Building an Application Without Coding
Applications are tools to get things done, be it on your desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
Commercial apps tend to address most of the needs of today's small to midsize businesses (SMBs).
Most, but not all.
Whether your business is a multinational enterprise or just a five-person basement operation, there will come a day when you encounter a deal or a process that simply can't be addressed by off-the-shelf, third-party software.
That's when you'll face the multi-headed hydra that is the custom, in-house development project.
The easier you can build and deploy working apps to complete a specific task or solve a particular problem on a team or throughout your organization, the more efficiently you'll be able to address any sudden requirements.
In an effort to make the app-creation process easier on the IT department and, at the same time, more accessible to everyday business users, businesses have begun to turn to low-code development platforms.
This emerging category of app-building tools gives organizations of any size—from SMBs up to large enterprises—the ability to quickly design, build, customize, and deploy business apps with little to no coding.
The feature set and customization ability varies from tool to tool but the core function is the same.
Through a combination of drag-and-drop user interfaces (UIs), form builders, and visual process modeling, users can leverage low-code development platforms to produce a working app that you can download, open, and start using in hours or less.
What Is Low-Code App Development?
The term "low-code app development" didn't exist until a few years ago but the concept isn't a new one.
There's long been a notion in enterprises and SMBs of the "power user" or "citizen developer," meaning business users who see an opportunity to optimize a process and take it upon themselves to create their own apps.
To do so, they often dabble in technologies such as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming in Microsoft Excel.
Low-code tools expand that philosophy from only the most tech-savvy of workers to any average employee who sees a business problem or process that a simple app could optimize and solve, and sets out to build it themselves.
The other side of the equation is traditional developers and IT, for which these low-code platforms are designed to accelerate software delivery by quickly building apps for specific business use cases.
Rather than spend the time and manual effort to code an app from scratch that is made up of common features and components, low-code platforms let the developers work from existing templates and drag prebuilt elements, forms, and objects together to get a particular department or team the simple working app they need with a lot less hassle.
As a result, low-code platforms are designed to serve both of these types of users at once.
That's a tricky proposition because the platforms need to cater to two categories of users with drastically different skill sets and preferences.
Low-code platforms need to give everyday business users a dead-simple UI which with to build an app step by step in relatable terms and with plenty of help along the way.
At the same time, the tools need to simplify the development process for IT while still giving more tech-savvy users a selection of customization options, plus the ability to pull in things like third-party services, additional data sources, and layer on additional security and compliance.
That's a lot for one platform to do while also keeping everything simple within a unified experience.
As such, not every tool is adept at doing both.
Some platforms excel at providing an intuitive, guided experience in which most people can quickly get the hang of the process and start designing task-oriented apps to fill specific business needs.
These needs include measuring progress on a project or building a simple form-based app for tracking employee shift scheduling.
Others platforms are a bit more difficult for the average user without much of a programming background to use.
But these platforms excel at giving developers an environment in which they can build complex process models, map database objects to user workflows, and customize UI design, without having to write their own code.
The most mature low-code tools are adept at doing both.
Mendix, OutSystems, and Salesforce App Cloud offer an array of training courses and Help resources, which lead directly into a responsive, drag-and-drop UI in which you can design an app by using a variety of templates.
At the same time, within the same dashboard, these enterprise-grade tools also house an extensive library of database objects and UI components that you can pull into a sleek visual process modeler.
Salesforce is also a good example of the tightrope on which these platforms need to walk because, despite having arguably the most impressive array of features, the resulting UI is so cluttered and complicated that it compromises the value of the platform.
Low-code tools should be simple and straightforward above all else.
The circular logic in all of this is that letting citizen developers quickly build their own basic apps fundamentally takes pressure off of the IT department.
Rather than inundating your development team with a queue full of requests for simple apps, the teams can build the apps themselves and to the spec for which they need it.
IT can then come in after-the-fact to tweak and iterate on it after the bulk of the coding work is done.
It's important to look at low-code development platforms from all of these viewpoints.
Ideally, you want the sales and marketing or helpdesk teams to be as comfortable using the tool as a software engineer from your IT department who needs to quickly pull in multiple data sources to build a website monitoring tool for a redesigned component of your website.
In that light, we took a slightly different approach to testing these products than how Daxdi normally conducts product reviews.
How We Tested
In each of the low-code development platforms reviewed in this roundup, we tested from the perspective of both an average business user and a seasoned app developer.
Testing independently, we endeavored to see how the same tool handled varied levels of development expertise and a different set of requirements depending on the type of app we aimed to build.
To test from the perspective of your Average Joe business user, we used each respective low-code tool to build the same basic scheduling app.
The goal was to build an app that could add a new event (name, date/time, duration), invite users to the event, a Save button to create the event, and the ability to view a list of events in Calendar view or via chronological list.
