What do you like best about the product?

Development of business applications as well as customer facing applications is fast and relatively simple to do in OutSystems. Prototyping is easy and it takes a lot of standard development work out of a developer's hands. This means more time to work on parts of software that really distinguish your application from others. If you set up the architecture in the right way, development is even more faster because the reuse of components.
OutSystems has a Forge which offers a variety of plugins that are mostly free to use. This makes it easy to extend your factory and you don't have to program functionality yourself.

OutSystems offers template screens, web applications and even mobile apps. This is a great way to start building applications fast. The components from OutSystemsUI are easy to use and offer all the functionality needed, in most cases. And if not, search the Forge or build it yourself.

Learning OutSystems is easy. It offers a lot of (online) courses and guided paths. When following and completing a guided path, developers are able to put their knowledge into practice. Ofcourse, as always, they'll still make mistakes and will get better when gaining experience.

The OutSystems Community offers a lot of support. Reactions are fast and fellow developers often create little pieces of sample software in order to help. That's a very big advantage. Community members are all about helping everyone making to most of their experience with OutSystems and delivering value to their business. Not only the community members, but also OutSystems customer support reacts fast en is very willing to help.

Last but not least, OutSystems has AI infused into the platform. With the help of AI, OutSystems makes suggestions for the next component to use in a flow when developing applications, based on best practices and frequently used pattens. Tools like AI Mentor Studio help to monitor the quality of your factory and technical debt.

All and all, it's an outstanding platform.

What do you dislike about the product?

Ofcourse, like most platforms, there are also a couple of downsides. While the Forge offers a wide range of plugins that you can use, the quality of support on these plugins varies. Even for some plugins that are supported by OutSystems. On top of that, one would expect that some functionality which is considered standard nowadays, would be out of the box available but isn't. Ofcourse, it can be created yourself but still.

Error messages aren't always clear and it doesn't take all work out of your hands. You still have to think really carefully about things like UX and architecture. OutSystems lets you create software very fast and because of that, it can also let you make a mess very fast.

Finally, the licencing costs are high, especially for smaller projects and companies and they increase disproportionate.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We bought OutSystems as innovation platform. It's mainly used to digitalize, optimize and increase efficiency for internal business processes