Overview
What is Appian?
Appian is a low-code development and business process management platform. It features drag-and-drop design for app building, automated work processes, unified data management, and cloud-based deployment.
Great Low code - no code Workflow tool in the market!!
TrustRadius Insights
Appian Is The Best Low ode Plateform
Low-code Prog: The Best Way To Digitalize Your Life
Best in class BPM tool
Appian is one of the best Low Code platform
BEST BPM TOOL - APPIAN
Quickly deliver upon your ROI goals
Leading us into the future
Appian--reduce time and effort for employees
remote user
A+ for Appian
its helpful
very good workflow software
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Platform Scalability (73)9.494%
- Reusability (75)9.494%
- Drag-and-drop Interfaces (72)8.989%
- Visual Modeling (73)8.888%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Appian Community Edition
$0
Application - Input-Only
$2
Application - Infrequent
$9
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
APPIAN DEMO RECORDING SESSION # 91-9866955524
Appian Developer Tutorial for Beginners | Appian Training
APPIAN DEMO
APPIAN DEMO | Harsha Trainings |
Features
Low-Code Development
Low-code development tools allow non developers to build simple process applications with little oversight. These tools simplify the application building process, and are frequently used for simple process applications.
- 8.8Visual Modeling(73) Ratings
Visual modeling tooling allows business users to design processes visually.
- 8.9Drag-and-drop Interfaces(72) Ratings
Drag-and-drop interface for building applications
- 9.1Platform Security(71) Ratings
Security guardrails in place to help prevent malware, data breaches etc.
- 8.8Platform User Management(72) Ratings
Tools enabling admins to control user access and on-board and off-board users
- 9.4Reusability(75) Ratings
An internal repository where assets, modules, and even entire applications can be reused
- 9.4Platform Scalability(73) Ratings
Apps developed by low-code platform must be scalable and capable of supporting large numbers of users
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Appian?
Appian provides a software development platform that combines Full-Stack Automation and enterprise low-code to rapidly deliver business applications. Appian can be used to improve customer experience, achieve operational excellence, and simplify global risk and compliance.
Appian is a platform for building enterprise software applications. Appian boasts running some of the most important processes at companies like Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Aviva, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and the US Department of the Treasury.
Some Appian use cases include - Intelligent Business Process Management Systems (iBPMS), Dynamic Case Management (DCM), Digital Process Automation (DPA), Robotics Process Automation (RPA), and Low-code Development.
Appian Features
Low-Code Development Features
- Supported: Visual Modeling
- Supported: Drag-and-drop Interfaces
- Supported: Platform Security
- Supported: Platform User Management
- Supported: Reusability
- Supported: Platform Scalability
Appian Screenshots
Appian Videos
Appian Competitors
- OutSystems
- Pega Platform
- Salesforce
Appian Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mobile Web |
Appian Downloadables
- Enterprise Checklist: Pave The Path To Digital Prowess With Low-Code Platforms
- The BPM Guide: Accelerating Digital Transformation
- The Case Management Guide
- Appian Product Overview
- Appian Premier Support
- Deliver Customer Experience Excellence
- Appian for Employee Experience
- Appian Intelligent Contact Center™ Platform
- The Total Economic Impact™ Of Appian
- The 2021 Ultimate Low-Code Automation Buyer's Guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(268)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Appian has proven to be a versatile and valuable tool for a wide range of use cases across various industries. Users and customers have reported success in automating business processes, improving productivity, and streamlining operations. Organizations have utilized Appian to replace manual paper-based systems, enabling online applications, document uploads, and simultaneous stakeholder reviews. This has greatly enhanced collaboration and cross-referencing of applications between different organizations.
In the healthcare sector, Appian has been instrumental in automating patient registration, diagnosis, and treatment workflows, eliminating paper-based processes and connecting patients with doctors and departments in a faster and more streamlined way. The platform has also been widely used for low code development and migrating older applications to the Appian code base. Additionally, Appian's capabilities in digital transformation and data analysis have allowed departments to study their own data and generate insightful reports.
Users have found Appian to be particularly beneficial for managing processes in areas such as trade reporting, client mailing process automation, onboarding new hires, workforce planning, case management, consumer marketing lists generation, CRM management, retail store remodeling, and even setting up cafes. They appreciate its ability to simplify complex tasks, automate mundane processes, and integrate with various systems. Furthermore, reviewers have commended Appian for its performance and scalability in handling large volumes of data and processes.
