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Cover image for A list of actually useful Nocode tools and I am not talking about site builders.

A list of actually useful Nocode tools and I am not talking about site builders.

Fayaz Ahmed on January 03, 2021

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 ...
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Stefan Smiljkovic • Edited

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.

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ImTheDeveloper

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!

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Arpit Mohan

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.

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ImTheDeveloper

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.

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Tobias Nickel

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.

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Arpit Mohan

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...

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Fayaz Ahmed

What are outsystems?

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imthedeveloper profile image
ImTheDeveloper

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.

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Devluc

Great article Fayaz, these are some great tools

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Marcel Cruz

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!

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Arpit Mohan • Edited

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.

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Fayaz Ahmed

Glad you liked it.

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sonu0702 • Edited

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.

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Kinanee Samson

Great one, nice new tools to learn

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Gayatri Sachdeva • Edited

Extensive list here with lots of new names for me. Thanks for sharing. Also, do check out DronaHQ (dronahq.com)

  • Greate for building internal tools on top of databases quickly
  • Connect to anything with an REST or GraphQL API
  • Query Builder for server-side filtering based on criteria defined at run time
  • Unlimited users in all plans and more to explore.

database connectors

Disclaimer (I represent DronaHQ)

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Steve Sewell

Builder.io is a great option here too - used by devs and non devs in large production sites

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davertron • Edited

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.

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chandragie

This is good news in early 2021!

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lcscou

Awesome! Very usefull! Thanks for sharing

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RealToughCandy.io

Very cool! Some fun tools here.

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Adnan

Does appsmith support firebase firestore?

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Ademílson F. Tonato

Hey,

Assuming that Arpit Mohan is a contributor and created this issue, I will say "yes".

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Arpit Mohan

Yes Appsmith supports Firestore. We don't have documentation for it yet, but the integration is being used by a lot of users. Please email me on arpit@appsmith if you need help with using it.

Our list of supported datasources are: DynamoDB, ElasticSearch, Firestore, MongoDB, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, Redis & REST APIs.

Appsmith datasources

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Kuldeep Bhatt

Brilliant! Aggregations.

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Peter Witham

Thanks some tools worth looking into on this list. Nice to see a list that doesn’t just make Web sites :)

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૮༼⚆︿⚆༽つ

To bad that Descript only works on Windows and Mac. I wish to install it on my Linux 😢

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Varun

Thanks for these amazing tools.
Descript - is exceptionally awesome.

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Pratham Agrawal

Do check out canonic.dev too!

It's focused on making API development easier and faster.

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Manan Chawla

great tools ty

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Cully Larson

Looks like Mail for Good might be abandoned; last commit was over a year ago. Great idea, though. Know of any good alternatives?

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Fayaz Ahmed

sendy.co

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Phong Duong

Great list. Thank you for sharing

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Kedasha

Great list! Will definitely be lookinv at DeScript + Super