[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Which NoCode platforms are fine?
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Ask HN: Which NoCode platforms are fine?
Which NoCode platforms are producing sensible applications,
(assumed the "core logic" can be supplied with serverless "pure
code")
Author : rweissgraeber
Score : 134 points
Date : 2021-10-25 06:24 UTC (16 hours ago)
| senko wrote:
| If you allow for Low Code as well (what I understood from your
| parentheses), https://apibakery.com produces an API backend with
| CRUD operations, as an Django or Node server.
|
| You can then use it as is (no code) or add business logic (low
| code).
| akudha wrote:
| I like appsmith for internal apps. Tried budibase and retool, but
| feel appsmith is better. They are also ridiculously responsive on
| discord - fixing bugs, giving advice etc.
|
| Not affiliated with any of them.
| arey_abhishek wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning Appsmith! We do spend a lot of time on
| support, glad that you noticed it.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| All I hear around here is Mendix. Experiences with it seem to be
| quite good. I think it's more low-code than no-code as you can
| write custom things with Java.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I think it counts as no-code if you _can_ write many things
| without any code; having the ability to _augment_ with code
| shouldn 't disqualify unless the no-code part is too limited to
| actually use without breaking out into code.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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.
| soco wrote:
| I tried a bit OutSystems and its learning curve is incredibly
| steep for what they claim to be. It all starts with a
| specialized Eclipse based environment to install and to learn
| and only goes downhill from there. I don't know any business
| user able to use it, and for a regular programmer it's just
| another language/environment to learn. Not sure why it's a
| thing.
| Raidion wrote:
| I interviewed as a developer for a company that used
| outsystems. They said they had a lot of technology
| challenges, but were going to stick with outsystems. Their
| flagship app is rated less than 2.5 stars on Google Play, and
| needless to say, I did not pursue that position.
| jawns wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning Yahoo Pipes. I loved that service!
| robador wrote:
| Drupal.
|
| I've been a Drupal developer for 15 years and started using it
| for it's low code abilities. In my opinion it still is an amazing
| low code platform which is extremely versatile. If you really
| need to customize, it's all there under the hood to hook into,
| override and extend.
| netol wrote:
| If you need to handle translations, users, permissions,
| revisions... and want to provide a good editor experience for
| building landing pages, (web)forms, etc. Drupal can be a good
| CMS. It won't be easy to start though.
|
| Is Drupal a generic "no-code" solution? I don't think so.
| Drupal is a CMS and makes sense to use it if you want a website
| and manage its content.
| santa_boy wrote:
| Bubble.io is fantastic for making business applications. We find
| performance can often be an issue and typically transfer
| processing activities to external infra (incl. serverless
| functions)
| soco wrote:
| If you draw the line and add all efforts up, is it worthy? I
| mean, it might be great to quickly draw the frontend, but if
| for the backend you must jump through a bunch of proprietary
| hoops, can you still feel some advantage to the _entire_
| package?
| santa_boy wrote:
| yes ... a lot.
|
| scaling may be different but very efficient approach to
| getting to reasonable scale (perhaps 1000s of users)
| lianna-vba wrote:
| I've been using Bubble for a few years for a side project. I
| always thought I'd use it just for the MVP phase but haven't
| had a need to move off it yet. The big downside is speed - the
| home page takes 2.5 seconds to load even after doing all the
| recommended optimizations (Cloudflare, fewer plugins, fewer
| styles, etc).
| arcturus17 wrote:
| 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.
| dexterlagan wrote:
| I can vouch for Odoo and its Builder module. Odoo itself is open
| source, but there's a paid support model. We implemented an open
| source version for one of my clients and for
| business/production/inventory/accounting I'd say it's second to
| none. The free modules cover maybe 90% of common business cases,
| and the 10% left can be handled by duplicating one of the free
| modules and customizing it in Builder. Odoo is actively updated
| by large team in Belgium if I remember correctly, and their paid
| support is quite good. Odoo is Python atop Postgres, and uses a
| simple HTML/CSS/js for the frontend. Quite customizable, and can
| be a no-code solution if one uses Builder, which covers most use
| cases.
