Vinyl is a modern, user-friendly platform that provides a clean and intuitive interface for coding, creating, and testing software applications. It offers a wide range of features including a powerful code editor, a visual debugger, integration with Github, and a built-in version control system. Additionally, Vinyl provides collaboration features that allow developers to work together on projects seamlessly, with live code sharing and real-time collaboration tools.
Capabilities |
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, On-Premise Linux, On-Premise Windows |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
Simply put - Their people and their platform, both of equal value and importance. How adaptable and relatively easy to use their Low Code platform is. I tested more than 10 other products over a 2 month period, and was feeling quite hopeless until I stumbled across Zudy. The closest matches in our testing were outsystems and appsheet (for our particular needs), both of those options were far too costly for a start up. I was particularly fond of appsheet for its ease of use but, struggled to get a response from their sales team, and then learned of the $15k per year sql cost. Vinyl was a perfect match for our needs and future growth needs. Beyond the product itself, the people and support are amazing. They are a shining example of how every new customer onboarding experience should be with a software platform. I have 20 years experience in ERP/CRM and backend systems and their process was by far the best I've ever experienced.
It's been a fresh and pleasant surprise to find this company, no issues at all in the first 3 months. I received help daily from their support team. They even setup a dedicated slack support channel where I can tap into their support team for random questions.
Building out a custom CRM and customer portal that taps into our backend data. Their tools allow for easy integration to a ton of backend data sources.
They listened to our needs, offered suggestions to make the application user friendly and delivered very timely.
Using zoom sometimes make it hard to convey exact needs.
Vinyl has built a user friendly application that helps us meet the CDC requirements need for Covid screening for our employees. We are able to use technology to not only screen the employees, and also keep records of questions answered as well as temperatures.
The communication and effectiveness of the team. How quickly they work through issues.
I have no complaints about Martyn’s team.
Database driven schedules and management. Across 10+states and 300+ employees. Different time zones and complex scheduling.
Support. This company has great support! Coupling that with an intuitive easy to use platform, our staff has fallen in love with Vinyl.
Is it necessary to dislike something about a great tool? We really don't have any real dislikes about Vinyl. Each upgrade gives us more capabilities than we could have ever dreamed up.
Time, Time and Time. The reason we are using a no code platform is to enable faster development for complicated applications on multiple platforms.
The challenge at the business level is the IT can build things, but they don't understand the business need/intent/problem. The Vinyl team not only has the tool, but the people to partner to provide the business what they need that provides better data and frees up workload for executives.
The tool is all positive from our side - no negatives.
1. Where our oversold issues are with Amazon and what the opportunity is 2. Weekly orders by account/sales people going from a very manual process to a very simple automated self serve portal. Terrific.
As a non developer, vinyl software is very easy to use. We are creating apps in short spaces of time compared to the months and months some coded apps take. Zudy also provide us with support from all pages we are working on and encourage us to suggest new features we would like to see in new versions of Vinyl. In addition to this, new features are being added all the time and you can use the provided 'wiki' to learn more about them and how to use them. Vinyl also allows the development team to work remotely using collaborative development as it is accessed online. This means multiple developers can work on it at the same time and any changes made will immediately be available to the other developers.
Documentation currently has to be done manually so it can take up some of the developers 'developing' time. Providing this is done along side the development documentation should be thorough and the client will have opportunities to approve of this regularly, at their convenience.
As far as I have seen there is a solution to everything with Vinyl. as long as you have the required data. The client should be open with the consultant as to what they want to see in their app and by working together you can achieve the app you envisioned.
Vinyl has the ability to quickly connect to many different data sources and other services. This allows information from disparate systems to be presented easily in one place and enables integration with any number of legacy or third-party systems.
In the past, the front-end page design look and feel wasn't quite as customizeable as desired. However, new capabilities are added with every framework upgrade, and the ability to easily apply themes and design aesthetics is constantly improving.
With Vinyl, we've gotten to minimum viable product for applications in a couple months instead of 12+ months! That has allowed us to replace legacy systems which didn't grow with our business and which limited our responsiveness to change. Some of these include new apps for: - Managing custom "Made to Measure" garment orders - Garment Alteration management - In-Store Task Management - Enhanced In-Store Item Inquiry With Vinyl, we've been able to respond to changing demands of the business with new apps and updates to apps in weeks or months instead of years.
