By Constance Drugeot
Jason Bloomberg, President at Intellyx, continues by saying that low-code tools are focused primarily on professional developers. Indeed, he tells me that there are visual development tools that help professional developers build applications more quickly with little to no hand-coding involved.
Hence, low-code accelerates their works, streamlines it, and makes it easier. It simplifies the integration and security and other aspects that slowed down developers but that aren’t part of the core business value.
On the other hand, no-code tools are aimed primarily at what we called citizen developers, who are not professional developers, Jason points out. They may be business analysts, specialists or graphic designers, etc., and they gain the ability to develop applications with no coding whatsoever. With no code, you don’t need to have software development skills; you can build straightforward applications in the context of the no-coding environment.
Greg emphasizes that no code primarily relates to frontend platforms, such as web flow and Wix, and Muhib says that it is for the end-user and feels more like an MS Project/Visio workflow. Indeed, he continues, you drag and drop functional blocks and the application will attempt to activate them. This has very limited adaptability and is typically for entry-level requirements to be provided to a more formal automation team later.
Thus, according to Jason, professional developers use low-code tools, citizen developers use no-code tools.
Historically, he highlights, the low-code tools were only good for building simple applications. They were limited in scope and the professionals using low-code tools would have to do a good measure of hand coding for a complex task like customer integration and user interface or things like that.
Yet, in the last few years, these two markets have started to converge, Jason tells me. The low-code tools are getting simpler and easier to use so more citizen developers can use these low-code tools. While the no-code tools are getting more sophisticated and adding new capabilities so you can build more sophisticated applications with them. Thus, this means that professional developers can be quite productive even with no-code tools.
