Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

The data grids in PowerApps are woefully inadequate though... and people have been asking Microsoft to improve them on their forums for a while to no avail.

If you’re working in React, I’m working on https://ResponseVault.com/demo

It’s a drag and drop form builder that saves as JSON schema. You can export and use in your own app, or submit to our backend and send Webhooks to an automation service like zapier.

I use it in my client projects since I frequently need to customize form fields, then I can reuse them across clients.

Hasura by far, lets you point-and-click build your database and table relationships with a web dashboard and autogenerates a full GraphQL CRUD API with permissions you can configure and JWT/webhook auth baked-in.

https://hasura.io/

I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you just have to write single endpoints for custom business logic, like "send a welcome email on sign-up" or "process a payment".

It has a database viewer, but it's not the core of the product, so I use Forest Admin to autogenerate an Admin Dashboard that non-technical team members can use:

https://www.forestadmin.com/

With these two, you can point-and-click make 80% of a SaaS product in almost no time.

I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate Hasura + Forest Admin, for anyone interested:

http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh

For interacting with Hasura from a client, you can autogenerate fully-typed & documented query components in your framework of choice using GraphQL Code Generator:

https://graphql-code-generator.com/

Then I usually throw Metabase in there as a self-hosted Business Intelligence platform for non-technical people to use as well, and PostHog for analytics:

https://www.metabase.com/

https://posthog.com/

All of these all Docker Containers, so you can have them running locally or deployed in minutes.

This stack is absurdly powerful and productive.

This is exactly what I came to post. It's just a really well thought out service with gobs of connectors and a rich enough model to allow for basic boolean, looping, and scripting.

I used it plus a Google sheet as the first version of a UI for the last company I worked at. Instead of waiting for our front-end folks to finish up the UI, I just pointed a logic app at it, ran some basic logic on it, and brought it into the system whenever it was changed, and imported the data into the main data stores.

For web development such as landing pages I like https://webflow.com. They've been able to create a nice UI that abstracts-away nested styling. It also provides decent animation features, form processing, and CDN asset delivery. Its biggest drawback is a lack of i18n without resorting to 3rd party iffy JS solutions.