Vinyl's speed to deploy really amazed our business. We went from a rough concept to Pilot program very quickly (weeks). It was flexible enough to meet all of our business requirements and we were able to gain efficiency that saved us time and resources along the way.
Buy in and involvement from the Business up front is key. This can be very difficult but will pay dividends in the long run. Customized user guides would also be beneficial.
Vinyl solved two main problems for us; Capacity and resourcing. Originally, we used an outdated platform that had limited scalability, flexibility and required our IT department involvement to run the day to day business. Once the full transition to Vinyl was completed, we were able to increase our output with 1/2 of the resources (none IT) in the same amount of time. This platform empowered the business to meet and exceed customers expectation without requiring the usual drawn out IT processes and implementation. We are now working to implementing this tool across our full business unit.
I manage the Vinyl portfolio at my company and I have grown to become very impressed with the quickness of implementations, quality of applications and the attentive customer service from the Zudy project team. The numerous applications we have implemented has proven to enhance the quality of work and improve efficiencies, which are key results from automating operational processes and reducing resource hours and efforts. It helps that the Zudy team follows a standard process for implementing projects, enhancements and quick fixes. This has allowed us to hit our timeline in an efficient way and ensure transparency with those involved.
Financially, the implementations are pretty costly but you would have to consider the quality of work produced and improvements made overtime. I would recommend an ROI analysis to ensure you're getting the "bang for your buck". In addition too, the Vinyl implementations have questioned our internal abilities to deliver quick and quality products within our own IT Department. It's pretty difficult to compare "apples to oranges" / "no-code apps to configurable apps" so it's necessary to explain the difference often. This is an opportunity to learn from Zudy and implement some best practices.
What business problems are we not solving! We are nearing two years since we have collaborated with Zudy. Since then, we have implemented about 10 applications along with many improvements and quick fixes. As time goes on, more and more business users learn about "Vinyl" and/or "Zudy", they hear about the amazing work delivered and the improvements our internal and external customers experienced. We are seeing many benefits across multiple departments – people are catching on and want a piece of it.
Vinyl makes it incredibly easy to translate business requirements into a functional application. Implementations and iterations happen quickly compared to other development platforms which enables me to react quickly to changing business needs.
As a former front end developer, I've found that my go-to toolbox of UI tricks are not necessarily the right way to implement styling changes. That said, the application has made it incredibly easy to customize the client side appearance without requiring me to decipher thousands of lines of CSS.
Product processing seems to be one business problem that arises fairly often for my team. Using Vinyl, we can create an application in a matter of days which is custom tailored to a specific process instead of bending a process around the limitations of an existing application. Additionally, because Vinyl allows us to integrate seamlessly with multiple and varied legacy systems, we can better focus on the actual business problem.
Before working with Vinyl I had very limited experience in app development. The speed and power that we gain through using Vinyl has been incredible to witness and be a part of. Even with all of the abilities which vinyl possesses, it remains a simple and straight forward tool to use. Learning to build apps within vinyl has been so much fun and allows for quick and collaborative creations.
Sometimes I do get confused with terminology used within vinyl but as I have worked with the tool more it is becoming very simple to understand the language used.
Vinyl allows for extremely quick development of complex and customizable applications.
Easy to use. Easy to build. Easy to deploy. Build applications from the ground up in days instead of months. Leverage existing data or start from scratch. This tool allows me to build solutions. I do not waste time debugging code.
Documentation within the tool could be more robust.
Using vinyl to build new front end against old data. Easiest and fastest way to get business users the tools and features they need to do their job. Retire old applications one at a time instead of trying to rewrite everything all at once. Vinyl is very iterative. We sit with the business for a few hours and get the high level overview of what the issue is. We spend a day or two building the prototype and come back and show the business the result. This spurs conversation and we take another day or two to incorporate those changes. Rinse and repeat. You get buy-in from the business because they are involved in the process.
The ability to code without coding allowed me to quickly learn the platform without learning a completely new language. Additionally, the light integration capabilities of Vinyl allows developers to connect to different systems and platforms brings data together in one easy to use and intuitive interface.
