Appian, almost there, but not quite...
Updated March 06, 2019
Appian, almost there, but not quite...
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Appian
We are using Appian at Sunsuper to upgrade and solve a lot of business processes. We are currently moving away from older technologies and manual processes. It allows our company to automate a lot of super related operations that always required manual input and turning an operation that took days to just minutes.
- Allows the use of BPMN to describe and implement a business process. Its not pure BPMN 2.0, but does the job nicely in most cases.
- Forms can be build relatively easily and with 19.1 and will allow for a lot of flexibility in the layout too.
- The ability to build Java plugins where needed is a huge benefit as there are very few solutions that can't be implemented using Appian.
- Can port to multiple platforms relatively easily.
- Database access is abstracted away, so trivial to move from one DB engine to another.
- The new objects to allow connections to web services is very nicely done and handles OAuth very well.
- No source control. In 19.1 they have included very minimal source control, but basically if you want to use GIT etc. you might be out of luck.
- Very minimal debugging.
- Appian boasts it is "low code", but it is anything but, especially if you want to do anything non trivial. To Appian's defence on this one, I've not seen any framework that is truely "low code". I've also noticed Appian's marketing has moved away from this.
- Very hard to install and upgrade. This should be easy, but very hard to get right, very easy to mess up.
- Doesn't scale easily, this again is a lot of hard work to get right and hard to maintain.
- Automation of business processes
- Time taken per process
- Update and expand those processes