| sirwitti wrote:
| Slighlty offtopic:
|
| Having shipped an Odoo project this year, how is the developer
| experience for you?
|
| It seems like Odoo forces developers into time consuming and
| frustrating workflows (for example using xpath + upgrade
| modules + possibly reload the server) that make developing for
| it a pain. Or I might be missing something?
| the_angry_angel wrote:
| You are missing stuff.
|
| In development mode with inotify you get python hot code
| reloading. In development mode the XML (with a handful of
| exceptions regarding menus, and ir.actions) will be read from
| disk on refresh.
|
| At work we use Dockerized Odoo based on a
| [Doodba](https://github.com/Tecnativa/doodba). We use [click-
| odoo](https://github.com/acsone/click-odoo) to manage module
| upgrades (amongst other things). Dev workflow is largely
| managed through [invoke](https://www.pyinvoke.org/) tasks.
|
| I do wish there was hot code reloading for the views (xml),
| but realistically if you're making an app of any complexity
| the views in the backend are the small part and likely not
| where you are spending the majority of your time.
|
| Website stuff is absolutely 100% stuck in the past at the
| moment, imho.
| sirwitti wrote:
| Thank you! I will check these out!
| sideproject wrote:
| I've been running Newsy myself to host all of my unused domain
| names.
|
| https://www.newsy.co
|
| Newsy takes an unused domain name and turn it into a content-
| aggregator (i.e. Reddit clone) with lots of features built in
| including membership, automated newsletters, HTTPS, using GMail
| for your domain etc.
|
| I built Newsy because I had close to 50 unused domain names but
| had no time to develop them.
|
| Newsy lets me quickly build sites for my domains and make use of
| them while waiting for (hopefully) one day that I turn them into
| a product.
| corobo wrote:
| > Newsy takes an unused domain name and turn it into a content-
| aggregator (i.e. Reddit clone)
|
| Who would want this though? I can't picture a reason to want to
| do this, it just sounds like the spam that shows up in searches
| sometimes that I instantly back out of
|
| > I built Newsy
|
| Ah
|
| Maybe I'm picturing something more spammy than it is but I
| don't think I'd ever want to use this, I'd rather the domain
| didn't resolve
|
| e: I felt harsh posting this, but having seen one of the sites
| you are actually rehosting the content you aggregate too, it's
| _worse_ than I pictured haha. This is spam.
| tjansen wrote:
| I think that LowCode makes more sense than NoCode, because sooner
| or later you will run into a requirement that requires a bit of
| code, but the LowCode tools I have used can be used without
| writing any real code. You only need simple expressions ('a.b.c >
| 1') in JavaScript. An understanding of either SQL or
| REST/HTTP/JSON can't be avoided though, if you want to access
| external data.
|
| I have some experience using Retool and UI Bakery. Both are quite
| similar and get the job done. The resulting UIs are never
| beautiful, but they are good enough to implement most
| requirements, and development is super-fast. I think I'd prefer
| Retool, but maybe that's just because I am more used to it.
| harmonycb wrote:
| this is what we are attempting with HarmonyCB - retool / UI
| Bakery but with a figma-level UI designer
| _sword wrote:
| Unqork
| yaseer wrote:
| No code is moving into similar territory to programming
| languages, as each tool provides a DSL suited to particular
| problem domains and abstractions.
|
| Check out makerpad.co for some courses which amount to design
| patterns.
| taneq wrote:
| All of them, until you want to do something that's not a good
| match for whatever the platform is designed for.
|
| If you need fine grained control over the presentation and
| behaviour of a system then you have to specify those things in
| detail exhaustive detail using a suitably expressive platform
| which we typically refer to as a "programming language".
