Likelihood to Recommend It's well suited if:
The organization has large number of applications that needs to be deployed frequently. The organization is tied to the DevOps mindset. The organization has programs in different languages. The applications does not need EJB's support that servers like web logic provide. It's less suited if:
The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance. The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances. 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 Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization. Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs. Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance. Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources. SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running. Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs. Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze. Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings. Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications. Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints) Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time 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 Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have. Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana. 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 While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services.
Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.
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 Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations. Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins. Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify. 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