What is low-code?
Low-code is a simple development approach in which developers can use intuitive graphic tools, point-to-click configuration and automation to quickly generate applications and websites.
This technology reduces traditional code writing and delivers a more simplified coding experience for rapid development. Thousands of codes and syntax lines are replaced with pre-built blocks. At the same time, developers can still add their custom code if wanted.
This leads to another definition: what is low-code development platform? Low-code platform is a tool leveraging the low-code approach with security, easy-to-use interface, vendor support to help businesses use the best of it with unlimited purpose. Some of the most popular low-code platforms are Creatio, Microsoft Power Apps, Mendix, Kissflow.
So Who can Use low-code?
- Developers, of course, to automate manual tasks and improve their coding performance
- Citizen developers ( aka your non-tech employees) can also join in digital transformation as low-code is easy to use without technical background.
- Company of all sizes can also use low-code. For examples startup can build MVP to launch and test faster, SMEs can improve their workflow and enterprise can modernize their legacy systems.
- All departments can utilize low-code to build their desired applications, from CRM, ERP to a niche/ specific use cases.
Traditional code vs low-code vs no-code
With the rise of low-code programming, people also mention no-code, another development method requiring no coding knowledge and entirely relying on drag-on-drop or pre-built templates. Thus, comparing no code, low-code with traditional code (also called the high-code), what are the differences and similarities?
| No-code | Low-code | High-code | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it does? | A platform to build simple and basic applications without the need to code or involve IT department | Platforms that allow both coders and non-coders for tech creation. A mix between no code and high code | Traditional code involves manual coding with multiple steps, programming languages and technologies |
| Features | Visual development environment: Drag-and-drop, pre-built templates. No customization and integration | Visual development environment: Drag-and-drop, pre-built templates. Allow custom code and offer plugins | Custom code from scratch. You can use multiple tech stacks, frameworks and development tools to make it easier |
| Complexity | Basic, simple. | From basic to medium. | From medium to complex. |
| Who can use | Citizen developer, people with no coding expertise, professional developer | Citizen developer, people with little coding expertise, professional developer | Professional developers at all levels |
| Time to build | Short. From a day to 2 weeks | Short to medium. From a few days to 4 weeks | Medium to long. From a month to 6 months |
| Money to build | Cost-effective | Cost-effective but you pay more for customize code | Require certain investment |
| Example | Wix, Webflow, Glide | Creatio, Microsoft Power Apps, Mendix,… | Programming languages: CSS, HTML, PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python |
You can check more detailed comparison in these articles:
Why should businesses consider low-code?
Whether a business’ users are making a software, or they are streamlining the development process, low-code development simplifies the process of creating flexible apps and software.
- Improved agility: Low-code development allows fast operating and thus delivers desirable app characteristics that users require. These characteristics help applications function smoothly on multiple devices, such as smartphones and desktop PCs;
- Reduced costs: As low-code helps build apps 5x to 10x faster, the costs eventually decrease. What’s more, low-code requires fewer human resources for coding, thus reducing hiring costs;
- Fight Tech Talent Shortage: Low-code is a great alternative strategy for business to tackle the lack of qualified developers in their team. By cutting down manual tasks, other team member can focus more on important ones and hence reduce the high recruitment demand.
- Fight Technical Debt: With low-code, you can partake in every development step much faster, instead of skipping them for faster time-to-market.
- Higher productivity: Low-code development shortens time-consuming processes from months to days, even minutes. This removes the temporal barrier to innovation;
- Effective risk management and governance: It is a must for enterprises to keep up with changes and constantly renovate themselves. With low-code development, businesses can meet regulatory standards while staying ahead of headlines;
- Better customer experience: Low-code development assists businesses in adjusting themselves to the shift in market and client needs. Its downstream effect of fast operation entails a better customer experience;
With all the benefit, low-code has been said to be the future of digital transformation. Garner predicted that 70% of apps in 2025 will be using low-code and no-code technology. Meanwhile, McKinsey reported that organization with citizen developers and low-code score 33% higher on innovation measure.
On the other hand, there are certain risk that might associated with low-code such as vendor lock-in or shadow IT. But with the right approach and setting out governance to use low-code, you can easily control the effect of these and manage the usage of low-code in your organizations.
And that’s not all, you can discover more advantages which low-code can leverage your company in our blog: Breakdown the Low-code Benefits & Disadvantages for Businesses
What are the types of low-code development?
