Low-code, no-code: What’s the deal?

Let’s start by taking a look at the google searches for “low-code no-code” in the past year:

Or maybe the monthly tweets using the #nocode hashtag:

The low-code no-code movement is a major trend around startups and VCs

Wired has recently published an article that synthesizes the whole movement in one single paragraph:

Dani Bell a British copywriter who hankered for her own marketing startup. Like many founders today, though, she faced a roadblock. She couldn’t code. Bell used a point-and-click tool called Webflow to build her site and a client-management tool to let customers order services. Airtable, an online spreadsheet, let her store details about each job. And she glued many of these pieces together by cleverly using Zapier, a service that uses if-then logic to let one online app trigger another. (Whenever Bell creates a new task for one of her contractors, for example, Zapier automatically generates a Google doc for it, then pings her on Slack when the work is done.) Nineteen months later, her company — Scribly.io — had around 23 clients and was doing $25,000 a month in recurring business.

Bell built a startup without writing a line of code. In the long run, she might get big enough to hire a coder to make a custom system. But, for now, it works.

Only 0,5% of the world’s population knows how to code but there are millions of kids who spend their free time building games on Roblox and they will certainly become the adults who build their company’s MVP using tools like Webflow for web or Bravo Studio for mobile app products.

Low-code, no-code: A paradigm shift

Low-code and no-code represent a paradigm shift in technology. It started out with blogging CMSs like WordPress and Wix and platforms like Shopify who aimed to democratize and scale processes. We’ve been drifting this way for years. Today, there’s a new low-code no-code product coming out every week.

As Webflow states in a recent blog post: the more access people have to a medium, and the easier we make that access, creativity and output and innovation go through the roof. Just look at books:

Or music:

The low-code no-code movement rests upon the fundamental belief that technology should enable and facilitate the creation, not be a barrier to entry.

Low Code tools are designed for everyday users and professional developers. It’s more powerful and customizable. No Code tools are built for everyday users who don’t have any coding knowledge.

How big is the low-code no-code market?

As I’ve said before, the low-code no-code market is thriving. These are just a couple of tools:

The worldwide low-code, no-code development technologies market is projected to total $13.8 billion in 2021, an increase of 22.6% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. The surge in remote development during the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to boost low-code no-code adoption.

There are several sites where you can find what NoCode Stack you need to make a digital product, such as Nocode.tech or Nocodelist.

‍