Creating websites these days has become effortless.
Many successful businesses have awesome websites using different programs where they do not h...
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Short answer? No.
This isn't happening anytime soon. I can comfortably agree with you No-Code platforms are an amazing and affordable way for small businesses to "go online", and a far better alternative than custom software development.
However, for any company that wants to scale into a medium to large sized business, or with requirements more advanced beyond a simple bare-bones website/marketplace/blog? Absolutely not. It's well known that any all-in-one easy-to-setup tool will have to sacrifice customizability (and thus, scalibility and flexibility). The same aplies to no-code platforms, and why they will never be taken seriously for medium or larger scale projects.
Go look at the clients for all those no-code-companies you mention, and try to find a single company on the scale of Facebook/Netflix that uses their platform for 90% of their code base. And this doesn't just apply to tech giants, the same will likely be true for general medium to large companies such as Walmart/Whirpool/Home Depot.
This👆
I always think that this holds because a visual interface only reduces complexity when a system is small and simple to oversee like a marketing site. When the company grows in scope a visual system will only making coding more complex, because there is simply too much to oversee in a node-diagram.
Added to that the fact that your no-code is also a highly complex system of code, it's obviously best to get down to the matter and fix things at the root instead of calling a vendor to fix your code for you everytime.
Depends how you define "website". For hobbyists, bloggers, etc., no-code has been the way to go for years. And in the early days, there were apps like Dreamweaver and Front Page - they weren't services like WordPress, but technically you didn't need to write code to create a site.
But for the thousands of companies who care about branding, and more importantly, whose product is a web app, no-code can't come close to fulfilling their needs.
I doubt in 20 years time they'll be a thing. We'll look back on no-code generation and and decide it was not the silver bullet people wanted. Half the problem isn't really the tech but if you ask a group of nontechnical people what they want and give them free reign, you'll end up with a mess regardless.
I've had the joys of dealing with Adalo for app creation. It's truly a terrible platform and we'd have saved money if we had just written the thing internally.
Same goes for Wordpess. Far quicker, easier and secure to build a site from scratch. You'll enter into a tech debt you don't want to be in otherwise.
I guess maybe if you literally want a non-functional, information based web site, no-code can work but the minute you want logic in there, I'd 100% avoid.
No-code for Websites was there for ages, it's not a new thing. We had Homesite, Frontpage, Dreamweaver for decades. RapidWeaver, Pinegrow and Bootstrap Studio (just to name a few) are great desktop site creation tools.
No-Code for software development is also not new, I remember the days in the early 90s on the Mac using a phantastic development environment called "Serious Developer", later bought by Novell and called "AppWare", and also low code platforms like FileMaker Pro are very powerful.
Brilliantly balanced article exploring the future of no-code. Well done!
I'm a full-stack developer and initially very skeptical that no-code could even begin to impact traditional methods of designing and building websites.
I'm still not an advocate of no-code will replace anything, especially with the advent of Jamstack, SPA's, headless/serverless and other emerging and developing technologies.
However, I dipped into no-code 8 months ago and have since published a few client websites. Depending on the no-code platform of choice it does offer some benefits. If you're a traditional developer and have a firm understanding of how websites are put together to begin with, no-code can offer a super-fast way to put a decent enough website together for a particular type of project.
When it comes to truly custom experiences that require even the smallest amount of interactivity with API's, modern databases, and scaling up cheaply, no-code isn't going to help. Yes there are ways in which to implement API's and databases via other no-code services such as Airtable but they cannot match the robustness and scalability of say document based or realt-time databases.
If your client requires something simple, fast, and manageable, then no-code is I think a viable option. Just don't expect it to be easily scalable without cost.
My concern is that new developers will claim to be "developers" who start with no-code with no clue of how a website actually works. Web development is a multi-faceted discipline which requires a keen understanding of how things work. If that's you, then use no-code to as an extra tool to push a certain breed of website faster.
Hi Kyle,
This is a very interesting article. I like very much how you explain in depth how building websites has changed and how no-code is making website building more accessible to many more internet users. If the internet is for everyone, then everyone should be able to use and contribute to it. Websites are the foundation of the internet (and will be the foundation of the new web3 vision as well)
I have to say, the no-code cons do not apply to all tools. I am building one ( pazly.dev ) that puts the user in control and has ownership of what they build as a core principle. It is not a platform, but a no-code website building tool.
To answer your initial question: Yes, I believe and hope no-code will be the primary way to building the websites of the future.