Bonus points were given for added functionality such as notifications or deeper ability to customize the UI.
But the goal was to build and deploy a simple app—ideally available in both desktop and mobile formats—that executes one straightforward business process.
When testing from a developer/IT perspective, the standard app we built using each tool was a bit more complicated.
Our professional programmer, who chose to remain anonymous, tested the tools by building a collaborative contact management app called Crowd Control.
This app is intended to be a simple contact manager with a contact list page, a contact detail page, and a new contact page.
We also wanted the ability to add photos and multiple notes to each contact, and the ability to pull in third-party services and add any additional features or automated logic to the app was a plus.
We needed a slightly more complicated app that would be useful whether on the desktop or mobile, so Crowd Control was hypothetically intended as a mobile, collaborative contact manager for a sales team.
For this side of the testing, we gauged success on a couple of factors.
Was our developer able to implement the full feature set, and also simulate changes to the app over time? IT departments have a regular need to push fixes and updates to business apps, so to simulate the project maintenance aspect of the process, our developer also tested whether the tools could handle adding a new field to the data model and pushing that change to the app, as well as changing an existing field to see whether the change is reflected without app errors.
The changes I simulated were adding a new field to the data model and including that field in the app and changing an existing field in the data model and having that change properly reflected in the app.
We also aimed to answer the same set of basic questions about each low-code experience:
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Were we able to build a basic, working app?
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Was the form-based and drag-and-drop object modeling UIs easier and time-saving or were they harder to use as compared to traditional coding?
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What customization features and added capabilities were available during the low-code development process?
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Did the platform require any coding while building the app? If so, how much and in what context?
Breaking Down the Low-Code Landscape
The term "low-code" itself comes from tech research and analysis firm Forrester Research.
Analysts Clay Richardson and John Rymer coined the term in Forrester's 2014 report, "New Development Platforms Emerge For Customer-Facing Applications," and followed that up last year with two market reports, "The Forrester Wave: Low-Code Development Platforms, Q2 2016," and "Vendor Landscape: The Fractured, Fertile Terrain Of Low-Code Application Platforms." The company's broad definition is: "Platforms that enable rapid delivery of business applications with a minimum of hand coding and minimal upfront investment in setup, training, and deployment."
Forrester's description gives you the basics: Low-code platforms should make it fast and easy to design, deploy, and use business apps.
The low-code landscape itself is far more nuanced, with dozens of companies in the space.
Copyright © 2017, Forrester Research, Inc.
As such, there is a long list of tools we could have chosen to review in this roundup.
Over time, we'll be adding new tools and updating individual reviews as new features become available.
As a living and breathing document, some of the tools listed today may not be listed in a year as scores may change and new products may be added to the roundup.
As you try solutions, be sure to check back in with us to see if any new software has been added to this roundup.
For our initial testing, we focused on a few industry stalwarts, smaller but experienced low-code vendors, and a couple of up-and-coming platforms from some tech giants trying to disrupt the space.
Appian, Mendix, OutSystems, and Salesforce are leading vendors in Forrester's landscape report.
They offer mature low-code platforms that have significantly evolved over the past decade or so.
Appian, OutSystems, and Mendix have strong customer and developer communities around their products.
Mendix, OutSystems, and Salesforce have the most mature ecosystems of all the tools we tested with their respective marketplaces and app stores for third-party apps and components.
Those marketplaces and app stores are called Mendix App Store, OutSystems Forge, and Salesforce AppExchange, respectively.
TrackVia, Quick Base, and Zoho Creator have also been in the space for quite a while.
They sit toward the middle of the low-code/no-code landscape, with a minimalist platform that features both an intuitive visual user interface (UI) and more complex logic and automation for developers.
Nintex Workflow Cloud is another veteran player that has recently joined the SaaS party; it sports the best plug-and-play workflow automation of the bunch.
Then we come to Google App Maker and Microsoft PowerApps, the two newest tools in this roundup.
Both platforms recently emerged from beta, with glossy UIs and good-looking tool sets.
It appears as though Google and Microsoft have been observing a fast-growing space and cherry-picked exactly the low-code features and user experience (UX) capabilities they wanted.
Competition in the low-code space is rapidly heating up as big and small companies, old and new players enter the space and refine their offerings.
In our inaugural roundup of reviews pitting the best low-code development tools against one another, we chose heavyweights from both the veteran and newcomer corners of the space.
There are two additional companies, K2 and Oracle, that we planned to include in this roundup.
Both companies have major platform launches coming up in the next few months, and will be reviewed when their products become generally available.
All of these tools are close to one another in terms of ease of use, breadth of functionality, and overall low-code feature set, both from a business user and a developer perspective.
We gave two Editors' Choice awards in this roundup.
One of them went to veteran platform Appian for everyday business users in...
