OutSystems vs. Xamarin

OutSystems excels with building web interfaces fast and lends itself to custom integrations written in .Net. Most anything can be brought in given this ability to be extended. One of the drawbacks to the speed of development is that most quality control teams become quickly overwhelmed and may be unable to keep up.

Incentivized

Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.

Incentivized

• Deployment management – OutSystems has a built in robust, multi-environment deployment system that helps ensures the clean and error free deployment of applications through the development, testing and production product lifecycle
• Rapid application development – Through the low code, graphical development environment you can develop applications far quicker than with more traditional development environments
• Cross platform mobile development – OutSystems handle the development and building of mobile application for both iOS and Android in a simple streamlined way that removes 90% of the problems normally associated with multi platform development

Incentivized

• We save development time with Xamarin, because we use Xamarin Forms an so we can share most of the code over 3 platforms.
• We can use our C# knowledge to develop iOS and Android Apps.
• Xamarin's integration into Visual Studio is very good and became even better during the last releases of Visual Studio.

Incentivized

• The platform controls all the parts. While great for development and overall maintenance, it could lead to discussions with your DBA (who has to trust the platform). As a developer I love the platform, as a DBA I would like more control.
• By making software development model driven using flows, you are forced to rethink the way of programming. It makes it easier, but sometimes the way of working leads to code which could be optimized (standard problem in model based software development).
• Most of the code is generated, so the technical knowledge of the inner working of coding are not Essentials. This could lead to degration of this knowlegde. As part of this, most technologies will only be used when OutSystems supports it. They do a good job on implementing these things. But things like Node.js would be nice.

• Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.
• Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.
• The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.

Incentivized

We are very happy with OutSystems and our developers deliver good work. OutSystems lets us build new software on a regulare (2 weekly) basis, which is highly flexible and adjustable. Even without very much experience, our developers manage to build usefull software, which is working a lot better than our previous (legacy) software.

Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.

Incentivized

OutSystems has a feature in which we can develop a functionality in a application and can use that functionality in another application without developing it again. That is main plus point for the development team so they can work with different functionalities rather focusing on the same thing again and again. if we want to make any change on the user side then we can make it live with just the deployment using the service center.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done

Incentivized

The tech support is very reachable. Usually by [email] from but also by phone if needed. We had some difficulties at the start with understanding "what our machine was doing" under high performance load. After some good sessions understanding our needs they delivered good solutions for our problems we had in the beginning.

I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow

Incentivized

Excellent material full of hands on that improve the understanding of the platform.

The online training material is well designed and explanations are step by step, helping trainees to understand and follow each exercise and new concept.

In a large company, patiently and consistently work the behind the scenes politics with business and IT partners across the firm.
This is transformational - you will need a solid set of key business partners to lock arms together to move forward.

Incentivized

Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.

Incentivized

Totally different products of cource. Sitecore is best suited for full fledged websites with extensive support for analytics. OutSystems for modular business processes with a UI. Hence, there is no overlap. But even for small websites, or even landingpages, I would recommend OutSystems, with a custom made analytics part or a plugin.

Incentivized

Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.

Incentivized

• The ease of use of the OutSystems development process has been the biggest ROI for us. We have developed our Framework product and maintained/enhanced it with only 4 workers.
• OutSystems has enhanced their product very significantly over the last 4 years. They have gone from a simple to use tool to a very simple to use sophisticated tool that covers the standard mainframe-based computing apps and the apps used on handheld mobile devices all using the same basic set of development tools.

Incentivized

• Code Sharing - We were able to launch an Android implementation of our app within weeks after finishing iOS. The amount of time taken to develop a new platform is very small.
• Monetization - not the best, but definitely getting better. We've had issues with finding suitable ad networks that work with Xamarin.

Incentivized