After many years of producing delicious baked treats for friends and family, our oven stopped working and could not be fixed. In our search for a new one, we researched the options. We read advice from chefs and other baking experts and narrowed our choices down to a few. Then we went online to a trusted website to get reviews of the ovens on our shortlist, looking for the one with the most stars and praise from users. Even better, we checked which vendor provides the best experience after a sale!

This common tale of everyday consumer life has become the norm in enterprise technology purchasing. If you’re a decision-maker in your company, you know the pain of trying to find the ideal technology for your business. Let’s say you’re investing in digital transformation and looking for the best application platform-as-a-service product and vendor. You have a long checklist of specific features you need, as well as a set of well-defined vendor expectations for the goals you want to achieve. You read the best rated tech articles about it, the key analyst reports, and the best case studies, so what are you missing? Where do you get true opinions from other users like you? That is when you realize you need to go to enterprise software review sites like G2Crowd, Gartner Peer Insights, CapTerra, Trust Radius, and GetApp. 

Because what experts write is one thing, but what users say is often quite another. 

What Is Gartner Peer Insights?

Gartner Peer Insights is the leading enterprise technology and vendors review site for IT solutions. Basically, any proven enterprise software user can leave an opinion about a solution or product their enterprise is using. With that kind of description, you might be wondering how much you can trust the reviews. How do you know the person really purchased the solution or even used it?

Well, for one, the sheer volume of reviews adds gravitas to what the users are saying. Think about Amazon shopping, Yelp, and TripAdvisor and how many reviews they have. But even as you scroll through what can be hundreds of comments, you probably have a feeling that some of them just might not be trustworthy.

To increase the trustworthiness of what’s on its site, Gartner Peer Insights does a thorough check of each reviewer and can veto any submission. Although Gartner doesn’t reveal the name of reviewers, it checks LinkedIn profiles and enterprise domains to ensure that those leaving the reviews work where they say they do and are who they say they are. The goal is simple: trust.

This is great news for you if you’re evaluating your next enterprise technology subscription; you are not just buying a product, but you are also committing your company to a service provider. So, you want to know how well they are operating in the market—as rated by its customers. This is where Gartner Peer Insights becomes so valuable. Enterprise users evaluate a product, sure, but they are also asked about the whole scope of the vendor’s relationship with customers, including: 

  • The vendor’s NPS-like rating (net promoter score)
  • Evaluation and contracting
  • Integration and deployment
  • Service and support
  • Product capabilities

It was with this concept in mind that Gartner just launched the Peer Insights Customers’ Choice, or, as I like to call it, the Voice of the Customer Magic Quadrant. But let’s start from the beginning.

What is the Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice?

The Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice distinction recognizes exceptional vendors who get the best  ratings and have consistently outstanding reviews from their customers. It combines the number of reviews for a company versus the company’s overall rating. Why is this so cool, you ask? Because this distinction is a pure market opinion reflection based on an unfiltered collection from many users in various industry and carrying many job titles. Above all, it’s the actual opinion and rating of real enterprise software users on how much would they recommend a specific vendor. 

To be considered for the Customer’s Choice, the vendors need to have 50 or more published reviews in the past 12 months and an average score of 4.2. This allows customers to focus on the short list that matters. For example, in the enterprise hpaPaaS market, only two vendors score this distinction out of 43 rated by users. This market has been growing insanely over the past few years. In the last Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms, Gartner evaluated 43 vendors, including companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Pegasystems. By the time this new distinction was launched, the market had 737 reviews. 

Why Is This Recognition Important? 

Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a new way for prospective buyers to evaluate vendors in any market at the individual level. They’re hearing from actual users and buyers. This goes beyond theories or quadrants. It’s real-world insights from the front lines.  

And, we’re proud to say that OutSystems was named the 2018 Customers’ Choice for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service—in other words, the market’s #1 rated low-code platform provider by customers. 

We had by far the most reviews: 240+ and counting against an average of 20.1 reviews in the category. That is almost 10 times the average service provider in the market. To put things in perspective, vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, or ServiceNow do not get even close, and they claim much bigger customer bases. Why is it that such a small base of their users is positively vocal about their experiences as customers in this market?

But this is more than just a beauty contest of who gets more votes. With a score of 4.5 out of 5 based on 10 times more votes than the average vendor, the OutSystems rating is more than 10 times more reliable than the ratings for vendors with few reviews. Again, if you use Yelp or TripAdvisor, you know what I mean.

But what’s most important to us is this: we’re more than honored to know that our customers are the happiest in the market and think of us as the best platform-as-a service provider. That’s what make us move forward and to keep on innovating to help customers, like the Personal Group PLC, to name one of many, fulfill their goals:

 

"We wanted to accelerate the development of the platform while leveraging the skills and capabilities we had in-house and minimizing the amount of additional technology recruits needed to get the platform to market quickly. We also needed to ensure the platform could service a high and growing number of customers and users. OutSystems and a low-code development environment was the perfect answer."—Ashley Doody, CIO of Personal Group.

 

That’s music to our ears.

Showing Some Customer Love

What’s unique for us is that based on the top five review sites out there, at the time of this award, OutSystems has more than 750 positive reviews. That’s close to 60 percent of our customers who have gone public with their praise for our platform and services, which is exceptionally high. In fact, no other major vendor reached this balance between the number of customers and reviews.

Therefore, it’s fitting to wrap up with some unfiltered customer feedback, here are some of the words our customers have written about us.

OutSystems Brought a Cultural Shift in Our Entire IT Delivery Team

"OutSystems provided all the support and the right people to engage with us for the long evaluation we did on low-code. They were very professional and open and set the context right. No overselling. The culture of OutSystems and their people is also one of the reasons on why we ended up selecting them. They understood exactly what we needed. It was also great to discover how OutSystems has developed a low-code platform which is very developer friendly and how it empowers them—this is very crucial to delivering high standard apps quickly for our end-users.”

—Director, Custom Apps and Collaboration 

OutSystems Delivers What It Promises

"Our company used the platform to do a significant overhaul of IT systems related to our core business. The platform has been able to greatly improve our time-to-market and reduce the size of the development team compared to previous platforms.”

—Developer 

Super Fast Development

"The platform is a game changer in terms of web and mobile development.”

—IT Director 

Excellent Platform to Reduce Development Time

"Moving from Java to the OutSystems platform has reduced our development time anywhere from 25–50 percent . We're very happy with the product and the services that support it.”

—Software Development Manager 

To see more OutSystems reviews, click here. And if you want to know which are the best mobile app development platforms for 2019 according to users, check out this blog post.