Low-code solution programming can be divided into 5 main types:
Business process applications
Generally known as low-code BPM, business process applications are utilized for organizations and enterprise-grade business operations. These apps concentrate on streamlining workflows and automating repetitive tasks to improve operational efficiency.
Customer engagement applications
Customer engagement applications allow businesses to build omnichannel, customer-related applications to address and manage customer issues. Organizations need to construct applications on customer acquisition, retention, engagement, and management to ensure high-quality and individualized outputs. Here’s how low-code can make your customer services better!
Legacy modernization applications
Legacy modernization applications upgrade, digitize, and completely redesign outdated systems. The shortcomings of a legacy system limit an organization’s digital growth. To address rising demand, businesses can employ low-code platforms to create modern, versatile, and highly configurable apps.
Outdated system is one of the most common challenges of many enterprises, which slow down their performance and growth. Learn What use cases your enterprise can adopt low-code in this blog.
Database applications
Since organizations and businesses frequently deal with large amounts of data, database applications are what they need. Low-code database platforms allow organizations to build their desired hub to upload, retrieve, and manage data.
Collaboration and communication applications
For internal and external teams of programming projects, collaboration and communication applications provide a seamless working experience and boost team productivity. Developers and team members can share content, assign tasks, and expedite approvals from a single platform. These applications help build a collaborative culture and create an easy data flow.
Must-have features of low-code platforms
1. Visual modelling tools
Low-code allows both professional and citizen developers to build multiple apps efficiently with less development time than using code. 451 Research has pointed out that low-code development reduces programming time by 50% to 90%.
Its system is equipped with a wide range of pre-built components, namely drag-and-drop functionality, visual UI, and many other modules. This model-driven approach helps developers visualize the app’s function and reflect details understandably to developers of multiple levels.
Visual modeling tools have a low risk of syntax mistakes. On the other hand, they offer cross-platform accessibility, total reusability, and easy update.
2. Drag-and-drop interface
Drag-and-drop is the core feature of every low-code software. This feature offers citizens and professional developers ease of use throughout the app creation stage.
As a drag-and-drop interface requires no coding knowledge beforehand, it enables non-coders to quickly create an app of their own. This helps shorten development time and effort and encourages employees to contribute to their company’s technical progress in general.
3. Reusable components
Low-code components like pre-configured modules, logic, and templates can be reused, customized, and extended by skilled developers. As these components are already pre-tested for performance and security, developers can rely on them to build software, app, and website with greater consistency and scalability.
According to Mendix, low-code allows cloud-native application building with 70% fewer resources. With the help of reusable components, developers can quickly extend the features of their program-in-progress with greater efficiency.
4. Security
A standard low-code platform should have out-of-the-box security tools and certifications accreditations like SOC, PCI-DSS, GDPR, etc. Built-in security tools help build secure apps and programs with visibility and insights into on-platform activities.
5. Collaboration tools
Built-in collaboration tools in low-code platforms can provide feedback loops, revision tracking, user stories, and many more. They also help developers of different levels understand and speak the same development language.
Unlike traditional coding, which can cause unsuccessful information exchanges between professional and non-coders, developers can now seamlessly communicate and work together. Eventually, tools like that create streamlined development with less rework required and better organizational communication.
6. Integration and APIs
Low-code platforms can securely integrate data from multiple sources and centralize data to create a digital ecosystem. This ecosystem can help developers discover and share data between teams and projects effortlessly.
There are pre-made connectors used for bi-directional integration with third-party applications. On top of that, custom integration using APIs like REST, SOAP, RPC, etc. collect data, handle structural and database modifications automatically, and executes the workflow. With API combined with visual modeling tools, developers can work 10 times faster on creating new digital experiences and modernizing legacy systems.
7. Application lifecycle management
Low-code platforms support all phases of the app development lifecycle from drafting the first ideas to the operation stage. By using automation and abstraction, all phases are accelerated for a faster delivery rate. Certain platforms help streamline project management, version control, version testing, deployment, and so on.
Check out our article: 18 Must-have Low-code Features For High-Quality Development for in-depth insights
A few low-code-based apps that you can build
Low-code is now applied for fast and accurate app development across almost any field. Here are some examples:
Accounting and finance
Customized business applications and software that support a wide range of workflows and information management processes are the main utilization of low-code tools for accounting and finance.
- They can design a portal for clients to guide them through many intricate processes like reporting expenses, income, and presenting bank statements without tons of paperwork.
