What is low-code?

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What is low-code app development?

Low-code is a software development approach that helps tech and business professionals collaborate and deliver digital transformative solutions faster by minimizing the amount of coding. More specifically, low-code largely replaces the need to create custom code with a collection of ready-to-go UI components, boilerplate scripts and integrations, solution blueprints, visual workflow automation tools, and other user-friendly features. For enterprise-grade application development, low-code platforms, such as Creatio, combine these features with other advanced tools for application lifecycle management, low-code governance, security, and AI/ML decisioning and offer the ultimate workspace for digital innovations.

“By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020.”

Low-code platform features and benefits

Visual modeling tools

Cut software development time in half by using a wide range of pre-built system components. To create modern UIs, workflows and data models, you need to drag-and-drop a component to the working area and configure it in a proper way. No-code is required, no risk of syntax mistakes, just instant cross-platform accessibility, total reusability and easy updating. Add hand-written code for further customization and your digital solution is ready in days or weeks instead of years.

Integration and APIs

Connect your systems and centralize data to create a digital ecosystem. Use ready-made connectors to enable seamless bi-directional integration with third-party applications. Create custom integrations using API protocols like REST, SOAP, or RPC to retrieve data, automatically handle their structure and database updates, and launch workflows based on events or predefined business rules. Open API combined with visual modeling tools make it 10x faster to create new digital experiences and modernize legacy systems.

Artificial intelligence

Discover customer insights instantly and make data-driven business decisions. Use built-in AI capabilities such as classification, scoring, next best offer (NBO) and next best action (NBA) recommendations to ensure a better customer experience. Build machine learning (ML) models to generate accurate predictions without writing code or hiring a data scientist. Create chatbots and conduct sentiment analysis using natural language processing (NLP) tools.

Governance tools

Eliminate shadow IT by inviting your business users to participate in the digital transformation journey. With the right low-code governance tools in place, this will fuel innovation and citizen development growth across the company. Create user roles and manage access rights, set up application approval processes, and use built-in application and infrastructure monitoring tools. Use auto-generated recommendations to optimize apps and workflows for better performance.

Security

Build secure apps and ensure compliance with industry standards. Configure security at all application levels using out-of-the-box security tools. Leading low-code platforms have the highest level of certifications accreditations, such as SOC, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR. Built-in security tools provide visibility and insights into all activities on the platform. Your vendor will conduct regular penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, so you can develop solutions at a faster rate.

Application lifecycle management

Simplify and streamline application management processes – from business requirement analysis and development to maintenance. Unify all development environments in a single view to gain end-to-end visibility and ensure security. Manage requirements and teams, create user stories and collaborate on MVPs, automate quality assurance and deployment processes in one place. Collect more in-app feedback using built-in feedback mechanisms.

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Low-code industry solutions

Streamline your industry-specific digital transformation initiatives

Financial Services

Enable your front office and middle office specialists to actively participate in digital transformation tasks by using intuitive low-code tools.

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Manufacturing

Put your production management, warehousing, and other LOB operations on the digital rails and seamlessly connect multiple workflows into a cohesive and highly adaptable solution ecosystem.

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Logistics & Transportation

Streamline your end-to-end supply chain operations with a centralized TMS that enables your staff not only to execute daily tasks but also continuously optimize their workflows and create new business applications with easy-to-use low-code tools.

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Telecom

Deliver on the most ambitious projects and launch new products faster by automating each aspect of Telecom infrastructure management and operations via low-code.

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High tech

Boost the productivity of IT professionals by allowing them to use composable low-code components for repetitive development tasks while letting them spend more time on high-value custom features.

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Business Services

Create a customer-first organization with a strong focus on personalized customer experience by automating the entire customer journey via low-code.

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Low-code use cases

Customer engagement applications

Create omnichannel customer-facing applications to efficiently and quickly address a variety of customer issues. Improve customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty by delivering faster, more reliable, and more personalized digital experiences.

