Introduction
Low-code/No-code development platforms allow business users and professional developers to build, test, and deploy software applications much faster and less costly. Low-code platforms provide visual designers and toolsets for users to drag and drop UI elements and business entities and build data models. If you’re new to low-code media, please read
What Low Code Development is.
Here is a list of the top 10 low-code platforms based on their market cap, customers, and market share:
- Outsystems
- Mendix
- Microsoft Power Platform
- Appian
- Salesforce Lightening
- Betty Blocks
- Pega
- ServiceNow
- Oracle Apex
- Zoho Creator
Gartner, Forrester, and Low-code Platforms
Before we look at top low-code platforms, let’s look at what top research firms Gartner and Forrester have to say about these platforms. According to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, Mendex and OutSystems are two-leg low-code platforms.
The above image shows the leading low-code platforms as of July 2019. Besides Outsystems and Mendix, the top names in this list include Microsoft, Salesforce, Appian, Betty Blocks, Pega, ServiceNow, and Oracle.
According to Forrester, OutSystems, Mendix, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Kony are top low-code development platforms for AD&D professionals.
#1. Outsystems
Outsystems is the #1 low-code platform among all. Outsystems allows enterprise-grade apps developed using its IDE and deployed in Outsystems cloud. The IDE lets you create apps to target desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. The app can also be generated as a native app.
Outsystems supports integration with external enterprise systems, databases, or custom apps via pre-built open-source connectors, popular cloud services, and APIs. In addition, OutSystems comes with pre-built stunning modern UI templates for desktops, tablets, and mobile apps. As a result, Outsystems is designed not only for pro developers but also for IT leaders, business owners, enterprise architects, and citizen developers.
Company History
Outsystems, founded in 2001 in Lisbon, Portugal, is currently headquartered in Atlanta, USA. Outsystems has 1228 employees worldwide.
Key features of Outsystems
Unbeatable Speed - From high-productivity visual development to powerful tools to deploy and manage your apps.
Full-stack Visual Development - Drag-and-drop UI, business processes, logic, and data models to create full-stack, cross-platform apps. Add your code when needed. No lock-in ever.
Single-click Deployment - Deliver apps and update them with one click. OutSystems automatically checks dependencies and handles all deployment processes for you.
In-App Feedback - Make your apps better and faster. Users can share voice and written feedback inside the application, simplifying the change management process.
Automatic Refactoring - Outsystems analyzes all models and immediately refactors dependencies. For example, modify a database table, and all your queries are updated automatically.
Mobile Made Easy - Easily build great-looking mobile experiences with offline data synchronization, native device access, and on-device business logic.
Architecture that Scales - Combine microservices with deep dependency analysis. Create and change reusable services and applications fast and at scale.
Pricing
The following table lists various pricing options.
Edition Users Hosting Env CI/CD Price On-premises
Free 100 Shared cloud 1 No Free No
Basic 1000 Dedicated cloud 3 Yes $4,000 No
Standard Unlimited Dedicated cloud 3 Yes $10,000 Yes
Enterprise Unlimited Dedicated cloud 5 Yes Custom Yes
#2. Mendix
Mendix Studio is an IDE that lets you design your Web and mobile apps using a drag/drop feature. Mendix is a high-productivity app platform that enables you to build and continuously improve mobile and web applications at scale. The Mendix Platform is designed to accelerate enterprise app delivery across your entire application development lifecycle, from ideation to deployment and operations.
Company History
Mendix was founded in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2005 and was acquired by Siemens for $730 million. In 2014, Mendix accelerated its growth by partnering with companies including Accenture and Capgemini, UST Global, HP, Pivotal, and others.
Mendix has about 660 employees worldwide.
Key Features
Mendix offers both no-code and low-code tooling in one single fully integrated platform:
No code – Mendix provides a web-based visual app-modeling studio tailored to business domain experts.
Low code – an extensive and powerful desktop-based visual app-modeling studio is also provided, which is tailored towards professional developers and can be integrated with coding IDEs to extend capabilities.
Mendix targets IT leaders, business developers, and professional developers. To build and deploy applications, you don’t need coding knowledge.
The following table lists Mendix editions and their features.
Edition Free Single App Professional Enterprise
Public Cloud Yes Yes Yes Yes
On-premises Yes
Private Cloud Yes
No. of Environments 1 2 2 3
Dedicated app container Yes Yes Yes
CI/CD Yes
Pricing on the Mendix website is not transparent. However, three versions provide unlimited applications in Mendix cloud with 1GB memory + 0.5GB storage per free app. The paid version is $1,875 per month, billed annually.
#3. Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Power Platform is a new cloud-based but one of the fasters growing players in the Low-code/No-code world. Microsoft Power Platform allows business users to build user interfaces, business workflows, and data models and deploy them in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
The four offerings of Microsoft Power Platform are Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.
Each of these products has its pricing model, per user per month, starting at $9.99. Once the apps are built using Power Platform tools, the production apps can be deployed in the Azure cloud.
Microsoft Power Apps is the platform that allows business users and developers to build apps using no-code or low-code.
Company history and critical benefits
Power Apps are from Microsoft and have the advantage of being a part of the Azure and Power Platform ecosystem. Power Apps provides excellent flexibility of integration with other Microsoft and third-party products. Once built and tested, deployment on Azure is simply clicking a button.
Pricing
Run unlimited apps for $40 per user per month.