- On the other hand, a financial institution might map workflows by automating loan approvals, risk assessments, decision flows, and information management.
Explore ideas behind using low-code for financial service and some real life cases in this article
Human resources
With low-code tools, the human resource department can customize job posts, automate recruiting processes, filter out potential candidates, and develop full training programs. These actions may now be carried out without straining the IT team’s resources.
IT departments
Low-code development helps IT teams streamline complicated operations while increasing efficiency and agility. They are liberated from repetitive code-writing tasks that are typically associated with the process.
Furthermore, by increasing the number of citizen developers, firms can eliminate IT bottlenecks and overwork. Harvard Business Review also pointed out that one IT developer can help up to ten or more citizen developers, boosting overall agility and productivity.
Supply chain
In relation to supply chain disruption (caused by pandemic-related delays, climate change, and so on), low-code tools have the potential to address these issues in three significant ways:
- Improve supply chain trackability and traceability;
- Develop automated workflows ad business processes to model, monitor, and improve supply chain operations (raw material procurement, customer delivery, etc.);
- Digitalize legacy data and records.
Manufacturing
With low-code tools, manufacturing businesses can promote the creation of smart factories and digital manufacturing environments. This platform also assists in operating manufacturing functions more smoothly and efficiently, from processing raw materials to packing and delivering finished items.
Process automation
As companies seek solutions to improve business process automation (BPA), process automation initiatives are on the rise. Robotic process automation (RPA), a key component of BPA, refers to self-learning software and bots that are made specifically to mimic human actions in repetitive business operations.
Low-code can join process automation as a driver of improved process automation results. It can come up with pinpoint accuracy to tackle log jams and weak spots in existing processes. This update is then passed on to the RPA bots to improve their performance.
Other use cases
There are still many low-code use cases that you can further explore:
- Complaint management;
- Employee lifecycle management;
- Expense claim management;
- IT bug tracking management;
- IT incident management;
- Marketing budget management;
- Purchase management;
- Sales lead management.
Coca Cola, Toyota and Rotterdam Government have used Low-code to alter their business and management. Learn how they and other businesses use low-code for better results
Top low-code development platform to use
There are many low-code development platforms in the market, with each has different pros and cons while focusing on certain aspect. Namely:
- Creatio: a platform to create process automation and mobile application development
- Microsoft PowerApps fastens the enterprise-level applications development process with fewer resources
- Zoho to create application quickly with scalability
- Mendix that prioritizes teamwork over individual efforts in development while providing a wide range of tools for IT departments to work better
- OutSystem that focuses on building application with high-performance with AI
- Appian leverages Full stack automation to create commercial apps and process automation for businesses
- Saleforces Lightning, Kissflow to build scalable cloud applications
- Integrated.io to build application for data management, data analytics, data warehouse on cloud
- Synodus Low-code Platform, created by our team, best fit to build ERP, internal tools and Fintech applications.
We have also reviewed these low-code platform in detail! Learn more about their pros & cons and when to use which!
Common FAQ about low-code
Low-code is helping organizations worldwide, from small to big enterprises, achieve tremendous technological innovation. Gartner predicted that 70% of applications will be built by low-code and no-code platforms by 2025. Of course, there’s still a long way to go, but the prospect of low-code and no-code is promising. They can’t replace the traditional code but will be a vital tool in many businesses.
Explore further insights by referring to this article for more information: Is Low-code Development The Future? What To Prepare For?
No. While low-code offer the tools for anyone to build application, making it work and best fit your business model is another thing. You can quickly assemble a generic application with your low-code, but the developers will input additional code to make it excel.
Yes, certain website builders that has customized ability such as WordPress, Shopify, Elementor are great examples of low-code
Yes, and the level of cloud development depends on the sophistication of your low-code platform. Advanced low-code platforms tend to allow you to deploy your projects on-premises or in the cloud (public, hybrid, or private). A recent study by IDC pointed out that clouds with high maturity levels can lead to more net-new apps created in low-code. Low-code is also capable of supporting whole cloud journeys.
For additional details, take a look at this article: Low-code For Cloud Development: Can They Go Hand-In-Hand?
Wrapping up
To sum up, low-code is a relatively new technology, yet it is being applied in various use cases for many industries. With such outstanding features, low-code is a suitable choice for businesses if they want to improve productivity and business results while having optimized development costs. However, keep in mind that it cannot compete against traditional coding in some cases. Therefore, as a business owner, you should consider wisely when the technology should be applied for development.
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