Pros and cons of no-code

What no-code tools did you personally use?

About the cons that you listed:

1. It is only partially true. Lots of no-code tools, the majority of them in fact, let you download the source code.
2. In my experience it's not true. I had zero technical knowledge and met a lot of people with zero technical knowledge able to build great things. To prove your point you mentioned webflow, which is the only tool I can think of where technical knowledge is a plus. With Bubble, carrd, sheet2site, draftbit, glideapps, landen and many others you need zero technical knowledge.
3. Seems the exact opposite of reality. When you start, technology is important. When you are big, it is not. With bubble, I cloned blinkist. They still had 10 m users, I had a couple of thousand. I could clone uber and airbnb, probably even facebook and instagram, still they would don't care, because they have a moat that doesn't depend on technology.
4. Partially true. Bubble has startups with 100k+ users, webflow ecommerce with million of monthly visits. If your definition of scale is facebook/youtube clearly it isn't going to happen, but the same goes for a website developed by an agency. I would argue that 100k+ users and million of monthly visits are both impressive measure of scale and that no small team of technical people can match that. Another example is shopify, used by companies that make tens of millions in revenue. Wordpress nowadays is basically another no code tool. You have templates for everything and plugins to make changes without having to code.
5. almost everything is true. "Especially on the mobile app front, no-code tools have a long way to go before making a robust, non-cookie-cutter MVP is possible". This is not. With drafbit you can build fully functional apps and glide is amazing for static apps.

My 2 cents, this article is not the truth about no-code, it is the analysis that you can expect from a company that makes money developing products (biased).

The truth about no-code tools is that you can build 95% of what you see on the internet in a more cost-effective and better performing way than a small team of technical people/agency can. And this gap is only going to grow.

Clearly, technical people will always be needed for high-complexity tasks and at big corporations.

Great article, good to see things like this out there.

I'm only partially technical. I'd say I'm 100% at HTML and CSS, maybe 20% at JavaScript and PHP, and 10% at Python. I basically suck at programming.

That said, I have been able to create some pretty fantastic web apps using the OG no-code solution, WordPress. It's a terrible CMS in my opinion, but the extensions and community let you build anything with it, even full-fledged SaaS apps with payments, dashboards, everything.

I've since chosen to go the "real" development route (mostly because my partner is far more technical than I am) so it's easier/better to interface with her and do the front end while she does the full stack.

But I can still spin up a fully functioning job board in about 1 hour using WP and a couple premium plugins. What's cheaper or easier than that? No-code is really, really underrated by a lot of Certified Pro Developers™ out there.

As an analyst, I have some light coding experience with SQL and python, but not nearly enough to build anything significant. I'm currently getting into the movement now, and exploring tools like airtable, twilio, zapier, etc. What I'm finding is that the capabilities to build something unique seem limited.

Maybe I just need to do some more digging though...

Nice articles, I enjoyed them both!

I'm a software dev so it's interesting to read how a non-technical creator might approach problems using no-code tools and the challenges they face. At some point I hope to build something that will contribute to the no-code movement.