Introduction
No-code development platforms provide drag-and-drop tools that enable businesses to develop software quickly without coding. The platforms provide WYSIWYG editors and drag-and-drop components to quickly assemble and design applications. Both developers and non-developers can use these tools to practice rapid application development with customized workflows and functionality. Many of these products are geared toward enterprise-sized businesses that need to quickly design business processes and workflow applications at a large scale. The tools provide templates for workflow, element libraries, and interface customization to create fully functioning applications without any coding.
These products differ from low-code development platforms because they allow for less functionality and customizability. Instead, they offer tools to quickly organize information rather than input unique code. Products in this category will offer no source code access or code modification capabilities
To qualify for inclusion in the No-Code Development Platforms category, a product must:
- Offer drag-and-drop elements to assemble applications
- Allow non-developers and non-technical users to build applications
- Integrate with databases, web services, or APIs to connect data
Top 10 No-Code Development Platform Softwares:
- Appy Pie
- Airtable
- Nintex Process Platform
- AppSheet
- JotForm Tables
- Salesforce Platform
- Quixy
- Quickbase
- SurveySparrow
- Outgrow
Appy Pie
Until recently, mobile app development was considered an option only for the big players in any industry. This created a growth barrier for companies with smaller budgets, preventing them from venturing into mobile application development. The solution presented itself in the form of low code and no-code platforms. Appy Pie, the free no-code platform presented no-code software development as a solution to address these worries and made it accessible for businesses of all sizes and scale.
Appy Pie’s drag and drop app builder software is the perfect solution for anyone looking for mobile app development services.
Mobile application development with Appy Pie is simple and is fabulously intuitive. Appy Pie makes mobile app development a breeze! This means for your next mobile application development project, you do not need to spend hours writing codes, worry about bugs, or syntax errors at all. You only need to have an app idea, pick a colour theme, choose the right features, and your app is ready to be published in minutes!
Mobile app development is no more an elite niche. In fact, Appy Pie, the biggest no-code solutions platform has managed to democratize this technology, making it accessible to businesses of all size, scale and scope.
Having established itself as the best mobile app development company, Appy Pie’s drag and drop app builder software makes mobile application development accessible to all. Most of the top mobile app development companies have their own expertise in different types of custom application development.
Airtable
Airtable is a software platform that empowers people to build the solutions they need to drive innovation and increase agility within their teams. Airtable puts the power of a flexible database into the hands of creators. They’ve raised over $170M in funding and have over 170,000 organizations running mission-critical processes and workflows on Airtable. At first glance, Airtable looks a lot like a spreadsheet, but it is much more powerful. Their building blocks enable teams to model the things they work on, define relationships between things, and create views explicitly tailored for their type of work. Airtable allows teams to adapt their software when markets evolve, or goals change. Airtable increase agility by providing transparency and visibility to collaborators and managers. Best of all, we allow teams to solve a broad set of use cases without IT resources.
Nintex Process Platform
Public and private sector organizations all around the world leverage the Nintex Process Platform every day to quickly and easily manage, automate, and optimize their business processes. The Nintex Process Platform includes capabilities for process management, process automation and process optimization. Under process management Nintex provide the ability to process mapping to plan, map and govern the process and process collaboration to create a canter of process excellence. Under process automation, Nintex provides facilities for workflow automation, create digital forms to capture data and to eliminate all the paperwork, create mobile apps, create K2 software, perform robotic process automation, document generation and automation and approve and sign documents digitally via eSignature all with an easy to use drag and drop designer. Under process optimization Nintex allows you to measure the efficiency of the workflow, integrate your business apps and download customizable process templates.
With clicks not code, Nintex makes it faster for organizations of every size to manage, automate, and optimize their business processes. With Nintex, enterprises can design, deploy, and manage the best solutions and services possible to ensure customer needs are met and productivity is maximized.
AppSheet
AppSheet is the intelligent no-code platform trusted by over 200,000 app creators around the world including Clear link, Enterprise Holdings, ESPN, Pepsi, Husqvarna and more. A Forrester Low/No-Code Development Platform leader in 2018.
Appsheet automates business processes such as order approvals and user notifications, auto-construct actions and views based on user with Google AI and Machine Learning, provide governance for citizen developers to build critical apps quickly, build one app for use on desktop, mobile and tablet and connects to a variety of data sources from Google sheets to salesforce.
Benefits:
- Appsheet empowers everyone to create custom applications and automation by leveraging the power of their data.
- IT and developers can efficiently collaborate with governance and corporate policy capabilities.
- Create time-saving apps that integrate with the Google workspace tools you already use.
