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No-Code Versus Low-Code: What’s the Difference?

Harnessing the power of the  digital revolution to automate business processes and give organizations the agility to respond to fast-changing circumstances has become a priority for IT departments in the modern marketplace. No-code and low-code platforms have emerged as the weapons of choice in the battle to replace cumbersome legacy systems with nimble modern applications.

The challenge for IT is an environment with dozens of applications—both legacy and modern—that often house extensive custom code, is complicated to manage, let alone orchestrate updates or changes. Since applications rarely run in isolation, adding, replacing or even updating legacy software impacts a whole plethora of connected applications. In a code-heavy environment, adding even a little complexity can quickly devolve into “app chaos”. According to The Chaos Report by the Standish Group, only 29 percent of software implementations are considered successful, and 19 percent completely fail and never go into production.

To address these barriers, IT teams are increasing their use of low-code and no-code tools. In fact, 56 percent of corporate IT professionals are looking to low-code and no-code to upgrade their systems. However, the two seemingly similar tools have some significant differences.

Let’s take a look at the differences between low-code versus no-code solutions:

Low-Code

As the name implies, low-code platforms provide the tools to build applications with a much lighter code base than traditional systems. These systems being pitched to IT departments that need to fast-track integration with existing systems and speed up project delivery. The low-code market is expected to grow from $4 billion in 2017 to over $27 billion by 2022, according to Report Buyer, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45 percent during the forecast period.

However, the term “low-code” is ambiguous and susceptible to “marketing-speak”. So-called low-code solutions can still require thousands of lines of code and so leave open the door to complexity and attendant bugs— resulting in the same missed deadlines, and even deployment failures that the transition to the new platform was intended to solve.

No-Code

No-code platforms remove the ambiguity associated with the term “low-code”, along with all reliance on manual coding. They are the logical next step. Without having to write a single line of code, IT teams can deploy or modify applications in record-breaking time with assured security and scalability. The ability for IT to keep up to date with business needs is a huge competitive advantage.

ENKI, a provider of managed cloud computing services provides a typical example of how no-code is displacing traditional systems. Co-founded by Netsuite’s former Director of Engineering, he naturally built the company’s business processes on Netsuite, but even he struggled to configure it to ENKI’s particular needs. After six man-months and writing 50,000 lines of custom code to build a system on the Netsuite platform, it was still not finished. Turning to a no-code platform as somewhat of a last resort, he was able to completely recreate those 6 man-months of effort in the space of 10 days. The system went live two weeks later, without requiring a single line of code.

As Enki discovered, writing complex, custom code is a key barrier hindering many organizations from achieving business growth, and no-code platforms address this challenge head on. While adoption of no-code platforms is still in its infancy, uptake will rapidly increase alongside as pressure related to digital transformation.   All in all, the removal of legacy systems is central to delivering on the modern organization’s need for agility to respond to business and customer demands. The lesson is that it doesn’t pay to modify code-heavy applications by rewriting code, even if the task is made easier on a low-code platform. To truly remove legacy systems and deploy customized applications that increase employee productivity, save precious IT man hours, and deliver massive increases in business growth, no-code platforms must play a central role in an IT departments’ future.

Agiloft

Colin Earl
Colin Earl
CEO and Founder of Agiloft

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