What is No-Code For?
08 Apr 2021No-code/low-code is a rapidly growing category of business software, but is it going to relieve businesses of the need to hire/manage software developers? The short answer is “probably not.”
Barely a week goes by without the tech media reporting on a new company offering “no-code” software getting funded at a “unicorn” valuation, being acquired, or even going public. No-code and its slightly more techy cousin, low-code, are jargon for tools that enable workers in a business to create software without (much) coding ability.
Tools in the no-code category do a wide variety of different things - there are website builders (Squarespace), databases (Airtable), workflow makers which connect disparate software (Zapier), data visualization tools (Tableau) and many others. Each of these areas actually has a number of contenders, with a slightly different emphasis or positioning. And there are almost as many “low-code” tools which are generally aimed at larger enterprises.
So why is this class of software having a “moment” right now? In the past, businesses would encounter a need for software and would have to make a “build vs. buy” decision. In other words, would off-the-shelf software meet the business requirements or would building a custom tool be more beneficial in the long run? There were (and are) pluses and minuses to each approach.
What characterizes the contemporary business environment is the rapid pace of change, the massive and ever growing quantity of data that needs to be anaylzed and operated on, and the reduced cost of computing power. There is usually not the time to run a long “process” to make a build-buy decision, nor are developers needed to build a traditional application cheap or easy to find. So companies are now induced to blend buying and building things. You might, for instance, purchase the finance team subscriptions to Tableau with which they are charged with creating/updating executive dashboards. Or, to give another example, someone in Marketing might use Zapier to connect data that comes in via social media or via online surveys to the company’s CRM of choice.
Will no-code and low-code tools supersede traditional software development? That is the hype around many of the superstar companies in the sector, but the bet here is that at scale, it will still make more sense for companies to solve problems programmatically. There is an unappreciated tradeoff being proposed with no- and low-code tools. They take little time to learn, but too often this comes through decreased usefulness in unique and unforeseen situations. Meanwhile, the investment in learning a generalizable, standards-driven tool like SQL will continue to pay benefits over the course of many projects.