The Anatomy of a Great Low-Code Platform

In today’s economic climate, slow and steady no longer win the race. Market conditions and customer needs change constantly. As a result, companies need to develop and deploy business solutions faster and with limited resources. For this reason, business growth and success rely on finding solutions and techniques that speed up product delivery using existing resources. This is where low-code platforms shine.

Low-code development uses a graphical user interface to faster develop and configure your applications. With low-code platforms, enterprises eliminate tedious traditional development processes and significantly improve time to market. They do this in two ways:

• By empowering non-developers to build and maintain solutions tailored to specific business needs.
• By empowering developers to build more applications faster

Either way, low-code development is changing the software development paradigm. Many businesses are shifting to low-code development to remain relevant in a competitive market. In this article, we’ll discuss the anatomy of a great low-code platform.

Low-code platforms require less programming expertise

Low-code platforms democratize enterprise application development and empower employees with minimal or no programming skills. As a result, citizen developers can build solutions that solve strategic business challenges.  Simply put, low-code accelerates application development by eliminating a developer’s need to master multiple technical skills to produce software applications. Using drag and drop in addition to other low-code platform features,  you can quickly create beautiful UIs. In addition,  low code development allows you to easily create solutions that directly solve your business problems. It is a far simpler alternative than customizing an off-the-shelf solution.

Does Low-code offer Faster Time to Market?

Time to market refers to the time it takes to develop a solution, from conceptualization to design to deployment. T0 stay competitive, businesses need to disrupt rather than follow market trends. In terms of rapid application development, Low-code platforms reduce time to market. Traditional application development that may take months or even years takes weeks or even hours with low-code. Low-code platforms leverage visualization and drag and drop techniques to make the development process run more quickly and efficiently.

What are the costs of Low-code?

All low-code platforms have different pricing policies but they are generally affordable for businesses. The most common pricing model is per seat per month. For example, Visual LANSA has different “per user” fees that depend on your capacity. Entry-level (up to 100 users) costs $16.66/user. Mid-level organizations pay $13.34 per. Finally, enterprise rates are only $8.34 per seat. Most low-code platforms also have different service tiers, and what each tier offers is transparent. This means no hidden fees — you only pay for the features you need. The total cost of ownership is significantly lower than traditional development tools. If you are feeling budget constraints due to COVID-19, low-code platforms could be the solution for you.

What about Third-party Integrations?

Most enterprises need solutions that can integrate with their existing applications, databases, or third-party applications. Unfortunately, off-the-shelf solutions can be very limited. Some can only integrate with specific applications. Low-code platforms, however, let you build your applications and integrate them with everything from APIs and databases to your existing applications. Low-code platforms facilitate integrations through third-party connectors. They use the RESTful web services found in most business applications. Drag-and-drop technology, templates, and widgets also make low-code applications easy to configure and integrate as you develop them.

Are You Ready to Leverage Low-Code Platforms?

Low-code platforms are powerful. They speed up your product delivery cycles. It doesn’t end there, however –by empowering citizen developers to solve business challenges, your IT department can focus on more strategic digital transformation projects or more demanding business needs. This increases everybody’s productivity.

To fully reap the rewards of low-code development, however, you need to choose a partner that’s the best fit for your business — one that offers all the features necessary to meet your business goals.

Check out all of the features of our hybrid low-code Visual LANSA.