No Code platforms are booming
And there’s very little doubt about that. Research from Gartner indicates that by 2025, 70% of all new apps will be built on low code or no-code platforms.
The recent surge of funding for no-code platforms bears this out as well, and the Covid-19 pandemic has only served to increase even more the demand for these sort of tools: 82% of no-code users started using no-code tools during the pandemic!
A proliferation of no code platforms means that there’s also a huge amount of choice for you when it comes to deciding which platforms to choose to build your app on.
This isn’t an easy decision to make!
Which platform you build your app on can determine whether your app has the opportunity to scale, what it might cost to run and maintain it, and how easy it is to update it with new features and functionality.
With so much riding on the choice of app platform, and with so many platforms to choose from, we thought it would be a good idea to try and organize all this confusing information into an easy-to-use guide, so that you can pick the platform that’s right for you.
Who Is This Guide For?
We wrote this guide for people who:
🚀 Have a great idea for an app.
🤔 Are confused about which no code platform to choose.
🏃 Are driven to learn something new.
⚡ Can see the potential benefits of saving time and money, using no code platforms.
If this is you, read on!
How It Works
This guide is split into two parts. There’s an interactive section that asks you questions about the app you want to build, and then suggests platforms based on your answers. You can access it here:
If you just want a quick suggestion for which platform you should use, the interactive guide is all you need. But if you want to dig into the nuts and bolts of the decision making process, you might want to keep reading.
We’ll be looking at each of the questions we ask in the interactive guide, and going over why it’s important to have answers to those questions, and what directions those answers will point you towards.
Are You Building An Internal App Or An External App?
Building an app that’s intended to be used within a company has different challenges or requirements, compared to an app that’s meant to be used by external consumers.
What is an internal app?
An internal app is one that allows employees or other stakeholders in an organization, to carry out some process that otherwise would be managed offline. A good example of this would be how some of Grid’s customers in the mining space are using Grid to manage their Soil Sampling processes. Internal apps are actually the most typical uses for no code applications, and that’s no wonder, when you consider that 90% of no-code users think their company has been able to grow faster due to its no-code usage.
What is an external app?
An external app, on the other hand, is one that a company’s customers might use, like any of the various e-commerce, video streaming, gaming, news or information apps that we use on a daily basis.
So why is making this choice important?
The main reason is because internal apps need to prioritize certain technological solutions above others. Internal apps usually have a higher need for data security and access control: you don’t want your internal data being leaked, or have staff from different teams looking at data that doesn’t make sense for them to be seeing.
Similarly, external apps need an emphasis on being able to customize the UI, create gamification options, connect with social media platforms, and other technology solutions that help lock in users and engage them.
A further consideration when you’re building an app for your company’s internal usage, is whether your company already works in a largely digital environment or not. No code platforms like Grid are designed from the ground up to work with companies that have traditionally not had any digitization in their operational workflows.
Why is the type of company important for an internal app?
This is important, because when you’re trying to switch your entire workforce onto a new style of working, you need it to be as seamless and friction-free a process as possible. Choosing a platform that has already taken this into account is really the best way to make this happen.
In conclusion, when you’re looking to evaluate different no code app platforms, having a clear understanding of which features you need is largely driven by and dependent on the audience that you’re building the app for.
Will You Need A Custom UI?
This might seem like a no-brainer - of course a customizable UI is a good thing, right? Well, maybe not always.
There are many advantages to having a fixed UI:
- You can save time: By not having to worry about building a custom UI, you can save many hours of work. Platforms that allow you to build apps with a custom UI generally have a steeper learning curve as well, which means the number of people with expertise at using it will be smaller - thus negating one of the key advantages of going with a no-code platform in the first place.
- Your users may prefer it: A custom UI means you have to be responsible for ensuring that users have the perfect experience. Using a fixed UI means the additional work of tweaking it and optimizing it as much as possible, has probably already been done.