To date, there is nothing that I dislike about Vinyl.
Vinyl removes business technology problems. Being able to quickly provide a scaleable, customizable web application tailored for a business process has proven to be an invaluable, robust tool. Pre-existing business data is leveraged to its fullest extent given the light integration that Vinyl provides.
Myself and our company are relatively new to Vinyl, but with moderate exposure and minimal knowledge, i can see the full potential this product has to enable us to digitally transform our business. It's easily accessible, highly customizable by users who are not developers and agile. What I like best is that it's EASY to use. It's clean, consistent and the IDE is not too complex. This can enable those who don't have a strong developer background to be successful. And the Zudy team have talented individuals who continue to improve it.
I can see how in some cases or for some businesses, the look and feel can be "too simple." However, I have not had a lot of exposure to the "cosmetic" side of app designing.
We're giving users a better opportunity to access data without having to VPN in, utilize remote desktop connection and wait for a clunky ERP to load. Employee satisfaction is a significant benefit from using Vinyl. As we continue to build more apps, the benefits will continue to grow.
VINYL combines the best parts of a sandbox environment and a structured application infrastructure. Because of its open-ended nature, it's easy for enterprises to run a variety of backoffice processes in a single platform, without having to conform to the process constraints of something that was only built to specifically serve one or two functions. But unlike many other open solutions that require you to know how to play with the backend coding to customize the platform, VINYL allows you to change those features within the platform itself, making it more accessible to more people.
Not much. Every now and then, some of the open-endedness can seem overwhelming, but there are resources in place to help manage and navigate.
VINYL makes it easier to go through the process of employee management, payroll, etc. Rather than having different platforms for, say, hours vs expenses, there is now one convenient place to organize and calculate everything.
In my experience, I really appreciate Vinyl's ability to connect to multiple sources and consolidate the information in a succinct and valuable manner. I also appreciate accessing Vinyl via a web browser, and hence it's platform flexibility. The API integration is very helpful when interfacing with numerous other applications and extracting information for consumption. Leveraging HTML, CSS, and other formatting options, the possibilities are endless in regards to the look and feel of Vinyl, which is great for customers. Vinyl can be highly customized and personalized down to the user. Avoiding the need to code is not just less troublesome, it is also makes development a lot quicker, which is of utmost importance for customers who's time is of utmost importance. And all customers want a quick turn around, in my experience.
There are two major functions I believe would make the usability and overall perceived and realized value of Vinyl increase: a better visual representation of the sql processes (tables, joins, etc.) and the ability to input raw sql code and have Vinyl build DO's, sub Qs, etc. These are small request compared to what I can already do.
As a developer, I have been solving many different types of problems including order review and tracking, scheduled workflow emails, customer management, business intel, and scheduling to name a few. I anticipate and hope to leverage the platform to perform other tasks like automated ordering, inventory management, and more complicated workforce management.
VINYL sits in our network on a very small environment, and it doesn't require a lot of infrastructure. Almost everything it needs sits on its own server, and it just works. It talks to all our other systems and brings their data into one place, where we can do almost anything we want with it.
VINYL has an awkward initial interface. Once you've learned it, it's pretty easy, but guessing what some of the terms in the IDE mean can be really hard.
We're combining a bunch of different systems to cross-reference the data in them, and provide a single view to our users. We've also been able to start storing entirely new data in the system as well. Vinyl provides a key "glue" to connect other commercial systems that are customized for a particular type of users, but are required for another type of user.
Coming from a background with no Computer Science, programing language or database experience I was blown away at how quickly I have been able to learn VINYL to make applications from scratch.
I wish that there was an option to view table joins visually with the lines drawn between tables. But, once I was able to learn the correct time/place for each join the need for this feature has kind of gone away.
I have used VINYL to build and improve applications in multiple industries including: Men's custom suits, automotive recall, medical recall and insurance.
VINYL is able to connect with what seems like an endless amount of data sources. The speed to get a feature developed or even an entire app is like nothing else I have ever worked with.
Most complaints have been small things, that have been addressed with new updates that come out frequently.
VINYL is extremely flexible and we have been able to come up with a solution for almost any problem. Apps have ranged from HR and Finance to even Call Center Management.