Creatio vs. Laravel PHP Framework

Creatio is well suited in following scenarios: Complex Business process modelling and automation, Low code No code development which is best for efficient timelines, customized reporting and dashboarding, seamless integration with other technologies. Scenarios where Creatio is less appropriate: Solutions which require high cutomizations on the frontend side as this can be done by javascript modifications but it increases the load on the page and slows it down.

Incentivized

Laravel is ideally suited for fluent PHP developers who want a framework that can be used to both rapidly prototype web applications as well as support scalable, enterprise-level solutions. I think where it is less ideal is where the client has an expectation of using a certain CMS, or of having a certain experience on the admin side that would perhaps be better suited to a full CMS such as Drupal or WordPress. Additionally, for developers who don't want to write PHP code, Laravel may not be the best solution.

Incentivized

• Creatio's client success team is super. The team is collaborative, solution-oriented, and client-driven. We have weekly meetings with the team. They show up prepared with solutions/ideas to business requests and they are clearly engaged.
• Creatio's infrastructure team has been critical to our ability to execute our cloud strategy. They have worked with us to set up our testing and production environments within Azure, assisted in testing, and are responsive and flexible to our unique requirements.
• Creatio has been very flexible to requests for customization. We have taken their low-code out-of-the-box solution and "Ringlerized" it. The benefit for us is an application that meets our niche business needs.

• Many libraries available which simplify integration of SaaS APIs within your application (eg, MailChimp, Mandrill, Stripe, Authorize.net)
• Pre-packaged tools to facilitate common tasks when building applications (eg, User Authentication and Authorization, Background Jobs, Queues, etc)
• Support for a broad set of technologies out of the box (eg, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MemcacheD, BeanstalkD, Redis, etc)

Incentivized

• When we started using Creatio in 2022 the new user interface had just been released and did not include all the features we needed; however, we used a more classic user interface and were still satisfied with the results.
• The ability to capture a digital signature directly within the application was missing in the base system; however, Creatio connected us with a partner that provided a solution for this specific situation.

• Significant learning curve. You cannot be an expert in a week. It takes many experimentations to properly understand the underlying concept. We ourselves learned it by using it on the job.
• Too much to soak in. Laravel is in everything. Any part of backend development you wish to do, Laravel has a way to do that. It is great, but also overwhelming at the same time.
• Vendor lock in. Once you are in Laravel, it would not be easy to switch to something else.
• Laracasts (their online video tutorials) are paid :( I understand the logic behind it, but I secretly wish it would be free.
• The eloquent ORM is not my recommendation. Let's say you want to write a join, and based on the result you wish to create two objects. If you use Laravel to do automatic joins for you, Laravel internally actually makes two calls to database and creates your two object rather than making one join call and figuring out the results. This makes your queries slow. For this reason, I use everything except eloquent from Laravel. I rather write my own native queries and control the creation of objects then rely on Laravel to do it. But I am sure with time Laravel will make fewer calls to DB.

Incentivized

We have always used a CRM and Creatio has proven to be much more effective in meeting our needs than our previous provider. Its customizability will allow us to adapt this product as our business may change in the future.

Incentivized

Because it is so easy to use and navigate through - even the most technophobic people in our company are using it on a regular basis. It is easy to change around and switch through different sections and keep neat and tidy.

Other than the daily maintenance window where the server may be inaccessible for a few minutes, there have been no issues with accessing our Creatio site. The daily maintenance window is outside normal business hours so it does not affect our Users - just myself when I am looking to implement changes.

Incentivized

Some Users have reported slow responses from the server at times which seems to be localized. Users are based across four different time zones and the issue is intermittent.

Incentivized

The people at the Creatio offices world wide are very friendly, patience and always happy to help. I have a huge respect for them, especially the people that were based in the Ukraine. Still in these strange times they always keep the focus on the customer, where we would have totaly understanded it if it was any different. So huge compliments to the whole team, keep up the energy and the good work

Most of the roadblocks to learning were not discovered until the users were actually in the system using it on a day to day basis. Our Customer Success Manager has offered to setup additional training sessions as needed to close the gaps in our learning. Some areas which required some additional training are setting up filters, dashboards, and generating reports.

Incentivized

The project manager for our implementation was great to work with and took the time to understand our business. We felt very comfortable going into the project with a reasonable scope of work to provide us with a functional version of Creatio to meet our needs. Unfortunately, we came across multiple challenges with this partner in their deliverables and timelines. Thankfully Creatio was able to provide support resources to ensure we were able to launch. We have since changed partners for our third-party support.

Incentivized

The user-friendliness of Creatio was a big selling point along with the low-code initiatives, both of which were important to our business. With Salesforce, unlimited wasn't really unlimited. You couldn't deploy an on-site instance and the overall cost of the system far outweighed the ROI. These are all things Creatio offers, out-of-the-box.

Supporting unit testing is bigger plus point in Laravel than any other framework. Developing with Laravel is much easier. Other frameworks have value in market, but Laravel has taken the lead in popularity among PHP developers in recent years. The large community supports you if you have problems. Using Laravel, integration became easy with third-party libraries, but it was costly too.

Incentivized

I can see the promise of how it can be customized to other aspects of our business.

Incentivized

• We went from manually processing Work Orders into Invoices once a day - representing significant impact to turn around speeds - to submitting automatically in real time, eliminating a great deal of human transcription errors and freeing up a great deal of operations time
• Custom Implementation automation in Creatio has eliminated 4-6 hours of configuration work per sale in comparison to our old manual methods

• Laravel allows us to rapidly prototype and build complete, scalable applications internally, which saves us time and allows us to have internal tools that fit out precise needs. We use Symfony for a similar purpose, but Laravel is an even higher-level framework that we find saves us substantially more time when building many types of web applications.
• Laravel solves many of the underlying concerns of building a large application (such as authentication, authorization, secure input handling) in the right ways. It saves us from handling those low-level concerns ourselves, potentially in a way that could take a lot of time or sets us up for issues in the future. It's tough to assign an ROI to this, but I'm sure it has prevented issues and saved time, which both have an impact on our financial situation.

Incentivized