Let me start by asking a question.
Would you prefer to write reams of code to build your website, blog, or web app, or would you rather use a tool that did all the work for you?
If you are a software developer who wants to practice application development, you may opt to write the code and build it yourself. However, if you need to get to market fast and don’t have the time to write or maintain the code, you may well favor a tool that does the coding for you, so you can start building apps faster and fulfil your business users requirements faster.
These tools are known as no-code tools. This collective term describes the technologies, applications, and platforms that enable even a non-technical person to build software without entering a single line of code, this is the magic of no code development
There are plenty of no-code tools that help create websites and blogs, manage developer workflow, and handle files or images. However, this range of choice creates challenges; with so many options to pick from, selecting the right tool for your unique situation can be tricky.
In this article, we’ll give you a helping hand by talking about the five best no-code tools for developers. Hope you find the suggestions helpful!
Bubble
Bubble helps you create responsive web applications for desktop and mobile browsers, and it’s particularly useful for building multi-user apps in the style of Facebook or Airbnb.
You can build a highly customizable user experience with simple drag & drop; the logic gets built in the background without you worrying about it. Building feeds, chats or other real-time functionalities is easy.
Bubble also provides you with a scalable data store to design the app’s data structure. Setting up identities is easy with OAuth 2.0 providers like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and you can bring data from third-party services into your application. If you’re building for a global audience, you can translate your app into 80+ languages.
Bubble handles the hosting and maintenance of your app securely, and the best part is that there’s no limit on the number of users, storage, or network traffic that your application can handle. You can use Bubble individually or collaboratively with your team members for your app development.
Plans & Pricing:
Bubble comes with a free plan that offers core platform features, banding, and community support. Other paid plans include:
- Personal. With this plan, you get additional features like API, custom domain and email support. The personal plan costs $25/month.
- Professional. This tier costs $115/month and comes with an additional three units of server capacity, two for application editor support, two for development versions and many more.
- Production. The production plan offers a significant upgrade on all the numbers above. You’ll need to pay $475 a month for this package.
All the prices mentioned above are covered by an annual payment plan. However, there are also options to play monthly. Please check out the pricing page for more details.
Webflow
Webflow is a fantastic tool for non-developers who want to create world-class websites and apps. You can design, create, and collaborate visually, and absolutely no coding is required.
The Webflow designer provides you with the visual canvas to put your creativity into practice and create a beautiful product. You can marry your design with the content of your choice using CSV, API calls or manual creation. Crucial user experiences, like searching and filtering data on your website, are easy to plug in.
Webflow offers a bunch of responsive website templates to get started, and its finely-tuned SEO controls allow you to set things up without possessing any knowledge of Google optimisation techniques. Also, you can host the website on an AWS-powered service that is highly secured and scalable.
This list of benefits adds up to a seriously impressive product, and the Webflow team is currently working on a logic feature that will make it even better.
Plans & Pricing:
Webflow provides a free plan to get you started. The other plans are:
- Basic. The basic plan costs $12 per month, which allows you to add a custom domain for your website with 50GB bandwidth.
- CMS. The CMS plan provides 2,000 CMS items and three guest editors. It also comes with higher bandwidth. This plan costs $16 per month.
- Business. The business plan costs $36 per month, pushing the numbers even higher for CMS items, bandwidth, and guest editor functions.
- Enterprise. You can contact Webflow sales and support to know more about the enterprise plan and price.
FlyCode
Imagine this scenario: you’re the product manager of an application about to go live. However, you’ve suddenly found a few typos in a paragraph and need to change the button text. You are not the app developer and aren’t very familiar with development processes, but you need to fix the problems asap.
The option you have now is to contact the development team and wait until they complete the process of fixing, reviewing the fix, and finally deploying it. That’s seriously time-consuming. What if there was a tool that helped you to do all these things yourself, without touching a single line of code directly?
Here’s where FlyCode comes in.
FlyCode is a Git-based copy and translation editor for web applications. It allows developers and non-developers to change the app faster and collaborate on visual screens.
