TrustRadius Insights for Appian are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently praised Appian for its visually uncluttered and intuitive user interface, with many stating that it allows for quick adoption by both internal and external users. The simplicity and user-friendly nature of the interface make it easy for business users with minimal training to navigate and perform tasks efficiently.
Low-Code Development Platform: Many reviewers appreciate the ease of use provided by Appian's low-code development platform. They find it beneficial that they can develop user interfaces without extensive coding knowledge, allowing for rapid application development and reduced reliance on traditional programming languages. This feature has made the development process more accessible and efficient.
Flexible Access Control: A significant number of users praise Appian for its flexibility in providing different levels of access to users based on their roles. This capability contributes to better data security and control within organizations, enhancing overall data management. Additionally, the ability to tailor processes for specific business needs and configure processes for new business users is seen as a major advantage, contributing to the software's adaptability.
Appian is used as a low-code software solution in the AT&T Consumer Organization. It addresses complex process[es] and automation issues across the organization.
Pros
Process Modeling
User Experience
Cons
Ease of development
Integrations with other platforms
Likelihood to Recommend
Appian is best suited for standing up web tools that carry out business processes.
Appian is being used to replace older technologies in development of the support tools for the analysts in Fitch. Currently, it is more of a pilot program on a department level. So far, it looks successful and has prospects to be used across the whole organization. Appian addresses problems which we had with other technologies which were not flexible enough to allow for implementation of the applications to meet their needs.
Pros
Appian speeds up the development.
Easier to build user interfaces.
When application using Appian fails - Appian throws pretty detailed errors helping debugging.
Cons
Search issues when type ahead and database search are used in the same field.
Buttons implementation where user is require[d] to click on the button description - if clicks on the button outside that text - button will not work.
Problems with using certain off-the-shelf performance tools like WebLoad or Neoload. That is because of different dynamic variables being used internally in Appian - which these tools are unable to correlate. We are still investigating using other tools like Jmeter to overcome dynamic correlation problem for performance testing.
Likelihood to Recommend
Appian is well suited to quickly develop a proof of concept (POC) to demonstrate to the business how the desired feature will work - before committing to a full development. In our organization, Appian proved itself to be well suited to replace applications build previously on JIRA.
On the other hand, there are some limitations which require creating Java or Java script functions. At this point, we did not try to convert the larger projects currently developed in Java into Appian - this is where we foresee the Appian limitations.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Appian allows us to give our offshore operations team a platform where they can quickly create web portal workflows that accommodate special project demands.
Pros
Role based access
Visualization of data
Connection to multiple third party flows (FTP, email, filedrop)
Cons
Enterprise database access
Common development language for extensions (.NET, Java)
User license costs
Likelihood to Recommend
Centralizing small workflows to one platform that can control authentication, logging, design, and security.
VU
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
FRB is the largest Appian customer in the West Coast I believe. It is used across multiple line[s] of business like deposits, PWM, lending etc. It solves many workflow oriented problems such as onboarding.
Pros
Manages businesses workflows well. Increases delivery by [up] to 50% against traditional programming languages.
Fast to develop onboarding related applications.
Cons
Integrations- authentication mechanisms are still some[times] not out of the box like Snowflake, OAuth 2.0, [etc.]
Lack of source control makes it hard to manage environments. Need something similar to GitHub for Appian
Likelihood to Recommend
Any onboarding use case, automating manual workflows. Lot of availability of skilled offshore developers who do Appian. It's good for implementing internal applications where UX / UI limitations would not be a big deal.
[Appian is being used from] Business Interface and Solutions to User and client interactions. It allows for simplified data acquisition from users to replace legacy applications. Additionally [helpful] for creating interfaces for users to interact with clients, tracking the activities, and assigning follow-up tasks for the same.
The Secure Web interface allows us to streamline the processes and allows access to all levels of users, as well as clients.
Pros
Common interface design
External system integration
Incremental Security and integration to AD
Scheduled and on-demand Execution
Cons
Creation and execution of Test cases
Patterns for DB Maintenance
simple Value setting of variables outside of interfaces.
Likelihood to Recommend
[With Appian, it is] relatively easy to create quick and accurate processes.