Employee experience and corporate services

Streamline a wide range of daily corporate tasks, including employee management, request management, audit management, as well as internal service and support. Increase the productivity of HR and administrative teams with highly automated workflows and consolidated, up-to-date information about employees, assets, documents, and more.

Operational efficiency applications

Build and integrate applications to automate enterprise-grade operational processes for a variety of business domains. Replace time-consuming and manual processes with highly automated, intelligent workflows to increase efficiency, improve cross-departmental alignment, and decrease costs.

Legacy modernization

Modernize, extend or completely replace legacy systems unable to support new complex processes using a modern, open, and highly-customizable software ecosystem that is free from code. Make sure that the process of transition to a new ecosystem will be quick and smooth, without adversely affecting the current critical processes of the enterprise.

Collaboration and coordination apps

Build an application where you can communicate, collaborate, share content, schedule tasks, and manage reviews – as simply, quickly, and conveniently as possible. Boost employee productivity and efficiency with built-in automated workflows, and access to consolidated information, content, and essential productivity tools.

Vertical-focused automation

Build applications to streamline operational and customer-facing processes specific to your industry and business domain. Apply highly automated, vertical-specific workflows based on the best practices of your industry – be it the financial sector, manufacturing, IT and high-tech, healthcare, etc.

7 reasons to use a low-code platform

Freedom to own your automation

Meet changing business needs with a variety of customization and configuration capabilities, unparalleled agility, and resilience. Every business strategy is unique. Make your technology fit your business strategy, and not the other way around.

Faster digital transformation

Digital transformation is about people. Make your employees the change champions by allowing them to develop the digital solutions they need. Ensure high user buy-in, address the tech skills shortage, deliver software solutions, and digitize processes faster.

Improved business-IT alignment

Build up technical literacy and turn your business-line employees into citizen developers. Low-code tools democratize software development, encourage better team alignment, and eliminate shadow IT. Blend technology and business domain expertise for better digital products.

Higher productivity

Empower your employees to automate repetitive tasks and make changes to workflows and business apps to increase their productivity in hybrid work environments. As business users do most of the automation themselves, it frees the IT team for more creative, high-value work.

Enhanced customer experience (CX)

Create omnichannel customer journeys, mobile-first apps, AI-enabled solutions to keep up with the latest CX trends and surpass consumer expectations. Bring data and insights together, ensure customer data privacy, and enable self-service capabilities to become a customer-first organization.

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)

Build more digital assets with the same resources while reducing maintenance costs. Repurpose and reuse system modules or entire applications to boost productivity across the entire company. Low-code platforms allow everyone to automate various use cases and workflows.

Improved governance and risk management

Configure system’s security using admin tools, access control, and threat assessments. Leading low-code systems have third-party attested certifications corroborating their internal security practices and ensuring user data and applications are safe from breaches.

Low-code value in numbers

Low-code allows for creating cloud-native applications with 70% fewer resources

TCO of low-code applications is 54% of traditional development

Low-code platforms can reduce the development time by 90%

0 month

70% of users without coding experience learned low-code in 1 month or less

Low-code platforms are 10X faster than traditional software development

$0M

An average business can increase in value by $4.4M by using low-code applications

Expert comments and quotes

Creatio platform makes us more flexible, and it easily scales as our organization grows. The no-code technology allows us to train our CRM business analysts to build processes. It's not a pandora's box for coders only. Business people also have their say in solution development. The no-code platform has helped us significantly accelerate our time to market.

Tomasz Ciborek

Group Sales Operations Director at ASEE

Once I obtained some product knowledge, I realized there is quite a lot I can customize myself. Creatio is truly a no-code solution enabling people with absolutely no coding skills to design processes. Beyond a CRM, Creatio is a platform to automate workflows and create custom solutions.

Fabrice Colin

Commercial Digital Transformation Manager at Vynova

Creatio's no-code capabilities help us to accelerate our speed to market. When we have a business case that we need to utilize, we can immediately go into the system, make the required changes and take it to market in a matter of hours or days instead of waiting months for the implementation team to do the same.

Brooks McClary

Director of Sales Performance, BNI

Our rapid growth has been enabled with the help of Creatio low-code platform and the solutions that we’ve been able to develop ourselves by leveraging Creatio’s low-code capabilities. The system has allowed not only to map our highly detailed customer-facing and internal processes, but also track them effortlessly in real-time, thus driving operational efficiency for us and our B2B customers.

Milan Dipiero

Partner & COO, Centauri Health Solutions

Working with Creatio’s low-code platform has become a game-changer in managing our internal processes. We now have a powerful tool that helped us improve service quality, achieve transparency among stakeholders, better manage portfolios, and efficiently use resources.

Elona Llaci

Risk Management Underwriting Team Leader, Raiffeisen Bank Albania

The product flexibility allowed us to digitize our key sales and service processes, deliver needed changes and create a foundation for constant innovation and change. We enjoy Creatio’s low-code approach that enables us to introduce changes and updates to the platform without staff overhead and within weeks, but not months or quarters

Andrew Kretzschmer

Director of Sales Operations & CRM, BSN Sports

Low-code vs no-code

Primally designed for developers

Primally designed for business users

Primary purpose – speed of development

Primary purpose – ease of use

Coding is needed

No coding required

Total customization available

Pre-built components can be customized

End-to-end development

Some platforms provide only limited capabilities

For advanced applications

Simple to medium complexity apps

Ideal for companies with an existing IT team

Ideal for organizations looking to empower business users

What is the difference

The terms “low-code” and “no-code” are often mentioned together because they are similar. Both low-code and no-code platforms use visual interfaces to enable users to develop their own business solutions without extensive coding knowledge.

The main difference between low-code and no-code platforms, as implied by their names, is that low-code platforms can still include coding in certain cases whereas no-code platforms require absolutely no coding whatsoever.
This essentially means that no-code technology is designed specifically for citizen developers, while low-code technology caters to both citizen developers and professional developers. Because low-code platforms can still involve coding, they are capable of creating larger and more complex applications than no-code platforms typically can. For better flexibility and control over the development cycle, forward-thinking businesses deploy platforms that combine both low-code and no-code technologies.

Low-code FAQ

Is low-code only for large enterprises?

No, any business of any size will likely find low-code technology useful in some form. Whether it is to enhance their CRM or automate certain business processes with low-code BPM, low-code platforms are relevant to small businesses and large enterprises alike.

Who can use low-code at my organization?

Anyone from an HR manager to a professional developer can use low-code to develop solutions. Their intuitive nature and scalability make it possible for anyone within a company to create tools to automate their work.

Who is a citizen developer?

A citizen developer is a non-professional who uses low-code or no code technology to develop applications. They don’t have to be professionals with extensive coding knowledge, which is why the term differentiates them from professional developers.

What is visual development/ How does it work?

Visual development is the usage of a visual interface, which both low-code and no code platforms use, to create applications. The visual interface includes simple logic and drag-and-drop features, which makes the development process visual and more natural compared to traditional development via coding.

How to build an app without code?

Building apps without code is possible with both low-code and no code platforms. The development process with both technologies is mostly visual and very intuitive, and these visual tools along with prebuilt modules erase the need to code while creating an application.

Can I use low-code as a part of crm system?

Yes, some vendors offer CRM modules as a part of their low-code platform functionality or vice versa. This equips organizations with a competitive advantage over those using solely CRM solutions without low-code capabilities, enabling them to build necessary apps to enhance and automate their marketing, sales or service processes.

Is low-code beneficial for business process management?

Yes, business process management is one of the main applications of low-code technology in business. It helps both citizen and professional developers to create apps which automate processes quickly and easily.