Appy Pie vs Bizagi: Which is a better fit?

Ryan E.: Hi, I'm Ryan. I'm an assistant professor and I rate Appy Pie three out of five. For more reviews like this one, click below. My students in my social media marketing class had expressed a lot of interest in building apps for themselves, for companies that they were interning for, for all kinds of reasons, and I wasn't able to find a solution that didn't involve lots of code, and involve tutorials and videos that required a lot of pre-existing knowledge about computers and so forth. So I started looking around to see if I could find a solution, and Appy Pie seemed to be a potential option, and so I figured I'd give it a shot. As I started evaluating options for easy-to-use software that would let my students build apps, I wanted to find a tool that was straightforward and wouldn't require a lot of knowledge of code or programming. After all, my students are advertising and marketing students, they don't necessarily have a background in programming. And so I didn't want to require them to spend money, or time, or effort, or energy dealing with roadblocks and software and things that they were never going to bother with again in the future. So Appy Pie was ultimately what I went with, even though there were two or three other competitors that I looked at. But ultimately Appy Pie won because it had the most straightforward interface, it seemed easiest to use, it was the least confusing, aside from, again, the registration kind of sign up process. But that aside, it is pretty straightforward and intuitive. It's not difficult to build an app at all. Though, again, there are some limitations in terms of what you can do with the free version. Comparing it to its competitors, however, it looks even better because a lot of the competing products that I evaluated had buggy interfaces that didn't seem to work well with my web browser, some of them seemed a little bit sketchy in terms of their overall trustworthiness and so forth. So in the end, Appy Pie seemed like the best option available. Getting started with Appy Pie is not the worst thing in the world, it's a bit of a mixed bag. You do have to set up an account and verify your email address, and jump through a number of annoying hoops in order to be able to preview your creation on an actual phone. And if you skip those steps and jump right to the actual making of the app, it's difficult to go back and get all of that set up again. And I ran into that problem several times with my students, I didn't realize what was going on at the time until I had one of them walk me through it and figured it out. So make sure to follow the sequence of steps that's laid out when you're registering. Once you actually get into the app building software, the web app where you actually start dragging and dropping and clicking and so forth, it's fairly intuitive. There's a very straightforward sort of wizard interface, where you choose a design, choose a color scheme, and start clicking and customizing. So that part's easy, but it does take a little bit of doing to get to that point. If you're thinking about giving Appy Pie a shot, particularly if you're using it in the context that I did, you might want to play around with it for yourself before you introduce it to your students. Not because the learning curve is particularly difficult, but because, as I said, logging in and getting registered has a bit of a futzy-klutzy interface and you might want to just prepare your students for what they're going to encounter. Other than that, it's fairly straightforward, a little bit limited in terms of what you can make and do with the free version, there you can expect to run into some limitations if you're really trying to do something advanced. But for first time use for individuals who have literally no experience with programming or coding, or building an app, it's a really solid choice and it's a great place to start.