Likelihood to Recommend I do not think I can recommend Appcelerator at this point due to the issues with Appcelerator studio, lack of good debugging support, lack of thorough documentation and forums and the additional cost overhead of licenses. The pros are just that it allows for cross-platform development. However,
Cordova does a much better job of it and excels at places where Appcelerator currently struggles
Read full review Well suited for internal exposure of business processes (invoicing, API layer to other systems, customer maintenance etc), whether a UI is required or not. Not so well suited for full fledged web design. An OutSystems application must serve one particular business need, if gets too much functionalities and responsibilities it tends to get chaotic and complex.
Read full review Pros Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework. Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps. Read full review Developing end user interfaces with ease and speed with a modern look and feel. First class low code development to reduce time to market with visual programming Their technical support team is fast and responsive. We've yet to have any issues they could not resolve. Read full review Cons It is very hard to debug your code. Breakpoints never worked for us even with the latest Appcelerator Studio and we had to rely on log statements to debug. There is a need to purchase licenses from Appcelerator to run the code on a device or for creating iOS distribution builds. This is an additional cost when you have already paid for Apple developer program for precisely these things. If things are broken due to lack to support between Appcelerator and a new iOS version, you pretty much have to rely on a new version release from Appcelerator for the issue to be fixed. It is difficult to create enterprise distribution builds where the distribution certificate is owned by your organization's team and you only have a development certificate for the same. The forums on developer.appcelerator.com are seldom helpful. It is hard to find solutions for issues even on other forums like stack overflow. Documentation needs to be improved. Read full review Price – The licensing model of OutSystems is very expensive and not suitable for small scale developments. This is offset by the time to develop and stability for larger scale developments Flexibility on PaaS version – The PaaS hosted version of OutSystems limits your flexibility to access the front end and backend database systems which can significantly restrict your options on high data volume developments or where anything requiring slightly out of the ordinary access is required Same price for PaaS and self-hosted system. Licensing model dictates that you pay the same price even when you host the system on your own hardware which effectively means you pay more to manage the infrastructure yourself Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are very happy with OutSystems and our developers deliver good work. OutSystems lets us build new software on a regulare (2 weekly) basis, which is highly flexible and adjustable. Even without very much experience, our developers manage to build usefull software, which is working a lot better than our previous (legacy) software.
Read full review Usability I am really happy using OutSystems in my work. It gives me the opportunity to create good working software without having had very much IT-experience before. It also made me more interested in the background of IT and learning different languages.
Read full review Support Rating The tech support is very reachable. Usually by [email] from but also by phone if needed. We had some difficulties at the start with understanding "what our machine was doing" under high performance load. After some good sessions understanding our needs they delivered good solutions for our problems we had in the beginning.
Read full review In-Person Training Excellent material full of hands on that improve the understanding of the platform.
Read full review Online Training The online training material is well designed and explanations are step by step, helping trainees to understand and follow each exercise and new concept.
Read full review Implementation Rating In a large company, patiently and consistently work the behind the scenes politics with business and IT partners across the firm. This is transformational - you will need a solid set of key business partners to lock arms together to move forward.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Appcelerator makes you write a structured code whereas
Cordova just packages your code and you are free to structure it. Appcelerator bridges your javascript code with native code and that would make it run faster than javascript code in
Cordova apps. However, with recent mobile browsers, you would hardly notice any performance deterioration with
Cordova apps. Appcelerator struggles with issues related to its IDE, debugging, documentation and forums and additional costs.
Cordova makes it much more simpler to develop cross-platform apps with better developer support, debugging support, documentation and forums minus the additional costs.
Read full review I tried to use
WordPress with some success. Also looked at Joomla. But when I saw OutSystems I knew I had been wasting my time there. It takes you longer to get going with OutSystems - but even I as a novice realized immediately that Outsystems is simply in another league. Outsystems is powerful. (Can you compare
WordPress and Joomla to Outsystems - I don't think so).
Read full review Return on Investment We were able to build and deploy a mobile app with Appcelerator. However, the platform still has issues and does not cover our needs as much as some of its competitor like cordova does. Read full review The ease of use of the OutSystems development process has been the biggest ROI for us. We have developed our Framework product and maintained/enhanced it with only 4 workers. OutSystems has enhanced their product very significantly over the last 4 years. They have gone from a simple to use tool to a very simple to use sophisticated tool that covers the standard mainframe-based computing apps and the apps used on handheld mobile devices all using the same basic set of development tools. Read full review ScreenShots