I’ve worked with code extensively throughout the years, and one thing I’m going to admit is that you don’t always need to write all the code yourself. For developers who want to speed things up and non-technical people who have an idea they want to build, I evaluated low-code platforms and detailed my findings in this list.
I’ll also share how I made my selections and answer some commonly asked questions about the topic.
What is a Low-Code Platform?
A low-code platform is a development environment that prioritizes minimal manual coding by placing visual elements at the forefront using features like drag-and-drop interfaces. Both technical and non-technical users can benefit from the technology by simplifying and speeding up the development process.
Best Low-Code Platform Summary
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| Appian | From $2/user/month | Website |
| Nintex | $20,000 /year | Website |
| Mendix | From $60/month | Website |
| Studio Creatio | Minimum $2000/year spend | Website |
| Caspio | From $140/month | Website |
| WaveMaker | From $500/month | Website |
| Jotform Apps | From $34/month | Website |
| Pega | From $35/user/month | Website |
| Power Apps | From $5/user/app/month | Website |
| Apps Script | Free | Website |
| Salesforce Lightning | From $25/user/month | Website |
| Kissflow Workflow | From $15/user/monthly | Website |
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Overviews Of The 12 Best Low Code Platforms
In the following sections, you’ll find my favorite low-code platforms, along with their strengths, weaknesses, and the reasons I chose them. After the overviews, I’ve included the criteria I considered when making the list.
Appian offers end-to-end process automation using low-code development tools that cover areas such as process mining and data fabric.
Why I Picked Appian: During my evaluation, I took note of Appian’s case management features, specifically the exceptions for ad-hoc processes and RPAs. For example, an RPA bot could hand off processes to me, and Appian would generate a full audit trail that I could examine later and use the data to make improvements.
Appian Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that made Appian’s case management capabilities stand out to me include the ability to converge data from multiple sources and still get a decent scope of real-time analytics and reports. The automation features also allow you to manage repetitive tasks on a large scale if you’re doing case management with several stakeholders.
Integrations are pre-built for SAP, AWS, and Salesforce, and there’s an API you can use to connect your own solutions.
Pricing: From $2/user/month
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
Well-developed process automation features
Robust case management functionality
Layered security platform-wide
Cons
Difficult to work with the built-in database systems
Limited custom reporting and data visualization capabilities
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Layered security platform-wide
- Robust case management functionality
- Well-developed process automation features
Cons:
- Limited custom reporting and data visualization capabilities
- Difficult to work with the built-in database systems
Nintex offers low-code process automation tools using a drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates.
Why I Picked Nintex: Nintex’s process automation features, available in the Nintex Automation Cloud platform, proved useful for managing complex workflows. It was comprehensive, covering processes across communication, records, and content systems at scale.
Nintex Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I kept going back to for workflow management include the integrated process mapping function that laid out all my existing workflows and allowed me to make changes with the full scope in front of me.
I was also able to use the built-in robotic process automation (RPA) features to automate repetitive tasks such as document generation and e-signatures, reducing bottlenecks in my workflows.
Integrations are pre-built for Azure AD Groups, Amazon S3, Google Translate, Openweather, Accuweather, Outlook, Slack, Smartsheet, Signiflow, and Bacon Ipsum.
Pricing: From $2,083/month (billed annually)
Trial: 30-day free trial
Pros
Support team is often responsive
Robust automation features
Comprehensive onboarding process
Cons
Steep learning curve
Expensive
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Comprehensive onboarding process
- Robust automation features
- Support team is often responsive
Cons:
- Expensive
- Steep learning curve
Mendix is a low-code development platform aimed at businesses, providing solutions such as enterprise application development, workflow automation, and modernization for legacy systems.
Why I Picked Mendix: A lot of the copy on Mendix’s website talks about its support for Agile frameworks, and I found that the Epics feature delivers on this promise. Epics is a built-in project management tool that allows you to organize teams with either Scrum or Kanban methods. It comes with customizable workflows that includes backlog, refinement, to-do, in-progress, testing, and done sections.
Mendix Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I liked in Mendix include its suite of tools for collaborative development. Aside from Epics, I found myself going back to its polls for more targeted feedback. I also liked that it was built on an extensible and open platform that allowed me to integrate the tools I was already using in my agile workflows, from test automation tools to CI/CD pipelines and even legacy systems that I seemingly breathed some new life into with a connector.
