What Are Low-code Platforms?

A low-code platform is a development environment that enables software creation through graphical interfaces and configurations instead of traditional coding, facilitating rapid application development. They change how we work by simplifying app development, enabling users to create sophisticated applications without extensive coding knowledge. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a 22% increase in software developer demand from 2020 to 2030, highlighting the importance of low-code development in bridging the talent gap and encouraging innovation. 

Imagine your team has an amazing idea for a new app for your business and you want to get it done quickly. But team members don’t have the in-depth know-how to properly implement and deploy it. You ask your peers in engineering for help but they are so busy, they wouldn’t be able to take the task until next quarter. You know this idea is brilliant and failing to deliver it may mean loss of business opportunities. In situation like these, consider using low-code platforms. 

In this article, we outline the considerations of using low-code platforms to fuel your business.

Common Use Cases

Here are some examples of widely adopted low-code platforms in different industries.

Internal Tool Development

Custom internal tools are vital for data management but are often time-consuming and costly to develop. Retool's low-code platform enables quick and efficient creation of internal applications. With pre-built components like tables, forms, and charts, it connects to any data source, allowing non-technical staff to build tools without extensive coding. This reduces development time and resources significantly.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Managing complex business processes with multiple disjointed solutions reduces efficiency. Appian offers a comprehensive low-code platform for business process management. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface lets users quickly model workflows, integrate systems, and automate operations, improving efficiency and consistency.

Enterprise-Level Applications

Enterprise-level applications often have long development cycles and require significant technical expertise and resources. Mendix offers a low-code environment for enterprise-grade applications. It supports full-stack development, enabling seamless collaboration between business and IT teams. Mendix's ecosystem includes modules and connectors that speed up development, reduce errors, and ensure scalability and reliability.

What to Consider When Selecting the Right Low-Code Platform

Selecting the right low-code platform for your company involves weighing several key factors to ensure the platform aligns with your business objectives, technical requirements, and operational needs. Here are some important points to consider:

Functionality

It must meet your business requirements. Consider edge cases and domain specific needs. 

Usability

A good low-code platform should improve efficiency by either speeding up work or making hard things easier. Assess if the platform is able to improve the effort, time or number of developers required.

Extensibility

Business needs will change over time. Choose a tool that will evolve with your business and can easily adapt to new requirements. 

Scalability

Pay attention to use case load requirements. Prototyping that supports a dozen users is drastically different from one that needs to support tens of thousands of users. If possible, simulate your usage pattern and load test the platform to make sure that it won’t break when you put it in production.

Reliability

You want your fancy app built with the low-code platform to just work. The least thing is to keep getting notifications about service outages. Evaluate the reliability of the platform and make sure that it is able to run stably.

Operational Burden

One important but often overlooked aspect is operation. Does this platform operate your application for you or you have to handle outages on your own? Operations can be complex and costly once your application is in production. Evaluate the options and see if this platform meets your needs.

Cost

The platform cost should be within your budget and you should never be surprised with a huge bill. Have a conversation with the sales representative and assess your ROI. Remember, a good tool should always help you save costs.

Easy of Integration

You may also want to integrate the tool with other parts of your system to leverage existing assets and data. Smoothing the integration process can save you many hours and amplify the value it brings.

Security

Make sure the platform you choose is compliant with your regulation and security requirements.

Support and Community

Customer support should be available in case you run into troubles and want to talk to someone. Make sure the platform provides enough resources to troubleshoot.

Introducing Fleak: AI Workflows. Simplified.

A right low-code platform can greatly improve your business efficiency. Fleak is a low-code platform for data practitioners helping them focus on analysis and insights, not low-level infrastructure issues.

Fleak is alow-code, serverless API builder. This means users can integrate LLMs, vector storage, Snowflake and lambda functions into workflows easily. These workflows can be deployed as production grade high-QPS API endpoints with a single click.

Fleak bridges traditional data science and modern LLM workflows with an intuitive platform that requires no extensive programming skills, allowing users to connect processing nodes within a unified framework and simplifying complex workflow creation. It also automates infrastructure management and code reimplementation for scaling.

Fleak makes advanced AI accessible, helping enterprise teams innovate quickly, reduce development overhead, and fully leverage AI in their operations. For example, we helped our users consolidate their real time news ingestion and sentiment extraction workflows into one process in 30 mins, and deployed to production with literally one click, where the same process would have taken a mature engineering team up to two weeks. Most importantly, there is no need for infrastructure optimization and maintenance, everything is built into Fleak’s serverless architecture.

Conclusion

The strength of low-code platforms is their ability to eliminate the obstacles of traditional coding, providing businesses with a substantial boost in efficiency. But, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. When selecting a low-code platform, evaluate the ten factors mentioned in this article and prioritize how they will help you achieve your business objectives.

About Fleak

Fleak unblocks your data team from batch processing and outdated workflows with LLM integrations. Its API builder allows Data Scientists, Data Analysts, and Software Engineers to effortlessly create complex operational workflows involving data transformations, model inferencing, embeddings, and microservices integration without the need for infrastructure setup. Fleak instantly generates http API endpoints for each workflow, ensuring auto-scalability and readiness for massive request load. Supported by 24/7 monitoring, Fleak integrates seamlessly with AWS Lambda, Pinecone, and Snowflake, streamlining data operations and management costs.

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