| harmonycb wrote:
| well, you can also write plugins for most, and/or when you
| reach that stage where a platform like HCB is just not
| expressive enough - we have an ejection mechanism that will
| allow you to just export a react app (but then you lose all the
| collaborative / builder advantages and it'll be a little more
| expensive as a one-off) - nobody needed yet so not converted
| our POC to functioning feature.
| davcancas wrote:
| No-code Data Science tool: https://graphext.com
| arey_abhishek wrote:
| I'm a founder of Appsmith, mentioned here a couple of times. It
| is a good open source project for building anything from simple
| CRUD apps to complex internal applications quickly. Drag and drop
| UI to avoid writing HTML/CSS, connect with any datasource, and
| use JS to write custom logic when you need to.
| desertraven wrote:
| I'm not sure if it fits the criteria, but Hasura has made
| backends considerably quicker to build.
| cies wrote:
| No code, or low code. I dont care as long as it is not "any
| thing you want that is not a straightup feature requires LOTS
| of ugly code".
|
| Hasura allows me to create a schema and then use it in a type
| safe manner in the front end (through GraphQL). This is a game
| changer to me: very little code in the model/controller layer.
| anaganisk wrote:
| But can we call it no-code?
| desertraven wrote:
| I think the platform itself could be considered no-code since
| there's not requirement to use the "graphiQL" editor.
| febin wrote:
| https://hellotars.com , I work here. We have customers from
| different industries including finance, health, e-commerce, real-
| estate, etc
| rectang wrote:
| I would say "none of the No Code platforms I've seen are fine",
| because all the ones I'm familiar with have either inadequate
| testing or no testing at all. The problem is that apps built
| without testing don't scale past a certain level of complexity --
| and so complex projects built with No Code tend to fall apart as
| they become successful.
|
| It's not that it can't be done, but that there's probably very
| little demand for it. By and the target market for No Code
| doesn't value testing.
|
| If you know of a No Code platform with good testing support, I'd
| love to hear about it...
| tvanbeek wrote:
| Maybe have a look at https://strapi.io/ and https://directus.io/.
| They are really easy to setup so yo can spend an afternoon trying
| out both and see if you like them.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I've built a significant number of relatively sophisticated
| applications as internal tools and one public application (which
| is used daily by ~300 people) using Airtable, Stacker, typeform,
| carrd, twilio and integromat. I also use MagicBell, Infinity and
| ApproveIt (a slack approvals tool)
|
| By "relatively sophisticated" I mean "would have cost me a
| significant amount in dev time to do this" and "have useful
| functionality that I can't get out of the box elsewhere".
| smoldesu wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, how much do you pay for that stack per
| year?
| miki_tyler wrote:
| Kit55, https://stack55.com is great - It is a low-code
| alternative to website generators that heavily rely on the
| command line, like Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby, etc.
|
| The app simply takes HTML files and assembles complete pages in
| your file system.
|
| The app watches for changes in your project and will build your
| pages accordingly. The pages you write have now access to a
| templating system, basically Jinja2 so you can reference other
| HTML files from your pages (to include a common header,
| menus...), and you can use variables, macros, etc.
|
| The app comes also with a small local webserver, so you can
| easily access your built pages. It also supports hot-reload, so
| when you make a change in a file, all pages that depend on it
| will be rebuilt and your browser will be refreshed.
|
| Full disclosure: I'm the founder
| itsArtur wrote:
| I have used Retool to create a (well-received) PoC of an
| internal-facing admin app. I was pretty impressed, even though it
| had some rough edges.
|
| Setting up UIs was relatively painless thanks to many out-of-the-
| box integrations, and it was surprisingly easy to implement
| auth/error handling/component dependencies.
|
| The thing I liked the most is that it's not really a "no code" -
| you need to be technical to build good apps in this tool.
| However, that's where the power comes from - it simplifies the
| mundane development tasks and lets you focus on something more
| high level.
|
| I wish the team would make it easier to consume your own, custom
| API however.