- Changes are easy: No-code platforms with fixed UI are usually more update-friendly. Any sort of functional change has all the UI changes needed to make it work already coded in. A custom UI would mean you’d have to work on more than just the business logic changes in your app.
- Expensive platform fees: Usually, no-code platforms that allow custom UIs are more expensive, feature-for-feature, than platforms that offer a fixed UI. There are exceptions, of course, and the specific plans and features that certain platforms offer might change to include UI customization, but in general, expect to pay more if you’re looking for a custom UI.
That said, there are certain use cases where a custom UI is invaluable:
- Competitors: If your app is in an area of heavy competition, then you need to be as unique and memorable as possible - and a great UI can go a long way to making that happen.
- Brand Restrictions: Sometimes, your brand (and specifically, some aspects of its visual representation, like colors, or typography) might be completely at odds with the fixed UI options that you have available - which means you have to look for a platform that lets you customize the UI.
Whatever your situation might be, this is an important decision, and will go a long way in narrowing down which platform works for you.
Will You Need A Mobile Version?
While the answer to this question will almost always be yes, there are a fair number of powerful no-code platforms that will work very well indeed for desktop / browser-based apps, if that’s all you need to create. Some examples of apps that wouldn’t need mobile support are:
- Dashboard apps that just need to display an output from a database.
- Inventory display apps (although if you wanted an Inventory Management app, you’d definitely need to consider mobile support!)
- Apps that need to be run in a very secure environment, possibly even air gapped from the internet, such as manufacturing controllers, or other specialized apps.
If, however, your app is in the majority and you do need a mobile app, here are some considerations to ponder:
- Will your mobile app need to work offline? If so, very few no-code platforms will support this - most require an internet connection to communicate with the backend databases and API endpoints. This is especially relevant to companies that work in more traditional industries, where most processes are still offline.
- Can the app be auto-generated? Grid is one of the few platforms that allow you to auto-generate a mobile version of your app. This is great because it gives you the best of both worlds: not having to worry about creating a mobile app, and also having one available, should you need it. (In fact, Grid is designed to work with the mobile app as a complementary tool, so the chances are high that any app you design on Grid will make use of the mobile app.)
- Can the mobile app use the same business logic and UI of your desktop app? This ties in with the previous issue of whether to use a custom UI - if you have chosen to do so, then you need to know if you have to repeat the entire app-creation process to make the mobile version of your app. While some of the bigger platforms, like AppGyver, let you create a single UI and then apply that across multiple devices, there are some, like Bubble, which need to have a different project created, if the output is to be a mobile app. This alone can have a huge impact on the time to create your app.
What Is Your Skill Level?
Another critical factor to keep in mind when choosing a no-code platform is your skill level, or rather, the skill level of the people who will be making the app.
In the case of most internal apps, for example, the people working to create these apps will likely be operations managers who know how to run their processes and are making use of the flexibility and ease of use of no code platforms to create, test and build, quickly.
If the platform comes with a steep learning curve, then your team will take longer to build the app. A key side effect of this could also be that a steep learning curve would prevent more people from using the no code platform you select, thus reducing the efficacy of using such a platform to begin with.
This reliance on skill level is most often seen with the larger, more feature-rich no code platforms, like AppGyver and Bubble - in fact you could even go so far as to say that in most cases, ease of use is negatively correlated with the amount of features that a given platform has.
What’s critical is to find the sweet spot for your company!
Are There Any Additional Features You’ll Need?
We’ve broken this issue down into four key areas:
Databases: If your app needs a database, that automatically excludes a bunch of platforms, so it’s easy to understand why it’s useful to have this information. In case you’re not sure, if your app relies on updating any information dynamically, that information needs to be stored in a database - so the answer to this question for most apps will invariably be, “yes.”
Integrations: If you need your app to integrate with other third-party services or applications, like email providers, payment processors, OAuth or other user authentication software, you’ll need to check if the platform offers it. It’s best to go in with a defined list of integrations that you’ll need, and prioritize them by the ones you absolutely must have or can’t do without, to the ones that are nice to have, but not critical.