Overall, Appian's flexibility, customization options, user-friendly interface, collaboration features, advanced analytics capabilities, seamless integration with other systems, and overall capability for rapid development and deployment have made it a reliable choice for organizations looking to streamline operations and improve efficiency.
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.
Inflexible and Expensive License Model: Some users have found the license model of Appian to be inflexible and expensive, making it challenging for them to include end customer processes due to limitations in named user licenses or big bang packages.
Limited Exporting and Data Analysis Capabilities: Reviewers have mentioned limitations on exporting data to Excel, causing inconvenience for users who need to analyze large amounts of data. They have also encountered issues with the date-time stamp of exported data, leading to problems in data analysis.
Steep Learning Curve and Technical Limitations: Users have highlighted a learning curve associated with the different paradigms in Appian and experienced technical limitations when using certain browsers, particularly with date controls. Workarounds were needed to overcome these limitations.
The most common recommendations from users are:
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Try Appian for quick application development with less resources. Users have found Appian to be a reliable platform for rapidly building applications without requiring excessive time or resources.
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Create evaluation criteria and apply a defined score to each platform for an informed decision. Users suggest defining specific criteria to evaluate different platforms and assigning scores to objectively compare them. This approach helps in making an informed decision when selecting the most suitable platform.
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Develop a small Proof of Concept (POC) to determine the requirements before deploying Appian. Users recommend starting with a small POC to understand the specific requirements and capabilities of Appian within the organization. This allows for a better understanding of how Appian can meet the organization's needs and ensures a successful deployment.
By following these recommendations, organizations can leverage the benefits of Appian and efficiently develop applications while making informed decisions about their technology choices.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(51-75 of 139)- Strong user experience and user interface design capabilities.
- Intuitive platform, making developing simple and enjoyable.
- Fast implementation and the ability to iterate easily with really slick object and application comparisons, as well.
- Appian documentation is really challenging to navigate and contains broken links.
- Appian Community contains valuable information from real developers of Appian, but it is hard to navigate and is disorganized.
- Process modeling screens are challenging to use because the windows are tiny, but there have been some changes to improve this in different releases.
- Not well-suited if your business is going to need very intricate capabilities that are not simple customizable features in Appian.
Appian: An easy way to be closed to the business
- Easy way to develop.
- Good to manage data and generate reports.
- No high programming skills needed.
- Not enough report capabilities.
- Not easy to generate beautiful tools.
- Sometimes rigid.
- Easy to get non-technical people up to speed.
- Compare and deploy means that deployments are simplified and avoid error.
- Integration is generally easy.
- Debugging can be difficult as error messages are not always detailed enough.
- Support is hard to get for individual freelancers and small company business partners.
- The flexibility between desktop and mobile development can sometimes limit specific development toward one platform.
- Simple workflows with approval processes e.g. with e-mail notifications, etc.
- Simple page-able and searchable lists to display data.
- Simple data entry screens.
- Quick implementations.
- Proof of concepts, potentially a very powerful tool.
Not so suited:
- Complex workflows with complex business validation rules.
- Complex integrations or UIs.
Appian - A Great Low-Code Platform
- OOTB UI elements enable quick building of forms
- Low or no code integration creation makes integrating with other sources easy
- Build once, deploy anywhere makes it easy to put an application in users hands, regardless of form factor (desktop, mobile, etc)
- I would like to see more flexibility in Appian's UI components
- We're currently locked in to needing to have a user account if you want to interact with the system - it would be great to be able to have anonymous users
- Appian's RPA capabilities are still growing. I would like to see more user friendly management/creation of RPA processes
A good low-code automation platform
Proficient in Appian application development, process modeling, and user interface. Knowledge and experience in design and development of process model, UI screen design (tempo forms), rules, SAIL (self-assembling interface layer) Interface, Appian records and reports, data management, document management, and expression rules.
- The best part about Appian is the low code experience and ability to link to a number of other applications for reporting, automation, data entry, and even API integration.
- Extremely easy to learn and ramp-up other developers.
- Database management in cloud solutions seems outdated; I'd like to see more options than MySQL.