| barrettnash wrote:
| I've really fallen for Adalo. Before I could only run tech teams,
| but now I'm one of the best developers I've met for building
| mature MVPs.
|
| Adalo feels to me like the most 'pure' no code experience, where
| it's not just a typical dev environment with a graphical
| visualization, but instead a tool built around functionality.
|
| I feel like Bubble, Outsystems, etc, is built with a traditional
| development environment in mind, and just replaces code with
| snippets, while Adalo is more about extending the functionality
| of design software like Adobe XD all the way through to the app
| store and the first 50K users.
|
| I've trained people on Adalo well and it's remarkable the
| progress a smart, committed person can make in just a few days.
| jamexcb wrote:
| We made https://www.kalipsostudio.com/ a low code app to generate
| Android/iOS/Win/Win CE/Win Mobile (They are still out there lol).
| Our focus is with mobile native apps not Web/server/backend apps.
| It's manly used for logistics, erp interface, shop floor,
| military, mobile sales, etc... you don't need to learn a new
| language but we assume that you know your way with SQL.
| moritonal wrote:
| https://nodered.org/
| gerardnico wrote:
| How do you make an unit test with this platform ?
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| I'd be interested to know if anyone uses nodered for anything
| other than home automation or small deployments.
| gallexme wrote:
| Sadly because of that my boss sold it as platform for non
| dev tech people to monitor production hardware (like
| weaving machines) using nodered and modbus, it's a shitty
| idea to do it in node red, it kinda works tho, but it's
| error prone, slow(to respond) and just writing some simple
| specific software for it would have solved the use case of
| the customer in a way better way, but it's great for
| conferences/workshops/presentations to just link up a node
| to a SMS /IM Provider to have some kind of wow effect
| brunovcosta wrote:
| Abstra, YC S21 (https://abstra.app) is great for frontends!
|
| It allows you to easily integrate with any backend and have a
| smoother learning curve. Also it is easily extensible by code, so
| you will never be stuck in feature limitations
|
| Full disclosure: I'm the founder ;D
| harmonycb wrote:
| https://www.harmonycb.com/ - it's currently used to build the
| whole UI for a number of startups where the backend/business
| logic is behind restful endpoints
| harmonycb wrote:
| it's also not 100% nocode, you can add javascript to do
| endpoint translation work, and small frontend logic that would
| be painful in some kind if ITTT system
| harmonycb wrote:
| onboarding and help is still somewhat lacking - but if you hit
| us up on twitter @harmony__cb or @MattTheMrM we can set up an
| onboarding call / chat about your use case
| d--b wrote:
| I am making www.jigdev.com
|
| It's not NoCode, but it's "little UI" code, meant to create BI
| applications when Excel is a bit too little. It's based on the
| observable runtime. The website and onboarding is still pretty
| crude.
| yoran wrote:
| 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.
| ssijak wrote:
| Their CMS is trash though. Treasure throve of bugs and issues,
| especially if you sync your stuff to it. Not to mention 10k
| limit across all projects even on Enterprise plan, non
| negotiable.
| jinen83 wrote:
| NoCode platforms can be further divided into sub category of
| tools. Depending on your need you got to look at using one or
| multiple tools.
|
| 1) BPM tools: build workflows & business processes. Tools like
| Appian, Pega, kissflow, etc
|
| 2) Form builders: jotform, typeform, etc
|
| 3) automation: Zapier, integromat, etc
|
| 4) Frontend builder - Consumer apps -> bubble, adalo, etc -
| Internal apps -> Retool, DronaHQ, Appsmith
|
| 5) App builder - Build core business apps (including backend,
| microservices , etc) - Outsystems, Mendix
|
| 6) Field force apps -> prontoforms, fulcrum, etc
|
| 7) Extension builder -> extension.dev
|
| 8) Test automation -> reflect.run
|
| Disclaimer: I am part of DronaHQ.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| This is a very useful thread ;)
|
| Not sure where it would fit in, but Looker adoption is crazy.
