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Ask HN: Which NoCode platforms are fine?

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Re: Ask HN: Which NoCode platforms are fine?

#3

Post by rcarmo »

It depends a lot on what you consider “Low Code” and what your target is. Corporate users tend to look at Mendix, OutSystems, etc. because they are typically looking at building end—to-end solutions, and those give you front-end, APIs and ORMs (or, rather, abstract all of those away).

Most OSS or IoT folk will immediately point to Node-Red or n8n.io, which look similar but are actually quite different in focus (n8n is geared at hooking up third-party services at a higher level).

And then you have all the Web Automation stuff that has been with us forever since Yahoo Pipes went down.

Re: Ask HN: Which NoCode platforms are fine?

#5

Post by arcturus17 »

Elementor for Wordpress is a pretty good page-builder.

It has a huge number of interface widgets and customization options while remaining very easy to use. You can pull off very distinct design styles with it quite easily. The markup it generates from what I've seen is decent.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not into Wordpress, and I'll take custom HTML + CSS + JS pretty much any day, but I've seen Elementor being used in production at scale and I can see it working for many businesses, especially if they're already into Wordpress.

As for platforms allowing more complicated logic, I've evaluated a few. I built a prototype in Microsoft PowerApps for a large enterprise, and ditched it in favor of a custom web app. We are now analyzing requirements and potentially building a real production app for that same customer, but the app is infinitely simpler (it's just a permissioned interface to read/write a centralized Excel sheet).

I've studied the market a bit (Appian, AppSheet, Bubble, PowerApps, etc.) and my impression is that they are quite complex for what they offer. The original promise was to replace developers and reap huge time savings but I'm skeptical on both counts - specialists need to operate these tools to get good results (so instead of a C# dev, you now have an Appian dev), and from what I've seen only the most boilerplate-y app features can be built significantly faster (and even then, I'm not sure if the difference is massive compared to a batteries-included framework).

The main use case I see for them is as small features or business applications within a larger integrated stack. Retool's approach which seems really centered on this use case and offers loads of database integrations out of the box, but while I hear good things here on HN I would still need to see results with my own eyes in production.

Despite my skepticism low-code is a topic I always keep an eye on, so I wanted to share my two cents and see what other HNers have to say.

Re: Ask HN: Which NoCode platforms are fine?

#8

Post by yoran »

I'm an experienced web developer but I'm happy that we chose Webflow for the website of our mobile app. It allows my non-technical colleagues to make basic changes to the website, like copy changes or moving blocks around. But Webflow doesn't abstract away the underlying web technologies (just makes it visual) so it's still easy for me to go in and make more "complicated" changes. It's not a panacea but I think they are striking a nice balance between ease-of-use and extensibility.
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