What is Low-Code No-Code and Citizen Development?
Today’s businesses want to offer quick and customized solutions. Coding is one of the core technologies to help them achieve their vision but before, this vision was limited to companies with trained developers. This was one of the major concerns for businesses and non-technical professionals. However, the new trend of Low-Code No-Code makes it feasible for anyone to develop applications without any coding expertise.
Low-Code No-Code solutions are beneficial to users with little to no coding background. These users include professionals like business analysts, accountants, and entrepreneurs who want to build an application to upgrade their services. Low-Code No-Code development platforms enable organizations to use graphical user interfaces (GUI) instead of traditional programming to build business applications. Here’s a bigger picture of Low-Code No-Code.
Low-Code
Low-Code is a development approach that is essentially the opposite of traditional software development. Low-Code platforms are equipped with graphic interfaces that do not completely rely on hand-coding. Low-Code focuses on reusing and sharing code and cuts down on time. As a result, IT professionals don’t have to write lines of code to deploy a simple change or update.
No-Code
No-Code lets users develop applications without any coding. It is mostly built using prebuilt components and visual interfaces. The rise of Low-Code has given way to citizen development where individuals without any coding background can create web and mobile applications.
The Evolution of Low-Code No-Code
Platforms created by rapid development applications (RAD) like Excel, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Access were the first applications to help non-technical users. They weren’t as advanced as today’s Low-Code No-Code applications, but they did enable non-technical users and only required a minimal knowledge of tools and development.
The demand for these platforms grew over time as businesses started to become more digital. For instance, small and medium scale businesses developed their own applications over the COVID-19 pandemic to continue their services but not all of them could afford an expert developer. In these cases, Low-Code No-Code platforms are of huge help to business owners. Not only is it economical but also helps them overcome talent shortages.
Low-Code No-Code also takes the burden off IT developers to build code from scratch. It is often used in cases of heavy prototyping where developers want to quickly create an application.
Benefits of Low-Code No-Code
Low-Code No-Code is new in the field of software development and will become more prevalent in the coming years. It enables businesses to quickly create new custom solutions for their needs without having to hire expensive developers or spend hours on development.
A Low-Code No-Code allows businesses to:
- Save money
- Increase profits
- Save resources
- Provide scalable business systems
Low-Code for IT Professionals
The Low-Code space is created to help professional IT developers create large scale applications without having to manually code the entire application. With Low-Code frameworks, you don’t need any development experience to build applications that enable automation. Self-service apps with existing templates, pre-built modules and elements allow the citizen development team to quickly create a working app.
Cost-effective for Startups
Low-Code and No-Code platforms are ideal for startups that need to get applications to the market quickly. Codeless platforms are useful for building business applications when you have limited IT resources. Low-Code platforms will support non-technical developers as they are closest to the business and focus on specific aspects such as task management, workflow automation, and user interface to ensure fast and collaborative application delivery.
Low Code No Code Platforms
By using Low-Code No-Code platforms, developers no longer need extensive programming knowledge to build applications. Instead, Low-Code No-Code platforms that include a No-Code application builder such as Comidor enables citizen developers to build, deploy, and manage business applications in one convenient unit with little or no coding. There are many applications that enable citizen developers to create applications, like, Appian, ServiceNow and Salesforce.
According to Gartner, 75% of large-scale businesses will use Low-Code No-Code tools in the coming years. They published a magic quadrant to categorize the efficiency of Low-Code No-Code platforms. Top performers in this quadrant are Microsoft, Mendix, Outsystems, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
Servicenow is considered to be the most efficient in the market as it offers increased speed, productivity and agility. It ensures a cost-effective process that does not compromise on quality.
Traditional App Development vs Low-Code No-Code
Instead of an expensive, time-consuming, and difficult process, Low-Code No-Code means there are pre-built templates for specific business problems. This allows developers to get the job done quickly and with minimal training. It also gives business managers a great deal of flexibility to customize their own systems.
Traditional application development and coding, on the other hand, are mostly limited to IT professionals who can write advanced code. Although, Low-Code No-Code is a much more effective way for developing applications, traditional IT still has its significance particularly to resolve complicated issues, generating complex code, etc. in a business point of view, Low-Code No-Code will still have to work hand in hand with traditional development. This collaboration will lead to much greater results.
Conclusion
Low-Code development platforms are simplifying the process of software development for developers, IT managers and organizations. With the rise of citizen developers, it is important to be able to develop applications locally using these tools. As many technology organizations struggle to find suitable developers and many domain experts retire, the enterprise Low-Code No-Code platform market is growing rapidly.
