Kissflow vs. M‑Files vs. OutSystems

KiSSFLOW is well suited for any information heavy paperwork that multiple people approve and have access to complete work. It is less suited for processes that require a lot of back and forth with a form initiator. The workflows like to be very linear without much back tracking. It can do that but it prefers to be forward linear.

M‑Files is great for companies with multiple locations. Drive letters can become cumbersome to use and collaborate with colleagues and M‑Files fills that gap. The check out/check in system is great and allows only one editor at a time. This can be good and bad depending on the situation.

Incentivized

OutSystems excels with building web interfaces fast and lends itself to custom integrations written in .Net. Most anything can be brought in given this ability to be extended. One of the drawbacks to the speed of development is that most quality control teams become quickly overwhelmed and may be unable to keep up.

Incentivized

• I appreciate the automatic email notifications when it is your turn to complete a task. This keeps everyone on track.
• I appreciate being able to "reassign" a task as well--leaving flexibility for some folks to cover for others when needed.
• I appreciate the personal check-ins from our rep, asking how things are going. That makes me feel like someone is paying attention and wants me to be happy with the product.

Incentivized

• Version control and history tracking on documents.
• Search ability to filter content for a team, creator, or another property.
• Permission control, limit access to documents to read or edit, or only specific workflow states.
• Administrative control to access all content.
• Administrative control to restore deleted content.
• Administrative control to audit and retag content when needed.
• Robust workflow capabilities.

Incentivized

• Deployment management – OutSystems has a built in robust, multi-environment deployment system that helps ensures the clean and error free deployment of applications through the development, testing and production product lifecycle
• Rapid application development – Through the low code, graphical development environment you can develop applications far quicker than with more traditional development environments
• Cross platform mobile development – OutSystems handle the development and building of mobile application for both iOS and Android in a simple streamlined way that removes 90% of the problems normally associated with multi platform development

Incentivized

• Learning. If you are coming from a 100% paper process and have employees who know nothing more, then there is definitely a learning curve. You will need to bring someone in to help you train employees on the core concept of the change (the "Why are we doing this" questions). KiSSFLOW does have support, but this is more getting down to the details in your own work environment.
• Visual learners will love it, but not non-visual. If you are an accountant, and your brain works like an accountant, then this program will be difficult to learn. It is very visual, and I have seen more success with visual learners than any others.
• Bugs. A few years ago, there were a lot of bugs. There are not that many anymore. This is to be expected with any program, so if you are training an impatient staff who doesn't do well with error messages, you will want to be sure to pad the training sessions. I have not seen error messages in a long time; however, the nature of the beast is that you won't see one until you actually find one...

Incentivized

• More user friendly customization options that do not require knowledge of coding/scripting. For example, prompting the creation of a new document from a template in a workflow.
• When using the 'insert property' feature in a Word doc, I would love to convert dates from a mm/dd/yy format to be written out (such as September 21, 2018). Or possibly even just to pull the year or the month from a selected date to insert into a document.
• I've often wished that I could find more detailed tutorials online for some features.

Incentivized

• The platform controls all the parts. While great for development and overall maintenance, it could lead to discussions with your DBA (who has to trust the platform). As a developer I love the platform, as a DBA I would like more control.
• By making software development model driven using flows, you are forced to rethink the way of programming. It makes it easier, but sometimes the way of working leads to code which could be optimized (standard problem in model based software development).
• Most of the code is generated, so the technical knowledge of the inner working of coding are not Essentials. This could lead to degration of this knowlegde. As part of this, most technologies will only be used when OutSystems supports it. They do a good job on implementing these things. But things like Node.js would be nice.

Really love the product. Was pleasantly surprised that it has been easy to use for parents

Incentivized

M-files meets our almost all needs, we dont have other option to replace m-files. it saves lots, like Hardware because of Vault Feature means we can create many vaults (mini-servers) in m-files in other solutions we need more hardware for more installations.

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.

The system has room to grow as it's limited by not being able to edit POs after they've been approved. The system is great for registrations and syncing to other systems while including the attachments. The reporting from Kissflow is also easy to setup to link to other platforms such as Looker

Incentivized

It is a powerful system that can locate content fast and effectively. The system takes quite some time to setup initially. It can be hard for M-Files support to know how businesses operate and how they want to use the system in a way that works for them. The customization makes it great for companies to cater to their own needs. Once the system is set up in a way that makes sense for the business, the user experience is positive. There is room for improvement in the notifications, workflow, and support areas.

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

always there.

Incentivized

I noticed some lagging with the integration with Microsoft Office but not so much that I would not use it. It has gotten better with updates. to be fair the issues were when Office 2013 first came out.

Incentivized

I haven't encountered a need for support with KiSSFLOW. It's not a perfect platform, but it's functional, dependable, and reasonably intuitive. I can't fault a support team just because their product works!

Incentivized

Usually when I need help from them I got support and it was very good and focused to solve my problem. I didn't have so many problems, but when used it worked. I just would like to have a support in my native language, but I can understand that sometimes is hard for the companies.

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.

We had online conference call training with a recording to use later as needed

Incentivized

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

They answer all questions and record your training for later use.

Incentivized

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

The key insight is that the most important thing is to have a open mind. The application is easy to use, but if you have a company with different views and it is not aligned could be a huge problem. So the company transformation is required together with the application. Ensure to use as much as possible the capabilities of the application helps to have best ROI.

Incentivized

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

KiSSFLOW wants you to be able to increase productivity, make it possible to "manage the chaos" (their own words) and simply make things better. It is exactly what it sounds like. For a visual learner, KiSSFLOW is perfect. It really does make good on its promise to help you manage the chaos, and it makes it easy for your employees to understand how your business works. More specifically, I recommended this program for a small school that had never automated anything. They knew nothing about the process. Bringing in KiSSFLOW allowed them to not only refine their process, but it gave awareness to other employees and ensure that they could work as a team, knowing the intricacies of how each department works (so, the Director would understand the many steps of Admissions before taking over after enrollment -- they would know what each family experienced).

Incentivized

I've compared recently with Box, but they still predicate their storage on WHERE instead of WHAT, which means if it isn't in a specific folder, you won't find it. Some documents may relate to multiple projects. In M-Files instead of putting a copy of a file in many folders (thus having many copies) you can build out the relationships, so there is only 1 copy of a document which prevents multiple "originals" from being developed separately.

Incentivized

Totally different products of cource. Sitecore is best suited for full fledged websites with extensive support for analytics. OutSystems for modular business processes with a UI. Hence, there is no overlap. But even for small websites, or even landingpages, I would recommend OutSystems, with a custom made analytics part or a plugin.

Incentivized

do so much more than we need but has all the stuff we do need.

Incentivized

• Somewhat expensive compared to other cheap (or free) task management alternatives. ROI depends on your specific needs and the size of your organization.
• ROI can be ambiguous since KiSSFLOW is primarily for internal company use. A simple email thread could accomplish many of the same things, but with less efficiency.

Incentivized

• The price we pay for M-Files is about one third less than the price that we were paying our previous vendor plus we have a custom-built amazing dependable system with great support.
• From a compliance and legal standpoint, our policies are always available to end users including easy access to previous versions.

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