Plugins: Plugins are bits of code that citizen developers (or anyone, really) can write to extend the functionality of the base no code platform. Bubble, for example, has a robust plugin community, which has created thousands of super useful plugins that allow you to create things that vanilla Bubble can’t support.
Low-code / SQL support: Sometimes, for really complex applications, you want to have the ability to just write queries to pull data from a database. It’s at these times that low-code support becomes invaluable.
What Else Should You Look Out For?
Once you’ve used our interactive guide to narrow down on a few platforms that should satisfy your needs, you’ll need to evaluate your shortlist a bit more. We’d suggest looking at the following areas:
Opportunities For Scale
This is especially relevant if you’re looking at building an external app, because in general, the more users you have, the more successful your app is considered to be; but the flip side is, you might have to pay more to extend data limits, or bandwidth or any other scale limiters. Many no code platforms have such limits, and you should definitely consider how much data and bandwidth your app will need to run, not just at the beginning of its life, but also when it’s super popular!
Cost
Closely linked to scale, is cost. As you begin to climb to higher-priced subscription tiers and plans on your no code platform of choice, how will that affect your bottom line? Other important things to consider which are in the same ballpark are whether you can get a free trial, to test out the platform before you commit, and the availability of collaboration. Collaboration on the development process of the app means you can have multiple people working on the app at the same time. This saves time and also enables you to have a diversity of opinion and creative outlooks, which only makes your app stronger.
Updating Your App
Building an app is an iterative process, and once you’ve launched your first version, you’ll immediately have a laundry list of improvements and changes to work on. It’s just a part of the software development process, and your platform should support you in that. Great no code platforms provide a clear version control system which let you test versions of your apps until they’re ready to release to the bulk of your users, and sometimes, you might even get the option to rollback your version to a previous iteration, if something is broken.
Of course, with some platforms, such as Grid, this is not relevant, because you can test your apps with a limited pool of users each time, but for complex platforms like Bubble and AppGyver, this is a necessary feature.
Help & Support
Finally, look for robust support, in the form of help documentation, an active customer success team, and live chat support, at the very least, because no matter what happens, at some stage in the development process, you’re going to need assistance, and the more options you have at your disposal, the happier you’re going to be!
Security & Compliance
Security and compliance incidents, up to and including malicious breaches of data are not new, anymore. Whatever platform you choose, must be secure and you have to be able to trust it. To that end, you’ll need to inspect the security certifications and measures the platform has put in place. This becomes exceptionally relevant when you use a platform's own infrastructure.
Similarly, for compliance reasons, you may have certain restrictions, such as having to store data locally rather than on the cloud or with a platform provider. In such cases, if the no code platform you’re considering doesn’t support that, it’s an instant disqualification. Another area to inspect is the various security features for the app / application that you will be creating:
- Can it be set up to authenticate and authorize users?
- Can it be connected to your own Identity Provider?
- Can you set up multi-factor authentication?
- Can you encrypt the data in the app / application?
- Is it possible to set up your own certificates for SSL / TLS?
These are all questions that you may need to answer - depending, of course, on your specific requirements!
Conclusion
Thank you for reaching the end of this guide. We’d like to close by offering you our vision of the future, one we believe will come to pass, largely through the efforts of every single startup, software developer, investor, and citizen coder working on it now:
At Grid, we believe in the power of no code and the revolution it represents, bringing easy and powerful app development processes to millions of potential citizen developers. We believe that our software and other products like ours will help companies and individuals save billions of dollars in increased profits, through improved efficiency. We believe that millions of man hours will be saved through rapid application development, and that quick prototypes will help companies iterate quickly, learning what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately, we believe this will be a revolution for users, who will see a galaxy of apps evolve, for every single niche imaginable.
And while we believe, we also hope; We hope that this guide helps you develop the app of your dreams. And we hope it’s the most successful thing you’ve ever done.
