What's your experience with NoCode?
I can code, reasonably well.
So most of the basic stuff that I can imagine I can get out relatively quick with NextJs and Firebase.
But lately, bubble.io has really caught my eye, the promise of not having to mess around with the layout and getting a basic MVP out as quickly as possible is really exciting.
However, all the apps built on bubble that I have tested, seem really slow and "laggy"
Now maybe this is just an optimisation problem, and you can make semi-nice functioning apps with it
I'm just curious, what's your experience with no-code platforms for building something more than a simple blog site or a landing page?
EDIT: After reading all the comments, and doing some additional research, it looks like for a basic CRUD application NoCode is the way to go to quickly validate an idea. But it does have its limits. So after you get some traction, you can start thinking about creating a custom solution. Seems like the only way to actually understand this is to build an MVP with Bubble and see how it goes
As a developer my self I find learning Bubble cumbersome. I find that for most things im still able to quicker accomplish via code than learning bubbles UI.
I think Bubble is absolutely great for someone wanting to get into making apps without a tech background.
My current favorite nocode tools are GlideApps and Zapier or Automate.io
Ive made some good money with GlideApps 😉.
Thanks for the reply!
Care to expand on your experience with GlideApps? Was it for freelance or your own products?
hey Mark! I wrote up an expanded post here as it seems I could provide value to others as well:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/nocode-lowcode-for-tech-founders-and-small-businesses-210c5ae2c9
Essentially, many small businesses and startups use spreadsheets as their CRM/Database/backend because its just what people know. But business owners don't have the time to research whats better for them. All these spreadsheets are opportunities for apps and integrations in their systems with Glide apps.
Most of the time they have informal/manual processes that cross check spread sheets with emails, documents , some third party database. Using something like glideapps allows you to quickly bring these sources together without writing any code. I think Glideapps is by far the easiest to pick up and use, its just mind blowing how quickly you can integrate a spreadsheet (or even use their powerful Glidetables) and use zapier to glue together different systems.
Its mind boggling how powerful it is!
I’ve been building apps with Bubble since 2015 and IMO it’s far ahead of any of it’s competitors for building web apps.
I’ve built everything from marketplaces, to job boards, to SaaS. There are definitely ways to optimize and scale Bubble apps, but it takes time to understand how to do all that so the majority of apps you see will probably lack some speed. Fortunately, there are some great guides and courses coming out to do all this for more advanced Bubblers.
There are actually a lot of very polished B2B Bubble apps that are moving a lot of data quickly with tons of users, but the founders aren’t indie makers or building in public, so you don’t hear about these as often.
For some great examples of Bubble built apps, I frequently post on Twitter about Bubble SaaS apps. Also, I’m currently building a new marketing SaaS which you can check out.
@stephencharles can you please share some "more sophisticated" saas please?
Would love to see what's doable via nocode.
My experience with no-code tools is that you very early on need to judge whether you expect your application to be heavily reliant on data calculations and visualizations.
I am building a platform that helps people making the switch to electric vehicles. So I need a lot of data on each of the cars, charging solutions and the users.
I initially started out using a combination of carrd.io and Grid.is. This actually worked quite nice and was very easy to get up and running as I could utilize my knowledge of Excel. However, Grid.is does not yet support user management and hence, I was not able to allow for user login and storage of their profile information.
So I moved on to bubble.io as this tool is very versatile and also has a built-in DB. bubble had quite a steep learning curve but I had a good feeling I could build basically anything. Unfortunately I had some specific requirements as to how data should be merged and calculated which was not possible using bubble unless if you used several plug-ins and some pretty nasty work-arounds. And I have to say that I was a bit worried about the performance given all of this.
On the bubble community a user mentioned code2.io as an alternative no-code platform that could be used when data is a crucial part of your application. This was a complete game changer for my use case. All of the sudden I had a PostgreSQL DB available directly and I was able to build specific queries that suited all my use cases and which just performs amazingly.
There is no doubt that code2 also have a learning curve and I was not event super proficient in SQL. But the support I got from the whole code2 team was amazing. They even helped me build major parts of my application which helped me get off the ground and now I can do 99% of the development myself - even the SQL queries :-)
So if you know you gonna work a lot with data in your next application then you should definitely give code2.io a try!
Low code tools for integrating different tools with each other are great (zapier, etc), as integrating APIs was always rather time consuming for me.
Frontend no code application builders have their advantages and disadvantages. For MVP creation and smaller applications great. For more complex apps they hit their limits rather quickly in my experience. Having options to extend the low code with real code is a huge advantage.
