Item: OutSystems
Rating: 9
Author: Eric De Bruin

Overall Satisfaction with OutSystems

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

OutSystems is used to do innovations and enable access to the massive outdated unsupported monolith system made in Oracle. 4-5 teams are working on this for over a year now.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Simply develop fast and deliver apps so you benefit with extreme short time to market.
Maintainablility is even better compared to traditional development tools.
Work on the same module simultaneously without losing code by useful compare and merge options.
Well working staging / development tooling available in the form of Lifetime.
Fast learning curve, especially for experienced developers bu also for complete newbies.

Cons

Come up with a license model for SME. Now only medium and large companies are in focus. The basic license is just too expensive.
Introduce reporting tooling.

Return on Investment

Like stated before until today there has been a huge boost delivering apps with little effort, but the benefits are declining if you just look at the financial side of it because of the ever-rising license costs.
Apart from that The ROI is about 6 to 12 months in average.

Mendix is getting close to OutSystems but has too many vendor locks. Apart from that Mendix is no way near the current status of OS.
Betty Blocks is more suitable to service SME companies, since the costs are lower but the featureset is way smaller.

Likelihood to Recommend

If vendor software really suites your needs, it can be that you do not need OutSystems, but this is almost never the case. So almost always you can benefit from OS. And of course OS has to be careful not to make the platform too expensive, because then you are only working hard to compete and the great advantages no longer exist.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Build beautifull apps to do anything on any device fast, secure and lean