Integrations are pre-built for SAP, Microsoft Azure and Teams, AWS, Salesforce, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud. There’s also an API you can use to build your own solutions called connectors.
Pricing: From $60/month
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
Built-in project management features
Allows for truly Agile development
Open platform supports custom solutions
Cons
Not cost-effective for smaller teams
Prone to performance slowdown
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Open platform supports custom solutions
- Allows for truly Agile development
- Built-in project management features
Cons:
- Prone to performance slowdown
- Not cost-effective for smaller teams
Best business process management features
- 14-day free trial + free plan
- Minimum $2000/year spend
Rating: 4.9/5
Studio is an app builder from Creatio, a company that also offers CRM and industry workflow products for business users.
Why I Picked Studio Creatio: I chose Studio Creatio because I found its suite of business process management (BPM) tools to be helpful for defining business processes and strategies. It offers full support for the Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) 2.0 standard, meaning I was able to diagram processes from start to finish, the same way I’ve always done on other projects without needing to use an external tool.
Studio Creatio Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I think make Studio Creatio ideal for BPM include the collaborative tools you can access with an organization account for functions like editing, administration, and sending out invites to other team members so you can involve all major stakeholders in process design. You can also import and export process diagrams, making it easy to switch to the platform or involve external parties.
Integrations are pre-built for Mailchimp, Google Calendar, Tableau, Google Contacts and Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and Office apps, Twitter, Pentalo, and Brandwatch.
Pricing: From $25/user/month
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
BPMN 2.0 functionality out of the box
Robust CRM functionality
Comprehensive workflow management features
Cons
Unpredictable performance dips
Gaps in documentation
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Comprehensive workflow management features
- Robust CRM functionality
- BPMN 2.0 functionality out of the box
Cons:
- Gaps in documentation
- Unpredictable performance dips
Caspio is a low-code development platform whose primary focus is on database applications for businesses, and the company has placed a premium on customer support in more ways than one.
Why I Picked Caspio: During the entire time I was testing Caspio, there was always someone an arm’s length away for help, whether that was customer service or tech consultants. The company has several customer service lines, including local numbers for its biggest markets: the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. If you don’t feel confident when working with low-code platforms, the assistance might just be worth the asking price.
Caspio Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that made me feel comfortable working with Caspio’s (admittedly complex) platform include the comprehensive onboarding process, where they assigned me an expert team that I collaborated directly with, as well as consistent feedback, a training program, and coaching. You also get access to project consultation sessions where experts can help you flesh out your ideas before getting started, including writing a full proposal for your project.
Integrations are available through Zapier for thousands of solutions, including Gmail, Mailchimp, Google Calendar and Sheets, Unbounce, Wufoo, Twilio, Calendly, Quickbooks, and MySQL.
Pricing: From $127.50/month
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
Reliable customer support
Comprehensive onboarding process
No pay-per-user plans, making it cost-effective as you scale
Cons
Steep learning curve
Support is expensive
Pros and cons
Pros:
- No pay-per-user plans, making it cost-effective as you scale
- Comprehensive onboarding process
- Reliable customer support
Cons:
- Support is expensive
- Steep learning curve
Wavemaker offers a low-code platform for enterprise applications. Its main clientele looks to be financial institutions, but I’ve found there’s something for a lot of other groups.
Why I Picked Wavemaker: I chose Wavemaker because of its Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) features, specifically how many tools it gave me to manage deployments both off and on-premises. Whenever I deployed an app, it automatically provisioned the environment with dependencies, databases, and several other services I needed to keep it running.
Wavemaker Standout Features and Integrations:
Features include the system-wide cloud-native design that gave me the peace of mind of knowing that my deployments were more likely to retain ideal levels of fault tolerance, scalability, resilience, and availability. My deployments also had security compliance built into them for standards such as SAML and SSL encryption.
Integrations are pre-built for GitHub, Sharepoint, Google Calendar, Quickbase, Bitbucket, and Yammer.
Pricing: From $500/month
Trial: 30-day free trial
Pros
No vendor lock-in
Supports React for mobile front-end development
Easily navigable interface for beginners
Cons
Desktop version is no longer available
Not cost-effective for small businesses
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Easily navigable interface for beginners
- Supports React for mobile front-end development
- No vendor lock-in
Cons:
- Not cost-effective for small businesses
- Desktop version is no longer available
You probably know Jotform for its online forms, but the company also offers a low-code app builder for lightweight mobile and desktop applications.