Summary:
Used Glide, Integromat, Airtable, Adalo, Bubble, Zapier, Bravo, Telegram bots, Tilda.
Was fed up with Bubble's learning curve. Glide is underrated.
In case you have a startup idea you wanna build - dm me on Twitter.
My only experience with nocode is mostly zappier and a little bit with airtable. But I have interviewed a nocode freelancer and he spoke about his tool box. I was impressed with what nocode tools can do. Apparently one can replicate uber and airbnb with bubble...
I hate them as a user. They break middle click to open in new tab. Using the editor to throw up a landing page is a good UX, though.
tldr; bad for users, good for makers
Hi Markuss, take a look on my project, it was built on Bubble and (I believe) it's not slow and "laggy" ;) To check it out, leave your e-mail at the landing page. The landing was built in Webflow, but the whole backend app is on Bubble! Let me know what do you think about it.
As a non-developer who understands UX and product design, Bubble for me is a game changer. Before I’d write off most app ideas as I’d need a tech co-founder, but now I can create my own apps (or at least MVPs) without a tech team. Sure it has a pretty steep learning curve, but the fact you can create some pretty complex apps in a single no code tool is pretty compelling for a non-coder.
If vendor lock-in is the main concern then i would suggest taking a look at https://drapcode.com as you can build you app the no-code way and then if you need better control, then you can export the web app built on DrapCode and then continue your journey from there. You will not have to start from scratch.
Also, the exported code is in NodeJS/ExpressJS as backend, HTML/CSS/JS as frontend and MongoDB as Database, so its pretty standard tech stack.
I've worked with webflow (sorta no-code/low-code) and bubble -- probably a year ago so my assessment might be out-of-date.
Webflow -- Typically used for marketing sites. You can prototype inside of it. I found the UI great for building pages and or buying beautiful templates but their data-model is focused on being a CMS so you can't customize your queries. For instance the prototype we were building we could populate the pages with data. But advanced interactions like geo-filter was impossible without external apis. The Big draw back was only one person could be in the editor at a time -- this was a huge nightmare for the team. Since the marketing site was baked into the app we were protoyping so when marketing wanted to make changes while we were building it created issues. It required folks to coordinate in slack to signout, because you could pop someone out and their updates would get lost.
Bubble -- I spent a few days building a prototype in Bubble. I did feel the editor was clunky and not sure if it was multi-player capable. It did give you access to a database modeler that you could construct your own data-access pattern. But I remember the UI visual tool wasn't as nice as Figmas so creating something that look good required more effort. I had a basic verison working, in a day. But think I'd realized it was still going to take a few more days to get everything in place and we'd still need to setup Stripe for payments. Still took time and effort. And as a developer the whole thing felt janky, there were no tests or environment concepts so I could test/build the way I would want. Again maybe this has changed.
Most recently though Retool has come into my life. This is more low-code, you need to know SQL and javascript. But it is a powerful tool and think it can augment any developer(s) stack and save time when you need to build some administrative panel.
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I have a developer bias... I like the idea of no/low code tools. But for them to become part of my workflow I have a few requirements. I want to own the underlying database or at least be able to replicate it (postgres ideally) and it needs to provide a space/versioning for me to be able to work on a non-production version of the app with others. And not every tool supports this...
As a developer I think the most time consuming part is the front end. During iterations and pivots, changing the UI is a pain. The api in the other hand has a lot of code that we can reuse such as auth and third party integrations; and we would just have to build out the CRUD.
So I would prefer a no-code frontend that connects to a custom api and dynamically renders the UI. Not sure if thats something bubble can do.
The no/low code space in growing and developing at insane speeds. More and more tools are popping up all over. Some of which very interesting, like Plasmic (allows for a DnD builder to be dropped into an existing codebase to get the best of both worlds).
Personally, I try to only consider tools that allow for the following:
I am currently about 60% through building a mobile app (finance) using AppGyver, which is a solid tool (only found out recently I can't export my code though :( )
Some of these tools are awesome for creating a prototype/MVP though. Glide allows you to put something together in literally hours.
Final edit; Draftbit is also worth checking out. React Native under the hood, allowing for code export and custom components.
It's pretty great for getting a basic app out there. I wouldn't want to build a complicated product with it, but prototypes / MVPs definitely.
I can think of an app, get it built quickly by myself and get it in front of users. All within hours. That's pretty incredible.