Build Enterprise-Grade Apps Fast.
4.6/5 (233 reviews)OutSystems enables you to to develop and deploy your apps in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid model. Develop once, for all devices. Integrate all your existing systems and applications. Reuse the skills and resources you have.
OutSystems offers a visual development environment to rapidly develop and change mobile and web applications. Developers can assemble all components necessary to completely define mobile and web apps, without writing any low-level code. You'll be able to model User Interfaces, Business Logic, Business Processes, Databases, Integration Components, Web Services, Security Rules and Scheduling activities.
For mobile-specific apps OutSystems allows you to model complex offline behavior, model business logic that runs on-device, and easily integrate with device-native capabilities like GPS, camera, email, calendar, etc.
You'll also find an integration SDK to quickly create custom components to integrate external applications and databases. It includes wizards to automate the integration of databases, library APIs and popular third party applications such as SAP. It works with Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse to assist in the creation of custom integration adapters. Integration adapters are published with 1-click and then reused many times in different web business applications.
OutSystems provides version control and configuration management of all mobile and web applications, services, integration adapters and other application resources. Operation teams can monitor and audit running applications to detect and isolate performance and quality issues, and to manage highly scalable, 24x7 application server farms.
OutSystems also provides all the functionality needed to manage the entire application portfolio centrally, stage interdependent apps and components, and streamline DevOps processes. It simplifies staging across environments by performing a complete dependency analysis across environments and deploying applications and all their dependencies with one click. It also allows you to define your IT team's access to applications and their components across all environments.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
We started with Outsystems V9.0 and now we are using V11. I may say that we fell in love when we met V9.0, now, we are still being surprised. I also love when Outsystems Team consider our opinion as relevant. They have added new features to their platform considering our suggestions!
Pros
Is really easy learning Outsystems. All the trainning is free and, following only the courses, developers are ready to be certified as Associate developers. Learning curve is really short.
Outsystems has a very realiable community in which you cand find easily answers to your questions.
We developing speed and quality has no comparisson with any other platform we have used or tested. Is really easy to push / deploy applications with a very low risk.
Regarding mobile development, we do not need native code specialists anymore. It used to be really expensive. With Outsystems mobile development is extremely fast and reliable. Nowadays is really easy to build offline applications (they work perfectly even if they have no Internet access). Finally, is really easy to push mobile applications to Google Play or AppStore because the comply with Industry standards and are always compatibles with the latest OS versions.
Outsystems V11, has added a lot of awesome features such: micro services, containers, screen templates for Mobile or Web applications, better monitoring, etc.
Cons
I think that the Support Team need to improve their speed for answering questions.
I would like that upgrade process would be faster for those Environments with multiple Front End Servers.
Outsystems was chosen as a platform to rewrite a legacy product developed over 30 years and bring it into the cloud. It has been a really good choice for an organisation that had no web or cloud experience and has helped avoid many of the basic mistakes that could otherwise have been made. Whist there are some limitations on flexibility and price the benefits and speed to market far out way these.
Pros
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
Cons
• 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.
I've actually had occasion to make RAD-style tools in the far-flung past. This is the sort of platform I would have made if I could.
Some of the initial steps are a little harder than you would expect, but once you are used to where everything lives, it's easy to find it again.
Coding is done via flowcharts, and these are pretty easy to use, not to mention fairly easy to use straight up as diagrams to show other people what's going on.
OutSystems is pretty good for only showing you matching options, e.g. if you need a date, it will show you everything local with a date and important functions, like the current date. If you adopt certain naming conventions, OutSystems will fill in the type for you: IsSuccess will become Boolean on account of the "Is" part. JobEntryId will become a Job Entry Identifier.
Database design is extremely easy, just add, adjust and publish in a tree or diagram and migrations are automatic, though when you remove things, it won't remove them from the database automatically.
Using the databases is even easier. Drag and drop the columns, join whatever is not automatically joined, add sorting and filters and OutSystems will try to choose a sample of your data. This sample can be changed by changing the test value, e.g. let's see UserId = worker1.
There's a "business processes" that looks strongly inspired by BPMN 2.0, though it is not identical. These can be used for long-term states or even just simple asynchronous programming.
The web interface side of things is pretty slick, though it can be quite ornery about exact placement. I would recommend using the widget tree view instead when this happens to avoid frustration. There is some pretty good support for Responsive Web Design, especially if you choose a theme designed to show on many devices.
If you are missing some functionality, one option that is available is to make extensions. I've made a few of these. The programming side is a bit esoteric , and there are some odd holes (can use a list of records but not a list) but it's pretty good once you get the hang of it.
A few complaints or improvement opportunities: it would be nice if it was a bit more object-oriented. Built-in tools for data migration, especially between Development, Testing and Production, would be most welcome. I also found myself desperately wishing for a try...finally construct. Java versions of components are a bit neglected.
It's been very, very productive all said.
