No code tool directory. Do people even use these? | Hacker News Reader

No code tool directory. Do people even use these?

welovenocode.com

22 pointswhatsthenews37 comments

Yes - a ton of people. "No code" is great, tons of small businesses use them to put together internal tooling and reduce operational costs in a way that previously would only be possible with an engineering team.

Do you think that no-code will move to enterprise or it will stay in "small business" area?

I think it’s a lot like Excel and databases; in a way excel is often used as a sort of a “no-code” database.

There will always be use cases for the real thing, and there will always be people who reach for the easy option, and a lot of them really only need the easy option.

But there will also always be organizations who reach for the easy option, wildly outgrow it, and pay the price…

Lots of different types of tools here. Some are no code, most are low code. There is no clear dividing line between them: they are all configurable platforms with the ability to incorporate code through APIs and add ons.

Some are just special purpose utilities (eg Postman). Some are niche products with a relatively limited set of use cases(eg Airtable), some are enterprise grade platforms which can be used to build huge systems (eg Salesforce, MS Power platform), and there is every type of gradation between these.

This is a multi billion dollar business, growing steadily. It's going to accelerate even faster as LLM Technologies are increasingly tuned to build code extensions.

I agree, but wouldn't LLMs also deprecate many of the existing no-code players unless they can pivot hard?

LLMs make writing code easier, but they don't make it unnecessary. "No-code" is mostly small consumer apps and POCs, but "low-code" is a big industry based on platform building. Much of the work of building and maintaining an enterprise system is (a)data model definition (b) UI/UX construction and (c) workflows. Low code platforms specialise in doing this in a structured, fast and maintainable way without code. LLMs are great but they aren't a magic bullet. Enterprise grade development requires a lot of structure and LLMs don't provide that. Low code provides a pre built, well documented structure, enabling mediocre developers like me to build reliable, professional grade enterprise apps.

Hi HN, maybe I’m crazy, but why are there so many no-code tools? I see them launching every day but outside of Framer, Bubble, Webflow, etc., don’t know anyone who uses them.

There is a shit ton of people who use it - especially in the developing countries cuz the barrier is so small

What "barrier" are you talking about? Surely in a developing country having a human code instead of using a no-code tool, is more likely than in a developed country, as humans are more expensive the in latter??

There is a 2-3 years coding barrier till you become a "Junior" dev and can get hired. It requires access to quality education which people in developing countries simply do not have.

But since they are looking to earn money as well, they prefer to use no-code.

I'm talking from experience and from numbers: out of 60k no-code experts that we have, most of them (95%+) are from developing countries and not from developed ones

There's 60k "no-code experts" in the world? That's amazing.

Didn’t know much about “other” no-code tools (typical WordPress guy!) and just heard about Bubble a few months back (for me it was Bubble first and then track back to general no-code).

Saw a 3 hour YT video on how to create a airbnb clone with Bubble and I was just hooked.

Learning Bubble since. All these tools have a small learning curve, but if you get past it, it gets easy!

Pleasantly surprised to see a community of no-code people :)

Yah have used a few no code tools to stitch together MVPs; very useful for getting fast validation

Gotcha, that makes sense.

I was part of a non-profit organization that extensively used Airtable to drive it's processes. It works pretty well, but gets expensive with a large and open organization.

What's the best alternative?

Nothing, they still use Airtable. They just do their best to pair down the number of users/features or whatever Airtable bills by. They also use Softr on top of Airtable, but I don't think that mitigates cost at all.

In the 90's plenty of companies had small MS Access Applications developed in house. Before that, we had dbase and foxpro.

Lots of great no-code tools out there but you need some experience to use them, just like coding.

Miro is amazing. Many companies use ServiceNow. I'm sure you've already heard of IFTTT.

IFTT is such a great tool, use it a lot along with F5Bot

Is it true that no-code is just for making MVPs and can't be used for scaling up?

no, but depends on tooling you are using

I prefer Webflow for all stages, but Framer doesn't have the feature set necessary to scale at the moment

Need a suggestion: Which tools offer the most flexibility in terms of design?

I heard people like Framer

i feel like the bigger these tool directories get the harder it is to find anything. search is broken on these. How is this going to be different

Need an LLM tool for that

How do these tools handle data privacy and security?

mostly, they don't but there are some enterprise-level tools that do it pretty well.

No code vs AI, who's gonna win?

Yes, can be better than upwork!

Oh, I love Upwork, but definitely has downsides

which tools offer code exporting

Flutterflow does it

AppMaster allows to export code base on go for backend and vue3 for frontend

related, Framer export from Figma to code is super helpful for small side projects

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