Why I Picked Jotform Apps: Jotform made a name for itself in form building, and I found many of those features in its app builder, all with promising use cases where you need to record input from a small pool of users. One of the first things I did was create an app from a form and linked it to Google Calendar for a fully functional small-scale scheduling solution.
Jotform Apps Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I relied on a lot in the Jotform app include Jotform Tables, the free onboard database built on top of a spreadsheet that I could use to keep track of all the information coming in through all the input fields and generate reports. I also liked that it gave me the option to share my app via email or QR code, both avenues I’ve used to share many forms.
Integrations are pre-built for Google Calendar and Sheets, Paypal Business, Asana, monday.com, HubSpot, Airtable, Zoom, Trello, and Stripe.
Pricing: From $34/month (billed annually) with Jotform bronze plan
Trial: Free plan available with free Jotform plan
Pros
Easy to use
Hundreds of free templates
Free with a Jotform account
Cons
Not ideal for complex applications
Many templates have dated interfaces
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Free with a Jotform account
- Hundreds of free templates
- Easy to use
Cons:
- Many templates have dated interfaces
- Not ideal for complex applications
8 Pega
Best for DevOps
- Free trial available
- From $35/user/month
Visit Website
Pega is a platform that provides several tools for low-code enterprise development, covering areas such as decisioning and workflow automation.
Why I Picked Pega: From my time with it, Pega seems to be treating DevOps as a priority across most of its products. I used Deployment Manager to configure comprehensive CI/CD workflows for everything I built on the platform and could see it scaling well enough to serve most DevOps pipelines.
Pega Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I’d recommend in Pega for a DevOps team include the Pega API that is set up to integrate existing DevOps toolchains, so you don’t need to change your processes too drastically. PegaUnit allows you to automate unit testing and get detailed reports, supporting a consistent CI/CD workflow.
Integrations are pre-built for SAP, Docusign, Kubernetes, Docker, Cisco, Jenkins, Box, Amazon S3, and React.
Pricing: From $35/user/month
Trial: Free trial available
Pros
Supports advanced DevOps
Comprehensive case management features
Robust process automation
Cons
Difficult to set up
Sparse documentation
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Robust process automation
- Comprehensive case management features
- Supports advanced DevOps
Cons:
- Sparse documentation
- Difficult to set up
Visit Website
Power Apps is a low-code platform from Microsoft whose main focus is on applications for businesses of all sizes.
Why I Picked Power Apps: The moment I saw that Power Apps extends the functionality of Microsoft’s enterprise heavy-hitters, I knew the audience I’d be recommending it for. You can build custom solutions for Power BI, Pages, Automate, and Virtual Agents to improve business insights, websites, workflow automation, and chatbots, respectively.
Power Apps Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I like in Power Apps that enterprise users might be interested in include over 500 pre-built connectors for popular business applications that you can use to import data, all with Azure as the foundation. With the intelligent automation feature, you can generate recommendations for automated processes that work on desktops for both modern and legacy systems.
Integrations are available natively for services on the Microsoft Power Platform and are pre-built for Oracle, Twitter, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, Freshdesk, Google Drive, Box, Jira, Jotform, and Slack.
Pricing: From $5/user/app/month
Trial: 30-day free trial
Pros
Hundreds of pre-built integrations
Highly scalable platform
Strong data governance features
Cons
Difficult to work with formulas in custom scripts
Slow performance at times
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Strong data governance features
- Highly scalable platform
- Hundreds of pre-built integrations
Cons:
- Slow performance at times
- Difficult to work with formulas in custom scripts
Apps Script is a cloud-native low-code development platform from Google that’s designed to work across most of its products.
Why I Picked Apps Script: Apps Script works across Google Workspace and the plethora of apps within it, meaning it’s easy for anyone with a Gmail account to get started with it. For example, my first time working with it was with a simple script to calculate bulk payments in Google Sheets.
Apps Script Standout Features and Integrations:
Features in Apps Script that I think any beginner could benefit from include the macro recorder, which lets you log functions step by step and save them to run as a script, making for easy automation.
I also liked that as I typed out the code for a custom script, there were always suggestions and a sort of mini documentation like you’d find in a fully integrated development environment (IDE), so I didn’t need to keep all the syntax in my head.
