Pliant Reviews

Summary: Our business is extremely complex, and our customers support literally millions of end users. The scale we deal with is overwhelming, and so doing things manually is just not an option for us. Pliant allows us to build sophisticated workflows that, once designed and deployed, provision and deploy bare metal and related services at massive scale. nothing else we tried, third-party or homegrown could match this.

Positive: We use Pliant almost exclusively to provision bare metal. we deploy and operate infrastructure for a number of carrier accounts on a global scale and use Pliant to do the repeatable work.

Negative: This is more us than them, but because they're earlier in their maturity they weren't an approved vendor in our system so we had to look at incumbents first.

Summary: This allows us to package up workflows as callable APIs - it's really like having the ability to publish a million different shortcuts the team can use to be more productive.

Positive: The API gateway they have makes this tool so much more valuable than some of the other solutions out there. We found pliant in the marketplace to automate some network config and now i'm using it build and package my own APIs.

Negative: Their free version has these guides that really help with onboarding, but when we upgraded to their starter edition they went away. Would really like to have them as an option.

Summary: Overall I would recommend using Pliant for everyone I know whose business is heavily reliant on external APIs. We were spending hundreds of hours just to maintain our integrations so this tool really allowed us to expand upon our innovation.

Positive: Pliant has a ton of APIs available to use immediately. We were able to integrate our software system into more than 5 external APIs within the first 24 hours and we have not gone back because of how scalable the product is with our needs.

Negative: Currently, we do not have really any cons associated with their product. I do wish there were more options for templates available but their support team has been amazing in helping to build those out for us because once there is a template it can be used over and over again.

Summary: Pliant walked my company through the process and responded quickly to any questions or issues and this made the adoption process smooth and cost effective.

Positive: Pliant provided numerous integrations making Pliant a very easy tool to use for any company or organization.

Negative: Pliant needs better integration with Angular or React to allow custom user portals for better optimization of the user experience.

Summary: Don't get discouraged if they don't have an API that you need today, they are really good about building new integrations.

Positive: We have a dev mindset here and pride ourselves on coding our way out of any problem. A lot of our folks were hesitant to use a tool, but Pliant is really a mix of no code and code - it's not overly complex and it's not oversimple either...like the three little bears.

Negative: Pliant doesn't promote the fact that it's not just some tool enough. The fact is a lot of these orchestrators are built for really non-technical people. Pliant does that too, but it really is the best and most capable replacement for code that I've been able to find out there.

Summary: It's OMG time. I have built a library of workflows that I keep unpublished, I can then call in other workflows whenever I need them. When you put in the time you save so much on the back end. It literally takes me seconds to do what used to take hours.

Positive: Pilant works a lot like some of the more consumer friendly automation tools out there, but it's much better at building complex workflows. If you know haw to drag stuff to build an automation for gmail, you can use this to provision a virtual machine and the apps that run on it, slack all the stakeholders, and be done in time for a nap.

Negative: There's a little more of a learning curve than I would have hoped for. It's not difficult once you get it, but you have to really get it to be a power user.

Summary: Any time we need to add a new device for monitoring, we have to do so manually. And any time we receive an alert for performance on that device, we have to remediate it manually. With Pliant we have automated much of these processes. This saves time and effort, but more importantly it improves our observability strategy.

Positive: I support our HR organization and am responsible for supporting any It-related requirements for new hires. We use pliant to automate provisioning and distribution.

Negative: Easy to use, good coverage of tools and apps i need to provision, i like the team's responsiveness.

Summary: We want our L1 and L2 teams to do more. With remote work, sometimes it feels like all they can do is call an SRE immediately, which is not exactly a huge value add. It was also a struggle to give them access to systems at the 'right' level. Not where they can break major production, but also enough to where they can do diagnostics and maybe some basic tasks like resets and such. With Pliant we can build out run books, which also plug in well with our governance needs of tracking changes without extra paperwork. Now the teams can accomplish a lot more but we have seen increased participation from the NOC in building new workflows that once the SRE team reviews, they can start using.

Positive: After building the first few workflows with Pliant, every time we are on an escalation bridge and we got to a resolution, there are always a few items in the notes that basically say 'We need to Pliant this or that'. Once we started capturing a few of the basic things that our SREs did on a day-to-day basis, we have come to love the power of the system. We can take what used to be a bunch of poorly written Confluence run books, and wrap them in workflows that our L1/L2 team can use.

Negative: I really wish the system has a better concept of inventory and devices. Today we use it along with ServiceNow, but ServiceNow can be clunky as it tries to do too much for basic tasks. I am told some basic inventory capability is coming soon, so this may be a non-issue soon.

Summary: Automation was a really manual task here, and we needed something that pulled it all together. Pliant is like a conductor of an orchestra for us, taking a bunch of one-off scripts and tools and making them work together.

Positive: It is easy enough to use but it is not so simple that it cannot do everything we need as a business.

Negative: They don't share pricing online which was a little frustrating early on. The team got me what I needed quickly though.

Summary: We have lots of automation tools across the business. Lots of them do one or two things really well. Pliant helps me aggregate everything together - it's really helping with the silo problem.

Positive: Hands-down, their integrations. They have connectors with a huge amount of vendors and they guarantee that they'll get any others they don't already have when I need them.

Negative: They have a free version but you can't (or I don't know how to) upgrade myself like with a card.

Summary: Pliant saves me a lot of time and eliminates repetitive tasks from my weekly duties. Would highly recommend!

Positive: I like that they offer a free version of the product so i could just try it out. I wanted to play with an automation tool that wasn't just for kids. I didn't want to pay or pay much.

Negative: I'd really like to be able to add credits to get a little more functionality, but overall it's good and surprisingly capable for building automations -- they have tons of integrations.

Summary: i'm responsible for ensuring compliance with a ton of internal and external protocols. Giving away the keys to the kingdom is just not an option. Pliant helps me farm out a ton of work while still making sure i don't open us up to risk.

Positive: The access control is killer. I can give someone on my team a role that's limited to literally one action in one API. Gives me total control without having to do everything myself.

Negative: I wish I could grant temporary access that expires.