Item: Appian
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Appian is being used to run a specific business line. It is the application used by our business users to manage our customer rentals and vehicle maintenance. We use Appian to provide APIs used by our eCommerce website. It is used as the source of record for the whole business line.

Pros and Cons

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

Return on Investment

It allowed us to quickly build features, which immediately helped onboard new customers. The number of new customers in a month doubled.

Support Rating

Appian support engineers are very knowledgeable. They are quick to respond to the average ticket. Their monitoring can be improved to detect an outage before we do. My experience is our monitors detect an outage before theirs and therefore we are reporting it to them. The good news is there are rarely outages.

Usability

Appian is slick and easy to use from both a developer and an end-user standpoint. It is easy to navigate, easy to manage security, and easy to monitor and debug running processes.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) and Salesforce Community Cloud

The biggest pros of Salesforce are:
- the ability to create sandboxes
- refresh data from prod to sandbox
- auto-scaling

The pros of Appian are:
- cost
- no limit on API calls
- great professional services teams
- easy to get support when there is an issue
- ability to customize things like adding a VPN and connections to external databases

Other Software Used

Jira Software, ServiceNow

Likelihood to Recommend

You can develop new workflows quickly using Appian and deployments are easy. It is easy to build slick UI forms. If you need to continuously refresh non-prod data from production, Appian is not well suited for this. Appian also does not allow you to create sandboxes. If you need an environment that will scale up and down with peak loads automatically, then Appian is not well suited either.

Appian is slick and easy to use with room to grow

Overall Satisfaction with Appian