The Best Low-Code Development Platforms of 2018

Drag-and-drop visual interfaces and form builders have made it easy for anyone to create an app. We test how well 10 low-code development platforms hold up when building apps for the needs of IT departments and everyday business users alike.

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.

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. Mendix, OutSystems, and Salesforce App Cloud offer an array of training courses and Help resources, 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, these enterprise-grade tools also house 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 arguably 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.

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.