Imagine you are going on holiday, but you can't drive. You will visit landscapes that are accessible by public transport. The likelihood of you swimming alone in the sea is very low. If this does not appeal to you, then you will have to learn how to drive.
That's kind of how it works in the technology industry. Either you build your own software or you jump on the train that everyone is already on. In a world where almost every start-up differentiates itself through one technology or another, you rarely reach paradise with standard software. For many, however, this is precisely the problem. Many have ideas.
How often have you said to yourself; there should be an app for this, or this process could be completely automated?
But, you don't know how to code, you don't have money and you don't look like Mark Zuckerberg. Today, these are no longer valid excuses. The Gartner Radar for Emerging Technologies and Trends for 2021 lists low-code applications as one of four technologies that will have a significant impact on the existing market in 2021. Low-code is a software development approach that requires little to no coding. A low-code development platform uses visual interfaces with simple logic and drag-and-drop functions instead of extensive coding languages. The next step is no-code, so you don't need any code at all.
This approach is not new, what is new is that much more is possible. In the past, shop software had to be purchased at a high price, along with a suitable template. Programmers were hired for customizations and interfaces. Below are three low-code platforms with which I have gained experience in recent months.
Web design: Webflow
Are your marketing activities tied to complicated website releases or extensive campaigns? Companies that do marketing in real-time will pass you by. Because these companies are able to react immediately to feedback in the market with changes to their marketing campaigns. They achieve this with permanent, smaller adjustments and updates to your marketing channels.
With Webflow, you can create any website you want - right up to e-commerce shops. The design can still be defined down to the smallest detail via visual tools defined. This opens up possibilities for your company's websites that traditional manual programming does not offer.
The ability for team members without a development background to publish best-in-class web pages speeds up the delivery of iterations by several gears.
In the past, such platforms were not performant because a lot of superfluous code was generated. Webflow websites are clicked on billions of times a day. Reason enough for Webflow to use the scalable web stack for the designer, which runs on one of the most performant global network and server infrastructures; Amazon Web Services. Nowadays, Webflow is lightning fast. My Google Performance Index has never been so high. This is without ever worrying about scaling the database or the network.
On Webflow, anyone can do SEO, and anyone can replace the native connected marketing platform with another; the connectivity is huge. This simplicity makes Webflow a game changer in web design in my eyes.
Web applications: Caspio or Array
If you want to build special forms with logic and subsequent company-specific processes, you need a tool that can do more than just build websites. Take Airbnb or Twitter as an example. These are websites, but even with the professional web builder Webflow, you won't be able to build something like this yet. Because you want to collect data, change it according to predefined rules and pass it on to different endpoints.
Until recently, low-code tools were the only way for companies to build such applications without large developer resources.
Caspio is a platform that I know of, that allows you to build web applications without programming. The possibilities are enormous, but so are the necessary skills and the effort required to learn the platform. Currently, however, a number of new start-ups are raising that offer tools that allow you to build applications in record time, analogous to Webflow, without writing a line of code. I'm currently looking at Caspio and Array. With Array, you can create all kinds of forms, define the workflow behind them and generate the corresponding output in the form of documents or reports. If you want to build a website analogous to Airbnb, Caspio is probably the platform with the highest potential. Let me know on Twitter if you have managed it.
Organisation: Monday
The way we work is changing dramatically. Monday offers tools with its platform to accelerate the digitalization of work and organizational agility. All use cases in the areas of project management, collaboration, sales automation, change, and process management as well as campaign management are covered, and this across all industries. This sounds like a platform that can do everything and nothing properly. But it starts exactly where Webflow, Array, and Caspio start; if you want to go to a lonely beach in your own car, you first have to learn how to drive. Standard software forces you to carry out projects and campaigns according to defined workflows and rules. Everything in between you do either manually or with other tools.
With Monday, automating the process is not out-of-the-box, but "building the software" is child's play.
By covering different business areas, Monday allows companies to build their own business platform. Users do not start from scratch but can choose from a huge number of templates . The growing number of customers year after year seems to prove Monday right.
Only 0.3% of the world's population knows how to code. That will not change anytime soon. Don't make the digitization of your business dependent on this.
Other interesting no-code tools:
14 tools to build your next start-up
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