Pros
The hard things made easy - the BPMN capability, the tree editing and republishing of data entities, the Responsive Web design. Also, the fairly intelligent guessing about properties, the rather speedy resolution/propagation of name changes, deletions, etc. The monitoring software is pretty good.
Cons
If you're developing an extension, it's a four-step manual publishing process to update. No try..finally. The licensing model per certain kind of object encourages bad coding to try to save costs. The visual editor for interfaces goes crazy far too often, making the widget tree the only consistent way to edit them. The lack of built-in data migration is my biggest sticking point right now.
The business landscape has rapidly moved to digital operations. To be successful your business
needs not just to be resilient, but also to embrace a resilient culture. The technology that supports business operations should be agile enough to embrace the continuous changing market landscape and enable business to move at the speed of change. The Outsystems platform reduces development time by up to 75% and accelerate time-to-market by a factor of
three. This provided our organization to cost effectively implement locally developed solutions and other businesses in a significant shortened time. Our main focus is now more on the user interface and interaction, which provides the value expected.
Pros
The speed to develop and making changes to applications developed
Development is done logically with very limited hard coding
Ease to develop mobile applications and submissions to the app stores
Ease to use the native features of devices
Built in change management and control of the development and release process with a one-click publish feature
Built in security features in the platform
Excellent support and community forums
Technical aspects very well documented and user friendly
The true change and debugging features are invaluable
Notification and guidance on dependencies for changes made to modules
Cloud hosting option
The investment by Outsystems to provide annually new features, functionalities and keeping up to date with technology trends and providing their customers with the tools to easily stay abreast
Pre-build modules provided, which eliminates the need to develop commonly used functionality
Cons
Cost in South Africa is expensive due to weak currency and exchange rates
Difficult for developers used to hard coding to change their way of thinking to grasp how the platform works. However, this is not a flaw of the platform, but rather a change required in the mindset of traditional developers.
OutSystems is offered as a yearly subscription with everything you need to quickly deliver your first set of custom applications, and grow as you need.
Enterprise trials are available on request, for companies that want to evaluate the platform.
Free personal environments in the OutSystems cloud are also available for evaluation and personal use.
Unbeatable Speed - Every aspect of OutSystems is crafted to help you build better apps faster. From high-productivity visual development to powerful tools to deploy and manage your apps, OutSystems helps you deliver applications quickly and make changes easily.
Integrate with Everything - Core ERP and CRM solutions. Aging legacy systems. Custom apps that track satellites and power factories. These are just a few examples of real projects where OutSystems made it extremely easy to integrate external enterprise systems, databases, or custom apps.
Great UX by Default - Build beautiful experiences that perform great on any platform and device. OutSystems gives you the best of both worlds with drag-and-drop simplicity or your own UI code to easily create pixel perfect experiences your users will love.
Low-code Without Constraints - With OutSystems, it’s easy to extend your applications with your own JavaScript, Java, C#, SQL, CSS, and HTML code. And, because OutSystems is an open, standards-based platform with no lock-in, no proprietary data models, or proprietary run-time, you can count on worry-free, future-proof implementations.
Enterprise-Grade = Peace of Mind - OutSystems is the only low-code development platform with advanced enterprise features. From departmental deployments to mission-critical solutions with millions of users, you get the kind of enterprise-grade scale and security powering banks, factories, and satellite systems. It’s already built into the platform, so you never have to worry.
Unbreakable Deployment - Change applications faster. Decrease maintenance costs. Ensure that no matter how big the change, your applications will always be architecturally sound and functional.
Metrics that Matter - Ensure that your apps are always running at peak performance. Real-time data helps you easily identify anything that needs to be corrected or optimized keeping costs down and users delighted.
Below are some frequently asked questions for OutSystems.
OutSystems offers the following pricing plans:
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
OutSystems is offered as a yearly subscription with everything you need to quickly deliver your first set of custom applications, and grow as you need.
Enterprise trials are available on request, for companies that want to evaluate the platform.
Free personal environments in the OutSystems cloud are also available for evaluation and personal use.
OutSystems offers the following features:
OutSystems has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Public Administrations
OutSystems supports the following languages:
Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian
OutSystems has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
OutSystems supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone, iPad
OutSystems integrates with the following applications:
Amazon EC2, Dropbox, GitHub, Infosistema DMM, JIRA Software, NetSuite, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Twitter, Zendesk, Zendesk
OutSystems offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
I have been in the low-code/RAD space for over 16 years, even developing and selling a RAD tool that was targeted at a specific vertical, and nothing checks all the boxes like OutSystems. It is a large system, and it needs to be.
When I read how people identify Price as a Con, I felt that they had missed the point. Sure, OutSystems is not inexpensive but the value provided far outweighs the cost, especially to the business users! The time saved by the platform solving your IT problems will most likely cover the cost of the OutSystems License.
Simply put, OutSystems takes care of the IT problems and allows you to spend a lot more time with the business solving real business problems!