FlyCode performs a quick scan of your repositories for a section of text you are looking for, and you can make all the changes visually and send them in a pull request.
This entire workflow is effortless, even for a non-developer. You can control all your FlyCode applications from an easy-to-use dashboard, giving you the power to view, edit, and label your text directly from the app page.
Localization & internationalization of text is part-and-parcel of building global applications. However, when you’re writing code, it’s not always easy to configure and maintain the localization supports. With FlyCode, however, you can manage all text translations in just a few clicks.
Plans & Pricing:
FlyCode provides a free plan to get started with three apps, 500 unique texts, and one editor. The other available plans are:
- Team. With this plan, you get up to five apps, three editors, and unlimited unique text support. It costs you $79 per month, but if you use FlyCode to develop an
open-sourceapp, the team plan isfreefor you. - Business. The business plan costs you $119 per month. This includes all the features of the Team plan, plus auto-labelling of UI components for texts, audit logging, and priority support.
Airtable
Airtable is a platform known for its ability to deliver powerful applications.
The software allows you to simplify processes and workflows without writing any code using drag-and-drop features, drill-down, and customizations. What’s more, the built-in automation workflow helps you plan and execute complex tasks without manual interventions.
With Airtable, you can sync data from various sources and consolidate them to achieve vital aggregation. Then, you can transform your data into dynamic views which are actionable and process-oriented.
You can create views like calendar, grid, visual gallery, forms, Gantt, Kanban, and timeline, and the software empowers you to create custom applications like project planning, task planning, photo galleries and on-demand custom views. If you want to create reports of your work, Airtable enables you to use tabular data, charts, graphs and dashboards.
Plans & Pricing:
Airtable has a generous free plan for individuals or a small team to start. The free plan is enough for side projects. However, if your requirements are more widespread, please look into other plans such as:
- Plus. The $10-per-month option includes everything in the free plan, plus more options for integrations, storage, data retention and automatic table syncing.
- Pro. The pro plan costs $20, with additional features like Gantt, Timeline, personal and locked views.
- Enterprise. The enterprise plan is designed for organizations, and they should contact sales to find out more.
When we talk about Airtable, we must mention another no-code software development tool called Softr, which is designed to create websites, resource directories, online communities, portals and many other custom apps from Airtable. It’s fast and easy to use and there’s zero learning curve. Check out Softr and its pricing plans here.
Glide
Glide offers three excellent products: Apps, Pages, and a Data Editor. These three offerings help you build robust applications using theme, design, and data options.
Glide Apps provides out-of-the-box themes that allow you to design like a pro. You can chain multiple steps together for a logical user experience, and apps are responsive by default; this means you don’t have to do anything to make the app work in a mobile or tablet browser. The development environment is collaborative, too, so team members can pool their creativity.
Glide Pages are data-driven portals and dashboards created directly from spreadsheets. You can make highly customized, secure pages with your brand, and the pages can be shared as simple web links for anyone to access from any device.
The Glide Data Editor is a cutting-edge tool to bring your data from several sources, including CSV, Xcel, Google sheets and Airtable. You just need to connect to the data store and start syncing; the hassle of data migration is removed completely, and the columns in the data editor’s grid are highly customizable. You can do the math yourself, generate QR codes, measure distances and make API calls without a single line of code.
Plans & Pricing:
Like all the No-Code tools we’ve discussed so far, Glide also offers a free plan. The other plans are as follows:
- Starter. This costs $25 per month and allows users to build a handful of smaller apps.
- Pro. This is for teams and costs $99 per month.
- Business. This plan is for enterprises and costs $249 per month.
To sum up…
We hope you found this article insightful. We’ve really only touched the tip of the iceberg here; there are plenty of other no-code tools out there, and we can discuss them in a future article.
As the digital landscape becomes increasingly competitive, companies are constantly looking for one-percent advantages, and so the market for no-code tools and low code development platforms continues to grow. These tools are being used to build web applications, workflows, websites, blogs, marketing projects and educational tools, and their use cases are increasing all the time.
No matter your needs and the nature of the projects you work on, we’re sure you’ll find a no-code option to suit you. Happy coding!
