OutSystems

The Outsystems development environment it very easy to use for anyone with previous development experience as well as being a great place for those with little or no development experience to come up to speed quickly.
• Allows fast prototyping whilst keeping good consistency and a polished appearance
• Provides a good balance between continual deployment and traditional dev-qa-prod staging
• Enforces inter module dependency integrity
• Enabled good UI-Business-Data separation whilst still allowing for RAD
• Good merging and conflict detection when multiple devs are working within the same module
• Projects and applications are rock solid and stable once released
• Easy to bring non Outsystems developers up to speed
• Realy good certification and training material

• Priced at the high end and not cost effective for small scale development
• Shows some signs of instability in the publishing process with very large and complex projects
• On the PaaS version you are heavily restricted on access to the infrastructure and cannot get access to simple functions such as SQL replication or database maintenance options.
• Lack of skilled developers with pre existing Outsystems knowledge.

Speed of development is insane. Outsystems really cuts dev time to a minimum. The speed that you can build things from the Functionality that is built into the system is really good. I use the platform at work for web dev. But it offers app dev as well and for android and ios in one build. No need to build different builds or versions for different platforms. One build covers android and ios. Overall there functionality is fantastic.

It get's kind of complex as you get more in depth as to what it is you are capable of doing with the platform. But like everything you can be average or great and if you wanna be great you gonna have to put in the time to learn.
The biggest personal downfall of the system is that it takes away a lot of the actual coding. For me this is more of a preference as I personally love to sit and crunch code myself. And you can build with code in there program but there's really no point unless you doing something extremely custom because they have already built in the functionality. The system overall is great, really simple and drag and drop.

It's nice to see that OS is improving each day. The training videos and webinars are a real benefit for the new developers. The easy drag and drop technique is so nice to work with. I don't hate coding but this is just some much better. For around 1.5 year I started with the OS Cloud service that is free available for everyone. OS did a real good job to open a free possibility to let you play around with their software.

I think the main market for OS are the big companies with 250+ employees. By opening a cloud environment they let you use the application for free. Only if you have a company with for example 1 till 50 employees there is no solution for you. The license is that expansive that it's not possible to pay for small companies and the cloud environment is not for production use. I think this could be improved to also fill the gap in between free and real expensive.