If we distinguish between web sites and web applications, then I'd agree that no-code has a good future. When Wix came out, my first thought was "Thank God, if someone asks me to do a website, I can point them at Wix". And it's still going.
It should be apparent that applications are almost always going to require code. While the advent of the Power Platform is designed to open up to "citizen developers", to call it no-code is kind of disingenuous given that it's a little more than drag-and-drop. But, as a "low-code" environment, it looks promising for some organizations.
There's always going to be a place for specialized developers. So-called citizen developers often do not have a background in computer science and will need custom components to use in their low-code applications. Real-world applications with real-world resource needs and cloud-native components simply aren't going to be made by anyone but a specialist.
I cannot believe there are only eight replies to this.
Is no-code the future? Yes. But not for at least twenty years, if not more.
My car is “no code”. I have no idea how it works. Most of the people who literally built it likely have no idea how it really works. And that’s great. I don’t want to know anything about my car. Cars aren’t my thing. But if even the slightest thing goes wrong with my car, I’m spending a very large amount of money to get it fixed.
This holds true for pretty much every single technology ever.
You can almost certainly create a no-code website right now. But you won’t be able to truly customize it the way you want, if at all. And if anything goes wrong, you’re spending a very large amount of money to get it fixed.
Twenty years from now? Sure. Fifty years from now? Definitely. Today? Pay someone to do it correctly or learn yourself.
It would be an irony that programmers would create tools so everyone could write software w/o any programming knowledge, and in that way take the jobs for lots of programmers. That would be the same as we would switch to all electric in order to save the planet, but the mining of minerals needed for it would destroy the planet even faster :)
For me the programmers that are working on no-programming tools are either ot s smart when looking in the future or just wish to earn lots of money for themselves and don't care for all other people in the industry. I agree that this is good for some trivia stuff, but not to go all the way in that idea, unless the idea is for robots (AI) to do all the programming and we all leaving w/o working anything which won't happen for sure, at least the second part.
I believe everyone has a different need and expectation from a website, generally speaking the person using a DIY website builder is primarily the hobby blogger, the small low budget business or the "tight" business owner that thinks my quotation is overpriced, these people will generally utilise "Pre-built" templates to build out their sites.
In my mind this is where things go wrong for them.
The ideology of a website should ALWAYS be content 1st, so a client gives you the content and as a designer you build the website around the content and display it with a methodical process using design principles to display that content.
Pre built themes on the other hand give you boxes to fill out, that are probably not the best approach as although every business is different, they are lumping you all together and then consequently your on-line business is not really any different to anyone else's in the same sector that has used the same theme ?
At the end of the day I do not believe "No-Code" will overtake coding, there will always be a place for content designed approach.
Guys there is something that is drag and drop for design and still let's you code, it's called Adobe xd and it is best of both worlds. It gives you the agility of rapid web design and the flexibility of any of your favorite js frameworks.
Checkout CoCreateJS cocreate.app
Its a low code framework for building collabrotive no-code platforms and apps.
Built using micro headless components. Easily add, replace or customize a component. Components are lazy loaded when needed.
Using CoCreateJS core components we have built a datatable, kanban, richtext editor, website builder, crm, cms. Combine them all together and you get the ulimate no-code platform capable of editing its self.
Imagine using wix, webflow etc. To edit wix, webflow to fit your needs.
Also CoCreateJS is collabrative. Displays users cursors in drag and drop UI and code editor. Allowing for coders and non coders to collaborate on websites and apps simultaneously.
I personally highly doubt no-code is the future of the web. Unless it makes more difficult use cases possible I really don't see a use for it outside the smaller websites. And even those are generally quite easy to click together in something like Wordpress as well.
My previous company was going through a transition phase so I got the chance to attend a course of a week which went into the in-depth features. Simple API related tasks were possible, but far from the use cases I encounter on my day-to-day tasks.
Hey Kyle, great article about the no/low code movement.
Teodor from Wappler here.
I checked the platforms your reviewed and maybe you want to check Wappler as well and let us know what you think.
It has none of the cons listed above and gives you complete freedom for your code, scalability and hosting, no lock ins. I'd be happy to welcome you in our community if you're interested in learning more about it and giving it a test drive.
Obviously positing this in a dev platform will attract a lot of aggression ,clearly the comments indicate that.
For small business and individuals obviously no code is the solution with over 100 million people using WordPress well it clearly shows it's solving a problem
F*** no code website, all my homies code their own website own their own
Who codes the no-code apps? As long as people want sites like Wix and Shopify you'll need people to code those apps/services.
yes but artificial intelligence will take all the jobs