Whether you are a business user or a developer, developing great apps and dashboards rapidly without spending lots of time writing code is possible. Low-code or No-code platforms are the perfect solutions for this. 

What are Low-code or No-code platforms? 

Low-code or No-code tools allow you to write little to no code as you produce robust applications that support and advance your organisation.

How does your business benefit from it?

Low-code platforms help your business and developers address the growing need for top-of-the-line internal workflow applications, time-saving automation, better customer experiences, and seamless integrations. They can also help your professional developers build apps faster, avoid writing code line by line, and improve productivity.  

Low-code platforms do not all function in the same way, and choosing the right one for your business is critical for success. For example, if you are looking for quick Business Intelligence tools, you can use Microsoft Power BI or Qlik. Here, what you are really looking for is whether the platform or tool is flexible enough to meet your requirements.  

Some Low-Code Tools

Microsoft:

Microsoft provides various power platforms such as Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), and Power Virtual Agents in one powerful application platform, Teams. These technologies empower you to build solutions, automate processes, analyse data, and create virtual agents within a unified and integrated environment.

Power BI allows you to build reports, publish dashboards in a workspace, then distribute to a broad audience as an app to collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders.  

Power Apps allows you to quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Power Automate helps you create automated workflows between your favourite apps and services to synchronise files, get notifications, collect data, and more.  

Power Virtual Agents lets you create powerful chatbots that can answer questions asked by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service.

‍

Google:

AppSheet by Google:

Appsheet Applications can build mobile and desktop applications with powerful features like capturing images, logging locations, scanning barcodes, delivering notifications, generating reports, sending emails, building dashboards, accepting signatures, working offline, installing across devices, integrating platforms apply magic.

Salesforce:

Salesforce is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution that allows developers to build, test and resolve defects in cloud applications before deployment. The platform provides tools and services to automate business processes, integrate with external applications and offer a responsive layout to users.

Users can run and manage apps written in open languages like Ruby, Java and PHP using Salesforce and Heroku. Heroku Enterprise provides collaboration functionality, enterprise-grade support and control features for users.

Salesforce Lightning Design System provides guides and code to developers for building apps. Users can deliver apps using reusable building blocks, including maps, calendars, buttons and number entry forms. The platform allows users to build enterprise applications by dragging and dropping components into the Lightning App Builder. Users can also modify data-object relationships with a schema builder.

Oracle Application Express (APEX):

Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a low-code development platform that enables you to build scalable, secure enterprise apps with world-class features that can be deployed anywhere. It uses an oracle database engine.

There are many more apps and platform that allows Low-code or No-code solutions, but last one I would like to share is,

Airtable:

Airtable is an easy-to-use online platform for creating and sharing relational databases. The user interface is simple, colourful, friendly, and allows anyone to spin up a database in minutes. You can store, organise, and collaborate on information about anything—like employee directories, product inventories, and even apartment hunting. You don’t even have to learn what SQL stands for, let alone any scripting.

Summary:

Low-code or No-code solutions have advantages and disadvantages. 

It can save time by automating simple tasks, speeding up the app making process, providing a solution for different business problems. They also allow rapid prototyping and iterations, bringing cost savings relative to hiring developers or software agencies.   

Similar to their benefits, there are a few downsides as well. e.g. various tool providers have different policies for securing your data. Sometimes you are unaware of which storage/cloud your data are stored in. Some vendors stop allowing you to access the application after you stop using their tools. 

Employees can potentially download random apps and start using them without going through IT/security support.

Lack of scale or stability as your user base grows, pricing sensitivity e.g., Airtable can increase their price significantly or change their model, it can also get expensive as your users grow. e.g., at 50 users on Airtable, you’d pay 50*25*12 per user per year.  

As a business Low code, no code can be the best tool, but you’ll have to decide your priorities. E.g., cost, time-saving, flexibility to iterate quickly, skills hire, scale, stability and data ownership.

Thanks for reading!

Ngā mihi nui

Ayesha

‍