Key features:
- Automate the process and improve collaboration
AppSheet Automation combines no-code and Google AI to make it easier for anyone, anywhere to automate business processes. Quickly create apps with automation to reclaim time and talent
- Rich data collection and offline syncing.
Collect data in smarter ways, both online and offline in the field. AppSheet uses the power of your devices to add more valuable data like GPS locations, pictures, drawings, barcode scanning, and character recognition. Anticipate and automate data collection to streamline processes, save employee time, and improve data quality.
- Elevate apps by leveraging Google’s AI and ML to build faster.
Use natural language processing (NLP) to search and give commands on your apps and computer vision to capture and annotate images, and build predictive models that learn to generalize from historical app data—all without any machine learning experience.
- Scale with governance
IT and citizen developers work in concert by maintaining visibility and control over your organization’s application ecosystem. Set policies and customize your team’s experience by displaying only relevant features and information based on user role, employee, and more.
Build a No-Code App in 4 Ways:
1) Connect your data sources (e.g. Excel, Google Sheets, SQL, etc.)
2) Copy a sample app.
3) Use an Add-On for Google Sheets, Forms, or Excel.
4) Start from SPEC, our natural language declarative programming tool.
JotForm Tables
JotForm Tables is more than a spreadsheet and more than a database. It’s an all-in-one online database designed to boost your team’s productivity. Collect important data for your organization using JotForm’s powerful online forms and automatically sync responses to JotForm Tables — keeping all your information in one secure, collaborative workspace. And if you’re not sure where to begin, JotForm Tables offers 250+ free table templates to help get you started. Whether you’re collecting data through JotForm’s custom online forms, importing existing CSV or Excel files, or adding data by hand, it’s easy to keep track of your data with JotForm Tables. View and manage your data in spreadsheets, calendars, reports, and easy-to-read cards — then share them with others for seamless collaboration. You can also add preset column types, formulas, filters, and search through your data in seconds. Expertly manage your information, no matter your industry. Work on projects with teammates, monitor your daily to-do lists, balance your company budget, track lead contact details in a CRM, and more! By storing your information in a secure spreadsheet-database hybrid, you can get organized and boost your productivity.
Salesforce Platform
With 75 billion connected devices and 6 million mobile phones, companies in every industry are adapting to a demand for technological change across every stakeholder, from employees to customers. It can be difficult to meet these high expectations, especially with limited resources. One way to deliver value faster and increase innovation across your business is to build apps. Salesforce Platform is the app development platform that extends your CRM’s reach and functionality. You do not have to be a developer to build apps using the Salesforce Platform. With drag-and-drop simplicity, just about anyone can create apps that automate business processes or help customers find important information. If you are a coder, the Salesforce Platform is language agnostic, allowing fully customized application development in your preferred language. The apps you create for your business can be deployed on a mobile, tablet, and web, be simple or complex and connect to nearly any data source. Start finding ways to enrich user experiences and streamline processes. Salesforce app development is only limited by your imagination.
Quixy
Quixy is a cloud-based user-friendly business application platform that empowers business users with no coding skills to automate workflows & processes, and build enterprise-grade applications, using simple drag and drop design, ten times faster compared to the traditional approach. Quixy provides dozens of pre-built solutions for a variety of use cases such as CRM, Project Management, HRMS, Travel and Expense Management, Service Request and Incident Management, and much more.
Quick Base
Quickbase is an application development platform that unites business and IT teams by enabling problem solvers of any technical background to work together to safely, securely and sustainably create an ecosystem of applications. It helps lt helps businesses accelerate the continuous innovation of unique processes by enabling citizen development at scale across one common platform. Quick Base empowers businesses to quickly turn ideas into applications that make them more efficient, informed, and productive. By using Quick Base, anyone — regardless of technical background — can quickly create business apps they can use and share with others.
Quickbase enables:
- Low-code Development
Quickbase is a powerful and flexible low-code platform that unites business & IT teams to accelerate the continuous innovation of unique processes. It is the only complete platform proven to support citizen development at an enterprise scale. Our low-code platform enables teams to continuously improve their most complex business applications without the cost of traditional deployment, maintenance, or development. With Quickbase’s low-code development platform, you can:
- Maximize the effectiveness of every employee by delivering real-time, actionable insights across systems in a highly personalized manner
- Improve speed and agility by making it easy for everyone to continuously innovate in an application ecosystem on a single platform
- Reduce IT complexity & costs by eliminating traditional IT development burdens, bolstering security and standardizing governance on one platform rather than across many applications
Integration & Workflow Orchestration
Quickbase Pipelines enables you to quickly connect data, integrate your systems in real-time, and orchestrate automated workflows using simple business logic, all within one unified platform. Visually orchestrate workflows across your apps and third-party tools using pre-built integration channels or leverage Quickbase’s powerful and modern APIs to develop custom extensions the traditional way.
