These low code platforms are like blueprints in game dev engines. They are cool for the first 2-3 iterations and a nightmare after.
Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
11–20 of 95 posts
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#12Perhaps at risk of sounding facetious, but Excel.
I don't need a spreadsheet that much, but I've been finding MS Office 365 version of Excel to be obnoxious to use. They've changed a lot since I used it 5 or 10 years ago. I don't need it enough to learn it, so I've just been using Google Sheets as needed.
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#13No code has its role, there are many simple things it can make easier. For most non trivial systems, no code will get you 80%-90% to a solution and the last 20% of your solution will be extremely difficult, complex, or impossible to deliver in any maintainable way.
Developers are hostile to these types of solutions specifically because once you go past basic CRUD your no code solutions make everything so much harder and complicated compared to if you had of just used JavaScript in the first place.
I’m fully expecting some no code sales people here to disagree. They always do. Those same sales people will try to blame the programmers for getting in the way of saving money or being stuck in their old ways. Have a good long proper conversation with your programmers that you trust and try to understand their resistance better.
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#14Surprised no one has said Framer yet
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#15i’ve worked with retool at my past 2 startups and it has been very useful as far as allowing engineers to build out quick internal tools so that things like service requests that occur quite often can be handled manually by the customer service teams.
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#16We used Webflow for our company's landing page for a while but for our uses it was more "slow code" than "no code". To get the layouts we wanted you still had to understand the quirks and intricacies of flex/grid so it was just a clunkier interface than writing code.
That being said, it got us up and running quickly at a time where we didn't have much time to spend on that stuff. I think it's a reasonable progression to start out with something like a no code tool and switch to code when you've got the time/people.
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#17We tested PowerApps at work. It looks fine at a first glance but comes off as really rough around the edges.
It's a fine tool for the business if you want to avoid shadow IT, I suppose, but you have to be aware that sooner or later you will need to integrate it with .NET because of feature creep and by that point you end up maintaning PowersApps, .NET and a lot of duct tape in between.
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#18Having done some research on this for internal use in the past I would recommend AppSmith as the best of the bunch given it's mostly open source.
We had to give it a past in the end due to no i18n or equivalent support.
Re: Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
#19SQL as the database, Budibase for app building!