What is Low-Code? vs No-code?
No-code has been around for years, and it's maturing fast. It has only gotten truly effective in the last year years. It has problems. SAS vendor lock-in concerns, scalability and supportability.
No-Code is a term that describes a suite of Sas products that allow for the building of workflows, user interfaces and tools, with than for code. It’s not new. Ionic.io built a mobile app builder in 2010 that enables users with a little knowledge of what they need, without the learning curves that come with full native mobile application development.
There are plenty of bad things said about no-code. Sometimes these concerns can be true, but some are not. This is a breakdown of no-code, list of vendors. But more importantly, it outlines how an approach to ‘low-code’ can gain the benefits of both approaches.
Is No-Code IP?
No CEO wants to be told by their investors what their no-code solutions are not IP. Think about these concerns when you approach these tools. No-code, with the right strategy and communications is IP!
SMB vs Enterprise No Code Solutions
As with any marketplace where money is being made lower the cost of code ownership, there is a huge range of solutions, aimed at different segments. Some focus on SMBs, and others focus on larger enterprise clients and government agencies.
Enterprise Solutions
Domo, OutSystems are two examples of solutions targeting the enterprise market. When a vendor leads with SOC and security concerns, it’s a clear sign they are speaking to the CIO and CISO at large companies, who can block a vendor from their organizations. There are fewer of these vendors than you might expect.
The ecosystems for no-code for SMBs are huge. This is not a full list, but there are some standouts: Bubble.com, Retool.com
A good criterion to use when assessing a given no-code SaaS product is how they manage code changes. Being able to clone and manage changes via a git repository is a huge benefit. Without change control, you have no recovery plan or change control. It’s not easy and can pose issues for these vendors, as access to no-code apps as large JSON configurations, breaks the vendor lock.
Can I move my no-code app?
No. For now, there is no real way to move a no-code app between vendors. This vendor lock is one of the first objections you will hear when proposing this to your stack.
There are some options that can allow for some degree of portability, but there is no wholesale portability option right now. As No-code patterns mature, we can expect there to emerge standards for interoperability. But for now, these do not exist.
In the place of standards, my approach is to think less about ‘no code’, and more about the idea of “low” code. If a company jumps right to no-code solution, with a company that offers a SasS solution, they are building in vendor lock-in.
Is there one vendor to go with?
No. For a lot of reasons going with a single vendor to handle everything is a bad idea. It’s the no-code equivalent of building a monolithic application. Below are links to reference if you need some background on the concept. The TLDR for adopting no-code patterns is to honor the warnings to avoid monolithic solutions.
What are low-code patterns?
‘Low-code’ is more of an approach and a set of techniques than a single vendor or solution. The primary goal of low-code is to gain the benefits of ‘no-code’ while keeping the power of code, and the options to pivot and change as tools mature and evolve. A gentle balance gives a company a suite of solutions that are free from vendor locking, scalable either toward or away from a specific vendor, and have a lower cost of code ownership.
Below are four examples. A good approach to “low code” is the approach that companies have taken with Agile. There are standards, but every company is different and it’s adapted the Agile methodologies to meet their specific needs.
Here is a selection of vendors that can be knit to powerful solutions:
Platformatic is the brainchild of Matteo and his team. The builders of the fastify ecosystem of ultra-fast Node.js API tools. The secret sauce of this tool is that it builds a rest API in seconds using the schema in any SQL database. As business logic changes, endpoints come out of the library and into plugins.
Also, it supports on-prem deployments. An open source that can be taken on-prem is huge.
Retool.com is a no-code for admin tools. Admin tools are an infinite code time sink. In the six years I built my startup, we committed to our backend UI tooling almost daily. Retool makes this easy. It moves the admin tooling out of the dev team domain and empowers a product owner to drive process improvements.
[Neon.tech](https://neon.tech). Fully managed Postgres, with branch controls for changes. Someone decided to merge the power of git branches with the SQL schemas of Postgres. It supports Git-style branches for db changes. It auto-scales from 1/4 AU to any size to meet traffic load. So at midnight, when your customers are sleeping, your spending pennies for a production scale db.
Sperta. My newest find. A `json` rules engine deployed as a SAS, via a REST API. This allows one team to own the rules engine and workflow, and the API team to utilize.
Keeps your business logic out of code and accessible to your entire team; product owners, sales engineers etc.
Fly.io.Edge hosting without the dev-Ops of every other cloud provider. This service makes scalable edge computing turn-key.
This is just one of four similar vendors.
Pliable.io is a data science tool that replaced some of the transformation tasks of in-house data science teams. Hire less and do more with the non-data-scientists already on your payroll. Or even better let one of your investors (who exited a data science company) handle it (via this solution) for you.
Slack.com is the low-code orchestration layer. It has __modals__. It has __forms__. It has events. It has user __authentication__. It talks to APIs. It can be your GTM for a fraction of the cost of a traditional cloud application.
These seven solutions, when knit together with CI/CD process, with basic zero-trust best practices, is a valid technology stack. It’s a responsive and scaleable GTM product. It’s important to understand, that each of these components can be swapped out. Below is a link to my low-code search engine. I have been mapping solutions and alternatives. The ecosystem of solutions is huge, and gaining a larger perspective of the options is important for getting your stakeholders; BOD, investors, and co-founders comfortable with this approach. It’s new. It feels risky.
Wrap Up
These tools are not monolithic solutions. These are components that can combined and tasked to build the pieces of a technology stack that us the power of both systems.
API + Database + Admin UI + Data Science + Business Rules + Edge Hosting
When combined with new patterns in product ownership, code of code ownership and AI, hold the promise of more responsive solutions. The reason we all adopted agile in the early 2000s was the need to shorten deployment cycles and keep our product aligned with the customers’ needs. The reason to adopt Low-Code is the same.
Tech Note
Will low code impact my SOC? Yes, it will. There is no single answer. Reach out for help. It all depends upon your approach and how you implement each component. Each of these supports 'Enforced 2FA'.