Continuous Development
Achieve the ultimate for continuous deployment: roll out changes in real-time with no downtime for updated applications. With our application lifecycle management sandbox, you can tweak a business app, transform data, and change schema without having to take an application offline.
Survey Sparrow
SurveySparrow is an end to end omnichannel experience management platform that bundles Customer Experience and Employee Experience tools such as NPS, Offline, Chat, Classic, and 360° Surveys which are mobile-first, highly engaging, and user-friendly. The conversational UI lets your surveys deliver a chat-like experience and increases survey completion rates by a whopping 40%. Our key features include:
- Chat-like Surveys that switch from static to dynamic conversations.
- Classic Surveys that ask one question at a time.
- Offline surveys that let you collect feedback from even the remotest of places, internet-free.
- Offline Survey App that serves as a kiosk for offline data collection.
- NPS surveys to measure customer sentiment with a single question.
- NPS Word Cloud and Sentiment Analysis to gain an in-depth view of customer sentiments.
- 360° assessments to evaluate employee performance across various competencies and create personal development plans.
- Multilingual surveys to translate your surveys into the languages of your choice.
- Wide range of question types to gather a variety of data from respondents.
- Click-free dashboard and highly advanced report filters for generating insightful reports.
- Efficient user management to optimize your workflow.
- White labelling to customize every element of your survey.
- Sub Accounts to manage surveys independently under one parent account.
- Single Sign-On to log in to our platform with just a single click.
- IP Restriction to restrict account access only to trusted locations and networks.
- Survey automation with recurring mode to gauge customer or employee pulse at regular intervals.
- Survey sharing across a plethora of channels with the easiest sharing options.
- Efficient integrations to avoid the hassle of using multiple software.
- Custom CSS to add your own personal touch to every survey.
- Workflows to automate recurring tasks and increase action efficiency.
Outgrow
Outgrow allows you to better acquire, qualify and engage leads by making it easy to build personalized quizzes, calculators, assessments, contests, forms/surveys, recommendations, polls & chatbots. No developers or designers required! Outgrow has a host of design templates that are fully optimized for mobile, desktop, and tablet, and are easily embeddable into your advertising, websites, mobile apps, social media, SMS and email communication. In addition, there are over 1000 pre-made content pieces and funnels that are optimized to improve conversion so you can change the questions, make a few tweaks so it’s consistent with your brand and has your own interactive content ready in minutes.
No-code Development Pros and Cons
Pros
As it is quick and easy to use and allow non-programmers to pump out apps or workflows, no-code development platforms have become appealing. No-code development platforms are ideal for companies that have a backlogged development team and need to utilize business users as developers other than for traditional developers and business users.
- Since a majority of the development is done via a drag and drop interface, built visually with pre-built modules application development procedure has become a lot faster. Generally, automated testing further cuts down the development time supporting better agility.
- A high-level developer skill set comes with a price. But No-code solutions give you a way to build apps faster and cheaper in the long run.
- Being able to make apps faster, IT staff aren’t overloaded with requests from every other department and what used to take weeks or months can now be completed in hours or days with increased productivity.
- Being unable to perform changes to functionality or a feature with the output was a problem with the traditional hand-coding, especially if you are coding with a language foreign to you. But with no-code, you can. If you need to change something, you can simply implement the logic and make the required change in a matter of hours.
Cons
Something which seems cost-effective in the short term has the potential to blow up down the line, it is really important to understand the hidden drawbacks and the risks associated with No-code development platforms.
- Before using a no-code development platform, the user must determine whether their requirements do fit within the constraints of a particular tool. Even after that, their requirements are highly probable to change over time, and so the risk of these diverging from the evolving capabilities of the platform is always present.
- When building different features of an application, no-code platforms provide various templates and components to meet a set of use cases. As soon as you encounter that inevitable edge case required, you won’t have the specific tools to implement your business logic. Then suddenly your next choice will be developing the most possible solution rather than the required solution.
- Embarking on the no-code platform may take away your control over your application. Having no control and not knowing your app inside and out can lead to a number of risks around security and reliability.
- When moving to a no-code development platform, it is highly probable to run into the issue of vendor lock-in, which is generally accompanied by an inability to switch providers. Proper maintenance of the application will depend on the original vendor. Even the source code was made accessible, the implementation of the application will be tangled with unmaintainable computer stuff without any clear documentation.
Summary
Both no-code platform and custom development have their own perks and pitfalls. It is your responsibility to understand their significance individually and make a wise decision to cherry-pick the best for your requirement.