[It is well suited for] easy creation of repetitive processes for on-demand or scheduled execution.
[It includes] required or requested tasks assignment and notification to individuals.
[You can use] groups to support tasks when processing department-level requirements.
Appian is used to manage Network Order Processing. It is being used by few departments. It solves a pain point. Faster processing of orders. There is a huge implementation in Wireline Order processing.
Pros
Task management through the work flow.
Easily can be implemented for collaboration between different work groups.
Easily can be integrated between upstream and down stream systems.
Cons
For each release of Appian, it looks like regression testing is not proper. We see some broken old functionalities whenever it is upgraded. It can be improved.
Record List Grid View can be made with little flexibility. So that in the future we can use records instead of building reports.
In the monitoring view, better to keep 'process activity' tab as the first to load instead of the 'health dashboard.'
Likelihood to Recommend
Appian is well suited for proper task creation for proper workgroups. Appian is less appropriate when we need an application to manage data only.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
Appian was selected as the platform to help implement a global workflow management process for contract, premium, and claim management in our organization. The implemented solution allows our organization to standardize our processes, consolidate the information and provide a dashboard for our executives. Aside from this, it has considerably reduced our time to market and improved the quality of the solutions we deliver to the users in our organization.
The solution(s) implemented in Appian are deployed worldwide across all Aon Reinsurance offices.
Pros
Low code platform.
High availability and scalability.
Streamline integrations with external APIs.
Monitoring and error logging.
Cons
Integration with third party source control tools.
Better CI/CD capabilities.
Debug capabilities.
OCR capabilities.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for work management processes. Not very well suited for solutions that rely on heavy (mathematical) calculations.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Appian is being used across the whole organization both as a Low-Code development BPM tool to develop and use the various applications across different Business Units.
It is being very helpful in developing various banking applications like loan processing and claim settlement to name a few in easy to use manner.
Pros
Easy to Scale Process Management
Ready Out of the Box Functionalities solve regular problems
Innovating by Introducing New Features like AI
Cons
Sometimes finding OOTB functionalities is difficult specially for first time uses
In-Line help could be improved further to help new learners
The new Appian Certification levels are a bit confusing
Likelihood to Recommend
Appian is well suited for large scale applications as it's easy to scale as our business grow and also to integrate new features into the applications is very easy. Also risk is reduced a lot while scaling unlike some other Workflow management tools in the market.
Just my thought Appian might not be very well suited for small organizations considering its licensing costs.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
It is used by a department for client onboarding. It helps to automate the existing client onboarding process which was previously done manually. We are using it to manage onboarding questions that need to be answered by the client and send email notifications to the relevant parties within the organisation so that onboarding process times are reduced.
Pros
Easy to pick up on how to use the tool by going through a paid class organised by Appian.
Good documentation on the website to support developers.
Simplifies business process management so that companies do not have to reinvent the wheel.
Cons
Request for features to fix security findings is generally a slow process.
Request for features to support business objective is generally a slow process.
It's a great tool to manage business processes because it has features to allow you to manage different users and control permission of who has access to certain UI or documents. It takes very little time to develop new features for business needs. Great monitoring tool to help troubleshoot production issues.
If performance is critical, Appian will lag behind.
We use Appian for low code development, specifically, we are migrating several older applications to our Appian code base. Specifically, we are using in the Production and Technology workspace and slowly expanding the Appian footprint across the organization. Given the distributed nature of our workforce, using a tool like Appian allows us to leverage more expensive managers with our emergent coding organization.
Pros
Allows at a glance workflow documentation which assists in the need we have for information readiation.
Drag and drop interface for workflow development greatly speeds our apps time to market.
Using the advanced features of Appian, we are able to create working sites in a fraction of the time it would take to do so using "traditional" development.
Cons
There is a definite learning curve associated with Appian and functional information may be difficult to find.
Better in line help would be a welcome addition.
The pace of change means that, just about the time we are mastering this version, the NEXT version is coming out.
Likelihood to Recommend
We use Appian to build out the behind the scenes workflows in our applications and the web dev aspect to skin those new apps. If you have extremely complex algorithms or logic, Appian may struggle a bit... and the low code makes altering as needed for ADA requirements, extremely challenging.