Integrations are available natively with over 100 of Google’s services, including most apps in Google Workspace as well as Youtube, Chat, BigQuery, and Google Analytics.
Pricing: Free
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
Easy to get started with
Several native integrations
100% free
Cons
Relies on community support
Only works with Google products
Pros and cons
Pros:
- 100% free
- Several native integrations
- Easy to get started with
Cons:
- Only works with Google products
- Relies on community support
Best for Salesforce CRM integration
- 30-day free trial
- From $25/user/month
Salesforce Lightning is a low-code product that’s part of the Salesforce Platform. It allows developers to get most of the benefits of using a premade CRM with the option to add custom functionality.
Why I Picked Salesforce Lightning: Salesforce Lightning is marketed as being mostly the same as the classic version of the CRM but one that you can “make your own.” When I tested the myLightning feature, this became apparent to me because I could change nearly everything within Salesforce, from colors to custom user content pages.
Salesforce Lightning Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that CRM teams can benefit from include the Service Console, which lets you manage several cases from one screen, with an overview that manages to include most of the detail you need at a glance. On the sales front, there’s a feature called Path that maps out the most likely routes toward closing a deal, with in-depth tracking for past and upcoming activities like meetings, emails, and calls.
Integrations are pre-built for Google Workspace, Slack, HubSpot, Mailchimp, monday.com, ZoomInfo, Docusign, Calendly, Dropbox, and LinkedIn.
Pricing: From $25/user/month
Trial: 30-day free trial
Pros
Responsive customer support
Robust CRM features
Organized record-keeping system
Cons
Slow performance at times
Steep learning curve for anyone coming from classic Salesforce
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Organized record-keeping system
- Robust CRM features
- Responsive customer support
Cons:
- Steep learning curve for anyone coming from classic Salesforce
- Slow performance at times
Best flexibility features
- Free demo available
- From $15/user/monthly
Rating: 4.3/5
Other Options
Here are a couple of low-code platforms that didn’t make the main list but that I still believe warrant a look:
-
Best for simple websites
-
Best for automating field sales
-
Best large language model implementation
-
Best for custom CRM
-
Best audit trail features
-
Best access control features
-
Best for development on Oracle databases
-
Best for omnichannel development
Selection Criteria For Low-Code Platforms
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best low-code platforms for this article:
Core Functionality
Each option needed to be able to manage the following:
- Governance:It needed to allow the user to make the most out of everything they had at their disposal and not bombard them with bloat or filler.
- Application lifecycle management:The user should be able to cover all major areas of software development, from ideation to deployment, from within the platform.
- Well-equipped development environment:The platform should have all the development tools in one place, including things like debugging and testing.
Key Features
Some of the features I kept an eye out for include:
- Drag-and-drop interface:This makes it easy to implement new features, especially on the front end.
- Templates:These make it easy to go from start to finish if you don’t need too much custom functionality.
- Security:For anyone building a customer-facing product, it’s important to ship something that won’t put their privacy at risk. I went through each platform’s privacy policies and only included the ones that could ensure this, both during the development process and on the finished product.
Usability
I went into this exercise knowing that a lot of the people who were going to be looking up this information don’t have as much technical experience as your average software engineer. For this reason, I gave preference to solutions that let you build out as much functionality as possible from the GUI: The more I had to rely on a command-line interface (CLI) the less likely I was to recommend it.
Value For Price
During my time evaluating these tools, I kept thinking about the benefits they could provide to small businesses that can’t afford development teams, internal or external. Because low-code is a strong alternative, I looked for options that’d give them the most bang for their buck.
For example, I expect decent front end customization and stable back end performance from a product that costs $10/user/month, and I’d recommend that under a category into which a small business falls.
People Also Ask
Still feel like you haven’t completely wrapped your head around the concept of low-code development? I’ve picked out a few commonly asked questions to help you fill in some gaps.
Will low-code platforms replace programmers?
How secure are low-code platforms?
Should I learn low-code?
Final Thoughts
With low-code projected to grow18.9%, now’s a good time to adopt the technology. The low-code platform you build on should be geared toward your goals and available resources. Consider what scope you want the app or service to have, and choose one that performs well at that scale.
You should also consider your own and/or team’s skill levels. Even with some technical proficiency, you can still use a low-code platform to save time, just one that gives you the flexibility to add custom features.
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