, they got really better. We have a weekly meeting in which we can follow up all of our tickets and issues. The response time is very good.

In short, what I titled above. There is so much available to take advantage of from connectors, prebuilt integrations, screen design accelerators and even user feedback options. There's almost nothing I want that isn't already a part of Outsystems, and if there is I can use custom code integrations as well! I don't know if our team will ever have enough time or project to explore all Outsystems has to offer.

Some of the training was lacking for some advanced components at first (api creation, etc). That has improved with more training options, but also building more accelerators into the tool. (i.e. enter the url end point and it can automatically create functions and variables for you)

I want to talk about the platform!

Organizations spend millions of dollars trying to maintain information such as master data, application lists, component usage (jQuery) etc., or the developers and architects must pull this information together in a mad scramble, while interrupting many projects.

In seconds, OutSystems can not only identify which applications are using any object, it will also show where it is being used.

How many application documents to you think exist that have never been opened after the sign-off? Millions? Multiply that by the hours spent creating them. Millions of wasted hours providing zero business value.

OutSystems is the documentation! The OutDoc app is real time app documentation. If you do not like the look of the OutDoc report, change it!

Ask your users what drives more value to them: IT people solving IT problems by creating rarely used documents? Or, would they prefer the platform take care of the IT problems while you spend much more time helping them solve real business problems?

One Click Deployments: Gone are the days where you spend hours or sometimes days deploying and promoting your applications through each environment every few months.

4 Layer Canvas promotes proper architecture to ensure current and future applications are scalable and maintainable. The Discovery app will identify architecture issues. Without proper architecture and reusable components, you cannot even think about DevOps.

Lacking the ability to encourage highest quality apps in the Forge App Store. Many of the apps in the Forge App Store are easy to use, very helpful and well documented. However, many of the apps lack documentation or examples, making them very difficult to get full value. Compounding the problem, this often results in having to ask the community how to properly use the app, which is now impacting other people.

Many people will say the apps are free, “stop complaining”. I argue that they can be far from free and I would be willing to purchase a well-documented app if I knew it would save time. This might lead to a nice competition within the app store where everyone can win.

Searching the content on OutSystems.com needs to be fixed! OutSystems has A LOT of documentation, but the site does a bad job searching it, especially if your search criteria has more than one word. Although in the last couple of days, the search has improved so it is possible this was a addressed.

OutSystems isn't perfect, but from a big picture perspective we are splitting hairs at this point. Besides, how many hours of IT projects are spent splitting hairs?

The few items mentioned above are fixable and what is great about OutSystems is we can add them to the Ideas list for OutSystems to consider in a future release.

1. Easier integrations with inbuilt web API's within the organizations and excellent support for third-party applications
2. Connectors and Integration with all the databases is provided which helps teams in connecting to any kind of data source and deploying the application without hassles
3. Deployment to any interface like mobile, web, or any device is customized and made simple

1. Pricing is at the higher end which makes mid-sized firms choose other options compared to OutSystems
2. Coding or development in OutSystems is database-oriented and is based on data architecture, sometimes this makes it complicated when metadata changes compared to Object-Oriented design which is more reliable
3. Not completely flexible to match your needs. you need to compromise on some of the aspects but the solution delivered is reliable through Outsystems

There is not just one thing I like about the Outsystems Platform. I like the ease -of-use to build applications and the speed of deployment to production, The out-of-the-box Analytics to monitor the performance, the quality of the supportdesk and the active community.

The only thing that I don't like about the platform is the mystery around new versions. I would love to see a roadmap with a timeline for new functionalities and bugfixes. In relation to this I would also like to see from the Development Team which Ideas that are posted on the forum are put on the backlog and which will never be delivered.

It is easy to use and easy to learn. The visual logic layout simplifies development and troubleshooting, and allows the business team to participate at a lower level than traditional coding models. The entire team at OutSystems (and especially the support staff) are just really good, smart people who work hard to help their customers and users.

Some use cases are still hard to implement. The library of UI widgets still needs to grow. A native reporting solution is really needed. Automated test options are weak.

Easy, intuitive IDE; easy deployment and maintenance; highly productive; easily scalable; free personal edition in the cloud; ever evolving, embracing new technologies fast, new major versions at least once a year, bugfix releases regularly; excellent support staff; active community.

Pretty hefty licence fees, not suitable for small businesses. Needs additional licences for the infrastructure it runs on (MSSQL or Oracle DB). Still limited design patterns for UI design (no problem for business software, limiting for creative minds).

Incredible speed, easy understanding, great code manipulation and of course, the Final Result! Simply the best and most motivating IDE to develop WEB and Mobile software that we can use!

It's not compatible with Linux. But hey, now it works in MAC!