"A low-code development platform provides a development environment used to create application software through a graphical user interface instead of traditional hand-coded computer programming. A low-coded platform may produce entirely operational applications, or require additional coding for specific situations." --Wikipedia
"Low-code is a software development approach that requires little to no coding in order to build applications and processes. A low-code development platform uses visual interfaces with simple logic and drag-and-drop features instead of extensive coding languages. These intuitive tools allow users with no formal knowledge of coding or software development to create applications for many purposes like mobile apps and business apps.
"These platforms have become increasingly popular as a fast and easy alternative to traditional software development. Both professional developers and “citizen developers” (non-professional developers) can use a low-code platform to create apps of varying complexity to meet business demands for development, automate processes, and accelerate digital transformation." --Creatio
(partly from The Low-Code/No-Code Ecosystem)
Forrester: “application development platforms that enable rapid application delivery with minimal hand-coding, and quick setup and deployment.”
The term generally refers to any class of software and tools that provide:
Platform Governance and Management: Application lifecycle management (ALM) is an important feature when evaluating a low code/no code platform. This includes features such as version control, code management, testing and debugging, deployment, and monitoring. A platform that provides robust ALM support will help ensure that your applications remain secure, stable, and up-to-date over time, while also making it easier to identify and resolve any issues that may arise.
Entitlement refers to the platform’s ability to control and manage access to various features and functionalities within the application. Entitlements are critical for ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive information and that all actions taken within the application are in compliance with your organization’s security policies.
Environment management refers to the process of managing different environments such as development, testing, and production. A low code/no code platform that offers robust environment management support will enable you to easily create and manage separate environments for each stage of the development lifecycle. This will help to ensure that changes made in one environment do not affect other environments, allowing for a smoother and more efficient development process.
The platform should have robust security and compliance features to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with industry standards. Different industries and regions have specific compliance regulations that must be followed, such as data privacy laws (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA) and financial regulations (e.g. SOX, PCI-DSS). A low code/no code platform that supports compliance requirements will help ensure that your applications adhere to the regulations and standards that apply to your organization, reducing the risk of potential non-compliance penalties. When evaluating a platform, it is important to look for features such as data encryption, secure access controls, and audit trails to ensure that your applications can meet your compliance requirements.
Instrumentation refers to the ability to monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing applications. Logging, monitoring, and analytics will allow you to track and analyse environment’s / application’s performance and user behaviour which can be used to improve application performance, resolve issues, and make data-driven decisions
Some other aspects that you should also consider while assessing the LCNC platforms are
Scalability: The platform should be scalable to accommodate growth and meet future needs. Assess if LCNC platform meets necessary architectural and technical capabilities to support scalability, including the ability to handle large amounts of data, process transactions efficiently, and support multiple users and tenants.
Resilience: Assess platform’s capability to ensure it can maintain high availability and prevent data loss during downtime. The platform should have robust backup and recovery mechanisms in place, as well as measures to prevent single points of failure.
Training and Documentation: The platform should offer comprehensive support and training resources, including documentation, forums, and dedicated support teams, to help users get the most out of the platform.
Marketplace: A platform with a large and well-stocked marketplace can save time and resources compared to building everything from scratch, while a platform with a limited marketplace may limit the scope of what can be achieved with the platform. Consider factors such as the size and diversity of its offerings, the quality of the components and templates, and the ease of use and integration.
Ecosystem graphic:
Categories:
Business Intelligence: Tools that serve to transform information into knowledge, with the aim of improving the decision-making process in a company. Notable examples of these types of tools are Tableau, Looker, Google Data Studio, and SAP Business Objects — all of which give users the ability to manipulate, analyze, visualize business data.
Customer Service / CRM: Platforms that manage all the communications, opportunities and documentation relating to customers, along with those that help them in all stages of the buying and selling process. Salesforce is the giant in this space, but other tools such as Zoho, Bitrix24, and Creatio are all platforms that enable companies to automate their business processes to create and manage customer relationships.
Enterprise Application Development: These visual development platforms enable developers, of varying skills, to build out entire enterprise wide applications — building and managing custom databases and tools to run entire business processes. This is a large and lucrative space with a number of large players including ServiceNow, Appian, Mendix, and newer entrant Unqork.
IoT / Industrial automation: This category includes both IoT (internet of things) platforms, that serve to connect hardware to the Internet and Industrial automation platforms, that enable automatic operation of industrial processes and machinery without the need for human operators. Akenza.io for example, is a self-service IoT platform that connects, controls, and manages IoT devices allowing users to build IoT products and services.
Machine Learning: With the growth of AI and machine learning there has also been a surge of tools that have sought to make ML models available to non-data scientist users. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all have powerful such platforms but dedicated no-code companies such as Data Robot are also providing an increasing amount of AutoML-type tools.
Marketing / E-Commerce / Design Tools: Marketing-technology (or martech) has been a category of its own for quite some time — with large companies such as Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Marketo empowering marketers to build powerful management of campaigns and customer relationship management. We have also included e-commerce tools — including giants like Shopify — that enable businesses of all sizes to conduct commerce online while managing their products and services and their entire virtual storefront. Additionally, in this category, we added design platforms such as Canva and Figma where you can create and share designs and templates easily without having the trained skillset for it.
Software Development Tools: These tools are similar to enterprise application development but geared towards technologists. Virtuoso is an example of such tools, it offers QA automation and web application code generators, which allows for faster and easier website creation.
Web App Development: This is a large category that has been evolving over time, it includes long-standing tools such as WordPress and newer entrants such as Bubble, Adalo, Webflow, and even AirTable, which bills itself as an application development environment. These tools often contain a content management system (CMS) and a user-friendly set of capabilities. Individuals with little to no technical knowledge are able to create attractive websites and smaller applications very quickly with no HTML, CSS, Javascript or other esoteric web technology knowledge required.
Workflow Automation: A workflow may be defined as a set of related activities, which are completed in a certain order to achieve a specific organizational goal. Whereas automation enables these activities to be controlled by a system that will ensure their completeness, correctness and repeatability. Zapier, Kissflow, and Pipefy are all examples of tools that provide integration and/or facilitate business processes workflows, enabling LCNC business users to describe and run full end-to-end business processes.
List of LCNC platforms and funding (not sure as of when)
Visual modeling tools: form builders, GUI builders, etc. Use built-in components to represent information in a form that is readable; data entry/input; validate that input
Flow/workflow: ((Definition))
Automation: ((Definition))
Drag-and-drop functionality:
Database/storage:
Reusability: Use of pre-configured modules/components/plug-ins
Cross-platform/multi-device:
Security
Scalability
Reporting and monitoring
App lifecyle management (debugging, testing, deployment, etc)
Last modified 02 October 2024