4. Appian
Appian is a cloud-based Low-code platform. The critical functionality of Appian revolves around business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), case management, content management, and intelligent automation. Like Outsystems and Mendix, Appian supports both Appian cloud and public cloud deployments (AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure).
Company History
Appian, founded in 1999, is a platform a service company based in Virginia. It develops products and applications for enterprises. In 2016, Appian’s software platform was designed to focus on low-code app development.
Appian has 1200 employees worldwide.
Key Features
Appian Low-Code Automation Platform product supports full-stack software app development automation.
The key functionalities of the platform can be broken down into the following categories:
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Automate routine tasks in a workflow and integrate systems without APIs.
• Business Process Management – Design, execute, manage, and optimize complex processes with industry-leading BPM.
• Case Management – Automate collaborative work and exception handling with best-in-class capabilities.
• Artificial Intelligence – Make your applications work harder and smarter with integrated AI from Google, AWS, and Azure.
• Decision Rules – Quickly define simple to complex business logic and execute it automatically.
Pricing
Appian provides a free trial that lets you only set up your app on the Appian cloud. However, you must be a paid user to have Appian fully managed cloud, on-premises, or public cloud options.
Appian pricing supports both subscriptions based as well as flat fee models. A standard subscription starts at $60 per user per month. Appian also has the option to buy application licensing at a fixed cost.
5. Salesforce Lightening
Unlike previous Low-code products that let you deploy your applications and apps on any public cloud or premises, Salesforce Lightning is for Salesforce CRM users who want to build their own user experiences end support desktop, tablets, and mobile devices without writing any code.
Salesforce Lightning is a framework for users to create business UI and workflow on Salesforce without involving developers.
Salesforce Lightening includes the Lightning Component Framework that lets developers develop components using the App Builder and reuse the existing elements in other apps.
Salesforce Lightening is a part of the Salesforce Platform that offers a try-for-free option. The Platform Starter and Platform Plus licensing are the paid options that cost $25 per user per month and $100 per user per month.
Once the application is built and deployed, additional cloud costs may be incurred depending on bandwidth, number of users, memory, process, storage, and other resource consumptions.
6. Betty Blocks
Betty Blocks proudly calls itself a NoCode platform with lightning-fast speed. Betty Blocks supports drag and drop to build UI, business processes, and data models like other platforms. However, Betty Blocks claims to build applications 8x faster. You create blocks of functionality and reuse them in your future applications.
Betty Blocks pricing starts at $1400 per month, billed annually, including 100 Building Blocks, Public cloud with 10GB storage, and Standard SLA.
7. Pega
Pega Platform is a product of Pegasystems, a Cambridge, MA-based software company founded in 1983. Pegasystems has 5000 employees. Pega Platform is a No-code platform for rapid app development that allows its users to build, automate, and deploy apps faster in the Pega cloud.
Paga offers a 30-day free trial. After that, the Enterprise Starter price is $90 per user per month. For larger customers, Enterprise Transformation pricing is available upon call.
8. ServiceNow
ServiceNow was founded in 2004 and is a Santa Clara, CA-based cloud computing company. ServiceNow has more than 8600 employees.
ServiceNow’s Now Platform allows users to build, automate, and deploy apps without writing code. The critical components of the platform are Flow Designer,
IntegrationHub, Mobile Studio, Application Development, Virtual Agent, Predictive Intelligence, CMDB, and Performance Analytics.
9. Oracle Apex
Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a low-code development platform from Oracle. APEX enables its users to build scalable, secure enterprise apps that can be deployed anywhere.
The best part of Oracle APEX is it is FREE to Oracle database owners and offers native access to all the capabilities of the Oracle Database.
APEX’s IDE provides a whole developer experience with drag-drop and other IDE features, including responsive designer, wizards, components, debugging, testing, and CI/CD.
APEX applications can be quickly packaged into a single file deployed in Oracle’s cloud or other public clouds with the click of a mouse.
10. Zoho Creator
Zoho Creator, an app builder tool from Zoho, allows business owners to automate their tasks by creating their apps or using existing pre-built app templates. In addition, Zoho Creator lets you build Web or mobile.
The key features of Zoho Creator are:
Mobile app support with white-label apps for your clients and vendors. Mobile app features include receiving email, SMS, and push notifications, accepting payments, analyzing reports, providing offline data support, and customizing mobile screens and repeated actions.
Advanced features include the support of personalization for customers and vendors, user access, barcodes, location coordinates or files, data validation, calendar, timeline, kanban views, and scheduling.
Integration features include data connectivity with multiple applications and integrations with Zoho services, including CRM, Books, and Invoice. Also, use simple Deluge script blocks to link popular services like Paypal, Salesforce, Quickbooks, Zapier, etc. You can also use REST API to connect to various cloud services.
Pricing
Zoho Creator has four pricing options, Basic, Premium, Ultimate, and Custom. The following is a list of features with options.
References
Product owners and their respective websites and documentation.
Wikipedia for company history and other related data.
Jack JillPosted Sep 1, 2021, 12:30 PM
Informative article Mahesh. Well done. Just to add to your list, I recently came across a young platform called Pellerex (https://pellerex.com), and they provide a foundation for engineers to build software products fast. The idea is to give them ready-to-use and source-included Apps and APIs such as Identity and Payment, and they start building on top. It is kinda on the borderline of low-code but still can save engineers about 60% building their software MVP. Maybe worth checking, or adding to your list.