GitHub Copilot vs. OutSystems

Copilit is fantastic at the following: 1. Solving simple, well-defined problems, such as implementing an algorithm, manipulating a data structure, or string manipulation and regex. 2. Implementing simple APIs that are mainly CRUD in nature, with moderate business logic inside them, which may involve some processing or passing the data through an algorithm. 3. Implementation of well-defined activities, such as implementing a connection to an Oracle DB using Hibernate or JDBC, or implementing boilerplate code for a backend service to listen to Kafka events. It is not that great when it comes to understanding and implementing code in a proprietary DSL. It struggles when implementing a major feature across a complex codebase. I believe developers should also adopt the trust-but-verify paradigm when expecting highly secure or regulated code from GitHub Copilot.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Make code development faster and quicker.
• Helps write better code standards for projects.
• Provide the latest functions from the technology.
• Notifies about the deprecated functions.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The only issue I faced is the context token size, it can be increase.
• Sometime with agent mode it takes too much time, which can be reduced but I understand it also depends on the complexity of the given task.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

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.

I feel that GitHub Copilot's overall usability is good due to its tight integration with Visual Studio and the workspace. However, developers expect greater ease of use, as there is a learning curve to realize productivity gains with the tool fully. I think there is room for improvement in GitHub Copilot's UI integration within Visual Studio.

Incentivized

OutSystems has a feature in which we can develop a functionality in a application and can use that functionality in another application without developing it again. That is main plus point for the development team so they can work with different functionalities rather focusing on the same thing again and again. if we want to make any change on the user side then we can make it live with just the deployment using the service center.

Incentivized

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.

Excellent material full of hands on that improve the understanding of the platform.

The online training material is well designed and explanations are step by step, helping trainees to understand and follow each exercise and new concept.

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.

Incentivized

It is useful that copilot integrates so well with vscode, which is a very common IDE. I used Tabnine for a little while but it was not that intuitive, and did not seem as helpful as GitHub copilot was. I have enjoyed GitHub copilot a lot, especially the ease of hitting the tab key and seeing quick progress in my tasks.

Incentivized

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).

• Our ROI of the purchase of Copilot was met in less than a day. The timesave cannot be overstated
• Programmer boredom/dissatisfaction is down because of less repetetive crud work.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized