There's a lot of buzz going around the web dev world regarding Nocode, but a ton of these do the same thing and kind of miss the point of why they are to be used in the first place.
These tools are not just another Website/App builder, but actual tools that will help you develop/scale your existing apps/websites which solve production use cases.
1. PWABuilder
I have used this and you will be surprised how well it works. The name says PWA Builder, but in fact it makes your PWAs - actual android apps which you can host on the Google play store, these are small light weight apps which are hardly like 1 - 2 MB in size.
PS, they even have a neat PWA component library, like Auth, Contact Picker, Install component, which you can use in your PWAs.
2. Appsmith
Another tool that I have fallen in love with recently, imagine building internal admin panels without code with charts, APIs, form collections, all with a drag and drop interface.
You can even connect it directly to your Mysql, PGSQL databased right within this tool.
I am surprised by how many complex use cases it handles.
PS - it's all open source and they even have the hosted version for free(for now).
3. NoCodeApi
I have been seeing NoCodeApi being built and grow since the beginning and I cannot stress enough how useful and polished this tool is, you need not read the docs of third party APIs, set up separate servers, write code, handle auth, tokens, API keys etc. All you need is an account and just get started using APIs from Google, Instagram, Twitter, Airtable, Slack and there are literally tons of other platform APIs you can use in your projects.
PS, I have seen the next update of NoCodeApi and Danish is making something really amazing for developers called Dev APIs.
4. Pipedream
I am not exactly sure what to call this platform, because it does so many things you won't believe. Think of it like Zapier + IFTTT + Glitch + Firebase Database combines.
It has all the automation magic and it gives you the complete flexibility of writing code, it even lets you add/edit their own hooks. Pipedream even allows you to save data on an actual database
5. Letter
People sending newsletters, you know how hard it is to make good looking emails, letter is simple yet powerful, it can import data like images, titles, descriptions from links. right in their builder
6. Mail 4 Good
For sending 10,000 emails, Mailchimp charges you $200, Mail4Good does it for $1 (I am not kidding). The thing is you need to host it yourself, it is open source and it uses Amazon SES behind the curtains which makes it so cheap.
7. Descript
Descript is like magic for Independent video makers, it generates a transcript, editing videos is a breeze with this platform. Their website says video editor that works like a doc and I could not agree more.
Just look at their demo video and you will understand what I am talking about.
8.BannerBear
BannerBear automates Image generation for you, you just need to pass along some parameters to its API, and it will make the poster, image, text embedding, image resizing on the fly.
You can even generate these images on the bulk by uploading them to Airtable or google sheets.
9. Super
Super lets you use Notion as your CMS. It even lets you connect custom domains to the site that is generated.
Do consider supporting me by buying coffees
If you like my content do follow me on twitter.
For paid articles on Javascript, APIs, SDK Integrations etc just DM on my twitter handle.
Top comments (33)
Great list, thanks for sharing AppSmith, I was not aware of it.
Also, MailforGood is also great, and we are thinking about integrating it into our system and avoid expensive services like Mailchimp. Not sure about the mail deliverability rate, maybe that is related to domain health, or that is just the price we pay for good email delivery.
NoCodeAPI is solid, I am following it as well for a while. I think some UX could be even more simplified for "no-code" users.
Descript is no words .. Great tool.
BannerBear seems good, I saw it a long time ago. I think you can achieve a similar result using one Figma plugin + Zapier.
By the way, I am working on a powerful no-code web Automation tool automatio.co, which gives you the ability to build complex web bots or scrapers in minutes. We are in private Alpha, but I believe if it is publicly available, that it would deserve to be on this list.
Really good to see some other no code contenders coming out! I've recently been working with outsystems, but seeing an open source and currently free alternative is great!
Yes, the reason Appsmith is open source is because we believe that builder platforms should be extendable and not have vendor lock-ins.
Since you've been working with Outsystems, would love to hear your experience and what you love about that tool.
Whilst the platform itself as you may know works pretty well for development I found the tertiary tools in the ecosystem the most powerful parts. The logging capabilities, page analytics and such along with the environment deployment lifecycle is really impressive.
It has its pitfalls, and as you have pointed out the vendor lock can be a problem for some users. It's definitely a great product and I really do wish appsmith well on this journey we need more valid competition to these big Gartner quad guys.
do I see it right? You have been developing appsmith witjin only 6 months? that is impressive.
I would wish that in the inputs areas for properties could resize, even with a simple
myAPI.data.map(row=>({...}))it gets cumbled together. However I am impressed by the autocomplete: that even worked for the dynamically loaded data with nested objects.Thank you for your kind words. We've been working on Appsmith for 18 months now. The project was open-sourced 6 months ago.
I understand that writing code in a small text area is very cumbersome. We are working on a larger code editor which will make writing code much easier. You can track the progress of this issue at github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith/is...
What are outsystems?
outsystems.com/
Low code development platform. A huge ecosystem, I'm working with an integrator who are building a banking front end system with it based on an overall bank architecture I've designed.
A very cool tool, like ms access on steroids really. The future definitely is low code, the speed you can churn through work in a standard way makes cutting your own code a non competition.
Great article Fayaz, these are some great tools
Awesome list, thanks for sharing!
In case you're interested, I've put up some web development resources on devresourc.es, and I'll make sure to add a "no-code" section there too.
Feel free to check it out!
This is a great compilation @fayaz . Definitely bookmarking this thread for later. Also, thanks for including Appsmith (Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers).
The reason we started this project is that, as a developer, I needed a customizable Django Admin panel. I don't understand CSS very well. Hence, Appsmith is a framework to edit UI code visually & functional code textually.
I think the move towards more managed/no-code tools is inevitable in all industries. Descript is a great example of this happening in the video editing world. As abstraction levels increase, barriers to entry crumble. This creates greater value for everyone involved.
Glad you liked it.
Give Nodezap a try. it can be used to create Admin Panels. It has variety of charts and widgets to choose from. You can write your own CRUD logic to manipulate data. It will also let you fetch data from the external resources using REST api.
Great one, nice new tools to learn
Extensive list here with lots of new names for me. Thanks for sharing. Also, do check out DronaHQ (dronahq.com)
Disclaimer (I represent DronaHQ)
Builder.io is a great option here too - used by devs and non devs in large production sites
You should check out Retool: retool.com
I've tried a number of these tools, and Retool is by far the most mature and capable of the bunch. The only tick against it compared to some of these other tools is that it's not free, so as an individual user one of these other tools might be better, but if you're looking into this sort of thing for your job you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't check it out.