Building an Application Without Coding
We live in an application-centric world. In a modern business environment, nearly everything we do flows through the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps we open on a daily or even hourly basis. We communicate and collaborate with co-workers through apps. We track project and task progress by using apps. We manage everything from human resources (HR) and helpdesk tickets to expense reports by using apps.
Apps are tools to get things done, be it on your desktop, tablet, or mobile device. 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 your business will run. 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 small to midsize businesses (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. Salesforce App Cloud, for instance, offers an array of training courses and Help resources through Salesforce Trailhead, 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, Salesforce also houses 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 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 PCMag 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 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 interfaces easier/time-saving or harder to use 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. Five more products reviews will follow in the near future, but for our initial testing we focused on a few industry stalwarts and a couple up-and-coming platforms from some tech giants trying to disrupt the space. Appian and Salesforce are leading vendors in Forrester's landscape report and both offer mature low-code platform that have evolved significantly over the past decade or more. Appian has a strong customer and developer community around its products, and Salesforce has the most mature ecosystem of them all with its AppExchange marketplace.
Zoho Creator has also been in the space for quite a while, and sits in the middle of the low-code/no-code landscape with a minimalist platform featuring both an intuitive visual interface and and more complex logic and automation with a proprietary scripting language for developers. 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 interfaces and good-looking tool sets, as it appears 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 heating rapidly as big and small companies, old and new players enter the space and refine their offerings. So in our first round 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.
How the Tools Stack Up
In totality, all of these tools are very close to one another in ease of use, breadth of functionality, and overall low-code feature set from a business user and a developer perspective. Our Editors' Choice awards this time around went to veteran platform Appian for everyday business users in enterprise organizations, and newcomer Microsoft PowerApps for power user and developer use.
Appian, along with Google App Maker and Zoho Creator, provided the most intuitive guided experience for the average business user with no coding experience that wants to quickly build an application for a specific purpose. These tools provided visual environments with straightforward form-builder and drag-and-drop interfaces to create the basic application fast and without throwing too many options or heavy coding and logic at a user who's not going to need it. Appian separates its offerings into the lightning-fast Appian Quicks Apps form builder for basic app creation, and the full-fledged Appian Designer for customization and developer use. Appian is also the only tool that funnels all the created low-code apps into a collaborative social intranet application called Tempo, which adds an additional productivity and gamification element to the experience centered around projects, tasks, and social sharing within a team or enterprise organization.
In our IT-focused testing, Microsoft PowerApps offered the best combination of a sleek interface evoking the feel of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint, and powerful low-code developer tools for creating complex data models, automated logic and workflows, and providing a vast selection of objects, fields, and app elements to customize appls with little-to-no coding. Salesforce App Cloud offers an even more impressive low-code feature set, but as mentioned the tools are bogged down in an interface that can be a headache to navigate. Appian's full designer is powerful as well, but the flashy new interfaces of PowerApps and App Maker (the latter of which is built in a familiar Google style according to its Material Design philosophy) make the old guard look, well, old.
All five tools also had helpful training resources, video and interactive tutorials, and documentation to help you through the process. Google App Maker and Microsoft PowerApps did the best job of integrating those help resources directly into the guided app creation experience. Salesforce has the most comprehensive training website with dozens upon dozens of Trailhead courses for various aspects of its platform, but inaccuracies between the training material and the updated interfaces in the platform itself made those hard to follow. Zoho and Appian both have comprehensive help websites as well that are structured more like traditional knowledge bases with resources and community discussion topics.
It's difficult to make a blanket appraisal of maturity across these five tools, but our incognito developer concluded that Microsoft PowerApps, Google App Maker, and Zoho Creator all have impressive visual design tools mature enough to handle development and data modeling for smaller apps. Salesforce shined when it came to enterprise features like data access controls, which are very much in your face when building data models. One area where these tools are all in need of improvement from an IT perspective is change management, where feature enhancements are sorely needed around the ability to stage a release to a subset of users and the ability to rollback a release in case of an error.
After testing all of these tools, we found that for relatively simple apps like contact managers, task lists, small inventory managers, etc., these tools can get the job done; some better than others depending on whether an average user or a programmer is using the tool, but for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) these kinds of platforms fill an important need to tackle business processes and specific scenarios with targeted solutions that lean into the app-centered revolution that has changed the way we work.
Enterprise businesses with more complex app development and compliance needs may have a harder time integrating low-code tools into their development and legacy app stack, but tools like Appian and Salesforce show that it's possible to do so when you account for issues like identity management and security, while PowerApps and Salesforce App Cloud both boast a long list of third-party integrations and application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect existing apps and services.
Depending on your business needs, any one of these tools might be ideal for helping your organization get started with low-code development. Democratizing access to simple app-building tools within your company has the potential to improve productivity, solve business problems faster, and give both your tech savvy and average Joe employee the means and ability to apply the innovation of SaaS and modern mobile apps exactly where they need it. Read on to decide which low-code development platform is right for you.
Featured Low-Code Development Platforms Reviews:
Appian Review
$75.00 MSRP
%displayPrice% at %seller% For enterprise organizations willing to invest in the platform, low-code veteran Appian transforms app development into a social, collaborative, and productivity-driven experience for business users without a shred of coding experience. Read the full review-
Microsoft PowerApps Review
$7.00 MSRP
%displayPrice% at %seller% Microsoft PowerApps is a slick, mobile-optimized, and integration-rich low-code development tool. The database connectors and customization aspects are a bit much for average business users to handle, but its familiar design and uncluttered-yet-feature-packed environment makes it our Editors' Choice for power users and IT departments. Read the full review -
Google App Maker Review
$10.00 MSRP
%displayPrice% at %seller% Google App Maker is a young low-code development tool with some growing up to do, but boasts a straightforward design, intuitive app creation process, and strong visual-oriented features to make G Suite app building a breeze for business users and developers alike. Read the full review -
Zoho Creator Review
$5.00 MSRP
%displayPrice% at %seller% Zoho Creator is an easy-to-use low-code development platform with a minimalist design and strong selection of pre-built apps and fields. While it requires use of a proprietary scripting language to unlock its full customization and automation power, Creator is an affordable, user-friendly choice for SMBs looking to invest in a business app creation tool. Read the full review -
Salesforce App Cloud Review
$25.00 MSRP
%displayPrice% at %seller% Salesforce App Cloud is the most powerful low-code development platform on the market with a visual tool set and third-party ecosystem that can't be matched, but its cluttered and confusing UI and a messy collection of tutorials holds it back from unifying the sum of its impressive parts into a cohesive app creation process. Read the full review
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By Rob Marvin Assistant Editor, Business
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