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What is a low-code development platform?

With the rise of digital transformation and the shift to remote work, many businesses have had to make quick changes to meet their employees’ new needs. And as more people have moved to working from home, companies must continue to learn how to better support mobile users and rapidly develop new applications to help their workers stay productive, collaborative, and efficient.

One major way your business can support its employees is with low-code development. Instead of relying heavily on programming, low-code platforms simplify application development with techniques like drag-and-drop functionality and visual guidance. This means that anyone in your company, regardless of their technical expertise or abilities, can build apps so that the business can offload some tasks from IT.

Unlike professional developers, citizen developers such as these might not know much about hand-coding and don’t typically have formal training in programming, but they can still build applications using low-code platforms. Because low code simplifies the app-building process, citizen developers don’t need to be coding experts to build efficient apps. Using citizen developers also frees up your IT and development resources so they can focus on more complex projects.

Low-code platforms also help your business and developers address the growing need for top-of-the-line internal workflow applications, timesaving automations, better customer experiences, and seamless integrations. It can also help your professional developers build apps faster and avoid writing code line by line.

Because all low-code platforms don’t function the same way, choosing the right one for your business is critical for success. For example, you’ll want a platform that’s flexible enough to handle your unique business challenges and is still easy to use so that anyone in your company can quickly create professional, user-first apps.

The benefits of a low-code development platform

Low-code development platforms make businesses more productive and agile by delivering:

  • Efficiency. You don’t need to wait for developers to have openings in their schedules. With a low-code development platform, your other teams can simultaneously develop apps for multiple platforms and rapidly provide working examples. When developers are available to work on apps, they’ll benefit from intuitive features like drag-and-drop functionality and user-friendly APIs.

  • Flexibility. With low-code development, citizen developers can create flexible apps that accomplish specific tasks. That flexibility is also critical if your business must scale and extend apps to quickly finish projects.

  • Responsiveness. Sometimes your business must pivot to accommodate roller-coaster market shifts, and how better to do that than with new digital initiatives? With low code, you can quickly deliver and change a full-stack application.

  • Iterability. Provide customers a positive experience every time they interact with your brand. Online, this means providing a consistent, frictionless experience, and prebuilt templates and chatbots are a great way to approach this.

While low-code platforms can empower your employees who don’t have technical app building skills, they can be a great option for professional developers, too. Many low-code platforms are extensible and offer building blocks that are intended for developers to use, which makes these platforms a smart choice for just about any kind of user.

Ultimately, these benefits can help your business boost profitability. Low-code app development is designed for internal teams, so you can save money by keeping app development in-house instead of hiring external development teams.