- February 17, 2023
- Posted by: Indium
- Category: Application Engineering
According to Gartner, the global market for low-code application development technologies is estimated to reach 26.9 billion USD in 2023, a 19.6% increase from 2022. The demand for low-code development solutions is growing. With this growth comes one major challenge – having many low-code development platforms, making it even harder for clients to choose the right platform to address their enterprise app development needs.
Choosing the right low-code development solution is crucial and has numerous benefits beyond accelerating your app development. For instance, it:
- Helps you deliver unrivaled digital customer experiences
- Helps you to seamlessly modernize your legacy systems
- Automates data integration
- Streamlines workflows
- Supports data visualization
So, how do you choose the right low-code application development solution? Join us as we bring the key things to consider when making this mission-critical decision. But before diving deeper into detail, let’s introduce the basics.
What is a Low-Code Application Development Platform?
A low-code development solution is a platform that offers a graphical user interface (GUI) for programming or building software. Thanks to its prebuilt features and model-driven development approach, it helps business and expert developers build applications faster and with minimal hand-coding efforts.
Advanced low-code platforms, such as Mendix, help with quick setup and efficient coding and support developers through every stage of the development lifecycle, from ideation to deployment and maintenance. As a result, it’s easier, cost-effective, and less time-consuming to build apps using low-code development platforms.
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How to Select the Right Low-Code App Development Vendor
As initially stated, selecting the right low-code development vendor can be challenging, not only because of the hundreds of options to pick from. This decision will significantly impact how successful or unsuccessful your digital transformation journey will be. What’s more, it will be harder, time-consuming, and costly to switch from one platform to another once you’ve picked your preferred low-code platform.
Let’s explore some crucial considerations when assessing potential low-code development vendors.
1. Customization Capabilities
Most low-code app development platforms offer built-in templates, logic, modules, and drag-and-drop interfaces to save time and effort. However, the actual effectiveness lies in their customizability and adaptability. An excellent low-code development vendor should at least allow the following:
- Creation of apps on one platform and expand their usage on a customized IDE (integrated development environment) of your choice
- Modification of predefined and auto-generated codes
- Implementation of customized business logic
- Advanced customizations using custom extensions and methods.
2. Business Use Cases
Low-code solutions enable you to build enterprise applications with minimal effort from your IT department. As a result, most low-code app development vendors accommodate a broad range of business use cases.
Low code may entail the whole app development process or a bit of it, for instance, integration, user interface (UI) design, or project management. What’s more, low-code business use cases differ depending on the duties of the department they are being built for. Therefore, some low-code development platforms major in specific roles, like business intelligence and data analytics. On the other hand, other vendors are designed to help users create customer-facing mobile and web applications.
It is best to develop an extensively researched series of use cases, user expectations, and requirements and assess them against the vendor’s capabilities. This way, you can determine whether the low-code platform fits your use case. Doing so will streamline the application development process.
3. Assess Third-Party Integration Requirements
Some organizations cannot afford to develop or design low-code applications in silos. Therefore, integrating apps with enterprise systems, APIs, data center and cloud databases, and other third-party data sources is crucial. A perfect low-code development platform supports custom integrations, ensuring a standalone application.
When evaluating third-party integration requirements, it is crucial to ensure that the low-code platform supports easy development, consumption, and sharing of APIs, which are the building blocks of a modern app. Doing so ensures that the selected low-code platform supports the creation of apps that require simple integration and minimal maintenance.
4. Device Compatibility
People use different devices to access applications, including computers, tablets, and mobile phones. Therefore, it’s crucial to assess the device compatibility when vetting low-code development vendors.
A good low-code development platform supports multi-device deployment. This helps minimize rework and reach a significant number of end users. It ensures that the built low-code application is accessible across different browsers and devices.
5. Evaluate Pricing Models
Different low-code development vendors serve various business purposes and have varying pricing models. Some use the end-user pricing model, implying that you’ll be charged based on the number of application users. Other low-code platforms charge by scale, development of seats or apps, and metrics.
Before picking your preferred vendor, ensure that the platform offers a future-proof pricing model that meets your requirements, is within your budget, and is scalable.
6. Vendor Support
Selecting the right low-code app development platform helps your business become self-sufficient, especially if you opt for an open-source solution. But, most small-scale businesses lack adequate internal resources to maintain the entire software stack, and it’s not cost-efficient if they do.
In most cases, open-source low-code platforms are offered according to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, which includes software maintenance, hosting, and vendor support. However, with open-source software, you may consider taking out a support contract with a main project contributor. This way, you’ll have vendor support in your journey to becoming digitally self-reliant.
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Closing Thought
Selecting the right low-code application development vendor is crucial to attaining success in digital transformation. Once you pick your preferred low-code development platform, switching to another one will be complex, time-consuming, and costly. Therefore, it’s crucial to take careful consideration when making your choices. You need to examine each of your options, write down a comprehensive set of requirements, and assess them against the platforms. This way, you can select one that perfectly matches your needs.
Interested in venturing into low-code development? Mendix would be a great platform to get started. Visit our blog to learn more about the Mendix low-code application development platform.