- Process model designers need to be modernized.
Appian - Great Start
- Workflow
- Automation
- Ease of Use
- Presentation, I think new and innovative ways to present an app is always aprpeciated
Implementing Appian for a PoC
- Building of workflows and UI/UX
- Support/Training
- None found so far, but may do later in the PoC phase
- Not using the standar BPMN 2.0 notation, as they have additional more detailed notation derived from BPMN
The same for data extracts that some users may be interested in where they are given a self service platform to select the data and export.
Appian Review
- Workflows, assigning things to people, and delineating steps
- Providing structure to an organization
- UI design: some things are just clunky--circular references
- Presentation of information is rough in some places.
- Integrations with other tools such as ESRIs Portal
- Easy to develop new forms and workflows
- Easily manage security
- UI is slick
- Development can be done without any special software installed on developers' machines
- Appian does not scale up and down without adding physical hardware.
- Have to size your environment for peak loads even when the majority of the time it will sit idle
- No way to refresh non-prod environments from prod as well as spin up temporary sandboxes
Product Development with Appian
- Cloud implementation.
- Low code platform.
- Quick implementation to benefit.
- Less consulting resources vs competitors.
- Basic usability use cases in the platform for example difficult to remove defunct groups.
- In-flight upgrade of process model not as sophisticated vs some competitors.
- Tuning of performance/response times can be challenging.
Not all roads to success lead to Appian
- Speed: you can design something on the front end and show it to the client within a few hours for feedback.
- Weird quirks: There are some weird quirks that Appian has that are not well documented.
- Process modeling as a developer: There are many improvements with the GUI that could be made to make it easier to develop process models.
- Ease of building modern uniformed and dynamic UI.
- Web services support.
- In-place testing.
- Ability to extend application with usage of custom plug-ins.
- Unstable and sometimes forgiving and/or implied behavior for various complex language constructs, especially involving collections processing.
- Inability to customize UI only for a specific platform (e.g. Desktop) given priority to the notion of the universal platform support (desktop, tablet, mobile).
- Run-time error descriptions are not really helpful in many circumstances.
- The low-code environment is not low-code at all if you need to build UI of relatively medium complexity.
Appian Review for Company-Wide Work Flows
- Automatic Email Task Notification: Very simple with almost no code required.
- Task Escalation: If a user has not completed a task within a certain time frame, tasks can be automatically escalated on a set schedule.
- One platform for development. The majority of what is developed for the Internet browser will translate seamlessly to a mobile device. Developers are maintaining code for a browser application and a mobile device application.
- Easy to develop applications and re-use code for multiple applications.
- Better integration with external DB other than SQL Server.
- Export limit of data to Excel needs to be increased.
- Date/time stamp of exported data into Excel fix.
Robust BPM
Currently, being used by one large size department.
- Very intuitive development.
- Open platform that can easily integrate to any external system.
- Great product releases updates every Q.
- Excellent customer support.
- Shortens the development cycle and allows faster delivery.
- They can do much better in terms of training for developers. Online resources are of low quality. Training should be improved with more in-depth hands-on technical sessions offered free of charge.
- Need to follow up on the customer journey, especially in the early implementation phase, with direct communication regardless of the company size.
Appian is our enabler of Automation
We made the selection of Appian in order to meet two primary objectives, one to replace older expensive technologies that no longer satisfied our objectives and to implement new processes to provide improved processing efficiencies for our associates and clients.
- Rapid development of working code
- Process orchestration
- Integration with external systems
- Support for code deployment (continuous delivery/continuous deployment)
- Support for complex user interface behaviors
- Better support for code development when required
Appian is also suited for small to medium applications suitable for a business unit and business capability.
Appian is built to accelerate your success
- Student: providing all kinds of solutions like portfolio, scheduling, student records, and general support for many activities for student success
- Faculty and Staff: travel requests, faculty evaluations, and assignments, Tenure and Promotion, HR Onboarding, etc.
- Bringing data together from the different source systems to build actionable information
- Fast implementation - low code
- Looking for weaknesses to improve their product
- No standard programming knowledge
- No pool of developers available
It is not a specialized tool. If you are looking for an advanced CRM, buy a CRM rather than trying to build your own. Focus on letting other tools what they do best, and integrate with Appian.
Appian Rocks!
