Pros and Cons of Appian

Branching. Not possible with Appian out of the box. This can create difficulties when attempting to manage a code base for a minor release and major release including the eventual merging of the major and minor release code bases. Although I heard some rumors that this is being worked on. For simpler projects / applications this isn't a big issue. For larger and more complex applications it can be a challenge.

I would recommend reviewing the available contents on academy.appian.com. There are tutorial videos that go over some of the benefits of Appian when it comes to building applications.

Disadvantages will mostly be use case specific. For example, if your system is required to process bulk data, Appian is not necessarily the ideal tool for doing so. This isn't a disadvantage to most applications built in Appian, but it does impact some. I'm sure there are other disadvantages, most of these can be overcome through plugins or integration development.

Hi Ravi,

I will add my experience here,

1) We can use Appian for small scale apps to medium scale apps. It might not be good idea for using to large/huge enterprise applications because there is lot of data flowing in and out. This could be over come using developing custom plugins (this could be simplify the burden on what you are trying to achieve like you want to achieve a functionality where you want to apply huge logic on it where you can accomplish it with using multiple scripts tasks. in this scenario you can relay on plugin where you can write your huge logic and you can just use it out here as simple expression/smart service) and you may need to relay on the DB stuff when you are going for bulk uploads and retrievals using SP's or views.

2) As the Appian is built on some other open source like Java platform. You can integrate your own logic which can be developed in java and then just plug it with appian that's it you can achieve any functionality using this.

3) You can also find few things which may not be possible in current version and Appian is keep growing and trying to do as much as possible to implement new things in the feature version.

4) You can see other tools similar to appian are available in the market but you can get Appian at lower cost then others. As of now market suggest that Appian is 2nd in BPM/Case Management Lane.

5) Appian is good for everything unless as other folks suggested that there is little back branching and the full automation of deployments.

6) As soon as you follow Appian best practice and standards then Appian works as expected. If you have complex customer use case then performance may vary depends on the approach you take when you want to implement logic around complex functionality.

Hope this may help.

Hi Shanmukha,

Thanks for sharing your views about Appian’s best suited cases. While the simplicity of the Appian platform can quickly address any enterprise application requirements, the platform is particularly designed to handle large enterprise deployments. I would like to share some resources available for guiding you into how Appian scales at large enterprise deployments, some tips and share some of the latest features such as “Parallel Evaluation of Expressions” which many of our customers leverage to take advantage of multi-core processing power up to 100 CPU processing cores and deliver best-in-class scalability and performance.

Enterprise Architecture Overview:
This page explains how Appian works as part of an enterprise solution. It includes:
An overview of the core components of the Appian suite
How Appian interacts with other software and systems in the enterprise
How these components work together to provide features for end users, application designers, and administrators

docs.appian.com/.../Enterprise_Architecture_Overview.html

Scaling Appian:
As you build more applications and add more users to your Appian installation, you might find that the sizing and scaling decisions that you made during your initial deployment no longer meet the demand that this increased load places on your system. So it's time to revisit those decisions and scale up your installation to meet this new demand. This guide will walk you through several options for doing that, including which options are best for which situations and how to know which options are most applicable to you.

docs.appian.com/.../Scaling_Appian.html

High Availability for Appian Cloud:
Appian Cloud offers the ability to run in a high-availability (HA) configuration. An HA configuration protects your Appian instance from downtime in the event of a service failure (a software component of Appian fails), a server failure (the hardware that Appian runs on fails), or an AWS availability zone failure (the data center that Appian runs in fails).
This is achieved by replicating data across three AWS availability zones.

docs.appian.com/.../High_Availability_for_Appian_Cloud.html

Parallel Evaluation of Expressions:
In order to evaluate expressions faster, Appian automatically evaluates queries in parallel. So instead of waiting for each query to evaluate one after another, independent queries will be evaluated at the same time if there are additional resources available, reducing the overall time it takes to evaluate the expression. This includes database queries, web service calls, custom plugins, and even Appian functions that query data stored within Appian.

docs.appian.com/.../Expressions.html

Optimizing Interfaces:
Interfaces can vary immensely in terms of what they do and how they do it. To optimize a particular interface, you must understand how its specific characteristics impact each phase of an interface evaluation.

docs.appian.com/.../SAIL_Performance.html

Thanks again for sharing your views. Appian is able to meet a wide variety of use cases for both small
and large enterprise needs. It is always recommend also to utilize the Appian Playbook when planning your implementation of Appian, which provides guides for the many considerations when starting a new project. This can be found under the Appian Support page in community.

community.appian.com/.../

Regards,

Arturo