The 2025 Appian Developer Report: Inside the Growing Global Community

In this year’s Appian Developer Sentiment Survey, nearly 1,000 Appian developers from six continents shared their insights—a 53% increase from the last survey. The result? The most representative snapshot of the global Appian developer community yet.

This report captures what matters most to you—from views on AI and certifications to career goals and go-to resources—and how these inputs are shaping what’s next for Appian developers.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your experience with Appian. This year’s respondents represented a broad section of the developer community:

• Geography: Developers from six continents participated, with responses from Asia (57%), North America (22%), and Europe (13%).

• Relationship to Appian: Just over half of respondents work at Appian partner companies, while another 28% work for an Appian customer. Others included employees and independent developers.

• Years of experience: Respondent experience ranged from less than one year to more than six years developing with Appian.

Thanks to this wide participation, we’re able to share a fuller picture of the Appian developer community worldwide.

Certification is accelerating careers community-wide. This year, more than 70% of developers surveyed are Appian Certified. Among those of you who aren’t certified yet, a remarkable 86% said they plan to pursue certification.

So why are developers pursuing Appian credentials? The top three motivators are:

• Enhancing professional credibility.

• Validating technical skills.

• Gaining access to promotions and advancement opportunities.

These developers’ investment in certification is helping shape what their Appian careers look like today and where they’ll go next.

Explore Appian Certifications

The Appian developer community is thriving. When asked about careers:

• 80% of developers said they’re satisfied.

• 73% feel that their compensation reflects their skills, experience, and value.

• 70% feel optimistic about their long-term prospects.

• 83% would recommend Appian development to a friend or colleague.

That kind of sentiment stands out. Stack Overflow’s 2024 survey found only 1 in 5 developers describe themselves as happy at work, highlighting how this level of satisfaction is truly exceptional. It’s a testament to the meaningful work you’re doing across industries.

Your confidence in this path also reinforces the value of what we’re building, both in the platform and in the developer experience.

You’re busy building apps, but you’re also learning how to use Appian better. Developers are leaning into Appian’s own ecosystem—Academy Online, Docs, Community, and more—to grow their skills. Nearly 80% of developers rate these resources as “good” or “excellent,” outperforming third-party options. 

And you want more. You requested deeper learning opportunities, live practice sessions, and more structured pathways. These insights are directly influencing our enablement roadmap.

When it comes to the Appian platform itself, the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive:

• 88% would recommend it to others.

• 80% say it’s easier to use than other comparable platforms.

When looking at what Appian does well and where we can keep leaning in, you value:

• Robust features that expand what’s possible.

• Simplicity that speeds up delivery.

• Seamless integration capabilities that help you connect across systems.

This mirrors what we’re hearing in the broader market, too. In its 2025 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP), Gartner® highlighted the growing demand for platforms that can support mission-critical applications, composability, and full lifecycle governance. We’ll keep delivering and strengthening Appian’s scale, reliability, and developer experience.

We asked: What would make the biggest difference in developers’ work? The top requests were for:

• More cutting-edge AI capabilities.

• Richer UX/UI design tools.

• Continued investment in Appian Data Fabric.

These priorities go hand-in-hand with the future Gartner describes in its 2025 BOAT (Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies) report: a shift toward platforms that can unify automation, data, and AI in one place. As business and IT teams come together in fusion teams, platforms like Appian are expected to deliver orchestration and intelligence, without adding complexity.

And that’s exactly what we’re building. The roadmap ahead is grounded in intelligence, usability, and scale.

In Appian, you can build AI-powered applications for business users, but you also can use AI to accelerate application development. We’ve added major new tools to help developers work smarter with AI:

• AI Document Center uses no-code AI skills to extract data from complex documents with accuracy and speed.

• Generative AI Skills let you securely integrate large language models into workflows using drag-and-drop, with human-in-the-loop validation.

• Agent Studio (now in beta) introduces intelligent software agents that can reason over content, perform decisions, and escalate when needed.

• Appian Composer (coming soon) uses business requirements to generate an application plan. It’s your functional starting point to building an enterprise-ready app. 

See What’s New in Appian AI »

You told us design matters, and we’re listening:

• Appian now jumpstarts UX with smarter, more varied generated design options, like fixed buttons, wizard layouts, and improved grids.

• The UX Design Lab offers hands-on feedback from Appian’s design experts.

• We’ve added generalized async loading for SAIL UIs to make page loads faster.

We’re scaling our data fabric even further. See what’s new:

• Appian now supports syncing up to 10 million rows per record type.

• Backend enhancements deliver 5–10× faster queries across large datasets.

• Process HQ gives business users unprecedented visibility into enterprise data and processes, all in one place.

As Appian continues investing in AI-ready data, developers can do more with every application.