- Follow business processes
- Customize the display to the current user and show them relevant information
- Integrate with just about anything
- Appian has new releases every 3 months, and it's hard to find anything it doesn't do well.
Where Appian falls short is in data crunching or vast data visualizations, as it was not designed for that. While it can do those things, there are better tools for them.
Appian user's review
- Keeps track of the 'who' and 'what' and 'when' various tasks are completed.
- Helps us make sure steps are not missed/skipped in a process.
- Makes it easier to show an audit trail.
- Make it easier for any 'normal' user to create their own workflows with minimal training. The easier it is to rollout use of the tool, the more it would be used even just to help with an individual's or team's personal/team use.
It is not a great idea to use appian if the process, inputs, users, etc., are constantly changing - you can quickly find yourself always in a development lifecycle of an always-changing process.
Appian - perfect tool for our ongoing business transformation
- quick mockup simple forms to show end user how the data will flow.
- task setup based on time or other triggers works very well with the the SLA reporting streamlining teams performances.
- real time information now available and we can pro actively resolve issues now and inform our customers that issues are resolved before they actually knew the issue existed.
- whole Appian Version updates require our full change team to do UAT. There should be an automated tool provided by Appian to highlight what processes will be affected by the version update.
- we have issues with time/date conversion to Australian standard time as some of the time stamps are based on Washington DC time. This makes GAP analysis when issues reported by end-users challenging some times.
- certain default form layouts cannot be amended to our needs and require a total new sprint to get exactly what we need - which again is time and money we need to invest and something a change request on a form should do the trick
TrustAppian
- It's easy to configure/customize.
- It provides a consistent workflow across multiple pages/functions.
- It's designer interface allows for quick troubleshooting.
- There are places that come out-of-the-box that we can't customize, especially the user profile which sometimes, depending on the country/region privacy requirements, we need to be able to modify.
- There are places where brute force or hard coding is necessary
Not appropriate: Huge, complex business processes that would involve multiple users across a single transaction.
Appian user and liking it
- Easy to use
- Easy to debug
- Easy to get people onboard
- low code
- Dashboards on appian data
- Include option to use bots
- native dashboards with tableau integration
- actual low-code effort which can be created by business users and not by IT
- integrate it with sharepoint
With the rise of other low code BPM applications, Appian needs to keep pace with RPA, OCR, NLP and other associated technologies. They should make dashboards easy to construct as well.
Appian FTW
- As a developer, the fact that the entire platform is web based, is invaluable. I can work from anywhere that I can access the Internet.
- Like any other platform, Appian is constantly adding new features. It's a con that is also a benefit. You really have to stay on top of all the new offerings.
Transform to a Digital platform
- Responsive UI
- Records
- Backend integration
- Customer relationship management
- Have industry specific frameworks which reduce implementation timeline
Appian IS transformative
- Appian is great for sharing information across processes. The platform is designed such that objects from one application can be simply referenced in another (if your security permits it, of course.) This makes information sharing across processes quite simple from a technical implementation perspective.
- Development cycles on Appian are shorter as compared to traditional methods. We're able to churn out solutions at a higher velocity.
- Building a user interface is fast and simple. It has limited widgets but meets our needs 95% of the time out of the box. Appian regularly enhances there UI capabilities.
- Appian has drag and drop UI building, so a proficient Appian designer can build the interface in real time along side the business stakeholders.
- Advanced functionality requires use of the Appian expression language. The more advanced the logic, the harder it is to build with the expression language. This means development expertise is more relevant if you need advanced functionality, which I imagine applies almost all the time. I would much prefer if they allowed some common language such as JavaScript out of the box.
- Debugging has proved difficult. It’s easy for developers to get the app to or feature to a “working” state but it needs robust alpha testing.
- Deployment can be tricky. When a solution gets big and there are many teams and dependencies, it needs a careful process to ensure things don’t break.
- Reasuability of Appian objects is both a pro and con. Reusing objects across apps may be more trouble than its worth because of creating heavy dependencies. Experience is helpful to strike the right balance.
Appian Review
- Organization of data into an easily, readable format.
- Providing different levels of access, depending on the role of the user.
- Being able to develop UIs without having to use code.
- I am a new user to Appian, and am not too familiar with the product just yet to find a weakness.