OutSystems vs. React

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

React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for:

• Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces.
• creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications.
• creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload.
• The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates.

React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for:

• Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances.
• Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps.
• When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option.
• Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side.

• 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

• React is fantastic for building performant user interfaces. Our web app is snappy and great for our customers.
• React has the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well which is the view layer of the application. This makes it incredibly intuitive and flexible for developers to use.
• React has lead the way in being able to write modular and structured code. It is a drastic improvement since the days of spaghetti jQuery code.
• React has an unmatched community. The amount of tools and libraries available is fantastic, and there plenty of solutions available online for common problems.

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

• Debugging React is challenging. Bugs in react code generate stack traces internal to React and it is often totally unclear how it relates to the code you actually wrote.
• Relating your React elements to corresponding DOM elements is difficult. The intentional separation of virtual and actual DOM also makes it difficult to map the elements to the structures in the DOM. This is partially ameliorated by the use of the React dev tool, which provides a DOM-like view of the React elements, but the tool still does not provide a direct correspondence with the DOM that is often necessary to figure out why something isn't right.
• Because JSX is React-specific and not a language feature, a special compilation process is necessary to convert JSX code to normal JS. Coming from a C++ background, compiling things doesn't bother me, but many JS developers are used to a less structured development.

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 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.

React is just a bit of a different animal. I was avoiding it for the longest time. I thought for sure I would land on Vue or something else with a more approachable and familiar appearance. But after taking an online course in React, I started realize what people were raving about (and complaining about) and decided to implement it at our office for one of our products.

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.

Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.

Incentivized

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

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).

While this is a widely contested debate with various blog posts and benchmarks all over the place, its really a personal choice to determine what works for the team. Coming from a Angular 1.x background, I decided to try a new framework when Angular 2.x was announced and at that time React is gaining popularity and Vue hasn't taken off yet. Compared to Angular 1.x and Vue (hybrid of React and Angular) that split the logic from the html templates, I loved the way React breaks code into components using the jsx syntax. In my mind, this allows for cleaner components and easier maintenance

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

• Our web applications now run much faster because the whole page doesn't reload
• We spend less time developing UI components because a lot of them are readily available on NPM
• We don't have to optimize apps for multiple browsers since React natively supports it.

Incentivized