| It's deeper though: no-code data modeling
| sokoloff wrote:
| I write a fair percentage of LookML as a ratio of my total
| Looker data dashboard creation time. (It's _maybe_ low-code
| or "somewhat easy code", but it seems pretty far from no-
| code to me. I'm still a fan.)
| lysecret wrote:
| Love retool I used it daily :)
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Is there a competitive landscape of all the different tools?
|
| Surprised I haven't come across one yet...
| tmcneal wrote:
| Co-founder of Reflect here: Thanks for the mention!
|
| I think a lot of people think of "no-code" tools as something
| exclusively for non-developers; things like Webflow and Bubble
| for creating apps. I don't think that's ever really been the
| case, Zapier being a great example of that, but there's been a
| lot more tools coming to market in the past couple years that
| actually work well as a way to replace tedious code-based
| workflows. i.e. Use Retool instead of building UIs for internal
| apps, use Reflect to build automated tests instead of Selenium,
| etc.
| cjv wrote:
| Reflect is a cool name, but nearly impossible to Google.
| istorical wrote:
| Yeah I'm a dev but was a team of one embedded within a sales
| and marketing org at a a medium-large size startup with a
| mandate to automate and find growth hacks for sales +
| marketing, and I was able to use Zapier with its Salesforce
| integration, google sheets integration, Twilio integration,
| Marketo integration to do a lot of work that I wouldn't have
| had time to build, support, and do maintenance on if I'd
| built a full backend application.
|
| All of what I did with Zapier could have been implemented
| with a database, a bunch of scripting, and cronjobs, but
| using Zapier saved oodles of time and meant I was outsourcing
| the maintenance to their API integrators rather than to
| myself.
|
| I was able to do so much with triggers and webhooks I can
| only imagine what is possible now with their more recent code
| blocks feature and adding better environment variables.
| gitgud wrote:
| 4) should probably also include WYSIWYG website builder
| platforms like:
|
| WordPress, Squarespace and Wix... As their userbases dwarf all
| other systems mentioned
| lofatdairy wrote:
| Not a huge fan of integromat but I think zapier is probably
| fine.
| anotheryou wrote:
| I'd love to build low-code a twitter client (that would need to
| mirror a bunch of the feed in to a db). Haven't found anything
| that would let me play with a specific api that easily and build
| a nice web app.
|
| Feels like voice recognition: I tried every 3 years, since a
| looong time. And now that they are finally usable they still
| require an effortful pronunciation.
| tyleo wrote:
| In Rec Room you can build games, environments, and events using
| an in-game NoCode tool called circuits: https://recroom.com/
|
| Disclaimer: I work on circuits.
| AshleysBrain wrote:
| It's for games (not sure if that's what you meant) but our
| startup makes Construct 3, a NoCode platform for developing
| games: https://www.construct.net
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Oh thanks I was looking for it recently and I couldn't remember
| the name. I remember using it a few years ago with my daughter,
| she was able to create something simple, playable and enjoyable
| in an hour or so, using cut-out photos of her family. I
| remember the scrolling was very smooth and the final result was
| nothing to be ashamed of. Thank you for giving us hours of fun!
| I'll download it today and see what's changed since.
|
| EDIT: OK so it was Construct 2, the next iteration seems so
| much more powerful. The pricing is reasonable, both for
| individuals and businesses, thank you also for that.
| holri wrote:
| Free Software:
|
| https://frappeframework.com/
| glimmung wrote:
| Saltcorn [1] is worth a look. The back-end is Postgres, so
| integrations are simple. It seems to work how my mind works, it's
| fun to use, and I don't feel limited or locked in because the
| data and model are in Postgres.
|
| [1] https://saltcorn.com/
| Kinrany wrote:
| Various parts of the website seem broken, but I applaud them
| for dogfooding everything.
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(page generated 2021-10-25 23:01 UTC)