The Advantages of Low-Code

Airkit is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that helps businesses rapidly develop customer applications:

“Crawford has already achieved a 20x reduction in development times while reducing total cost of ownership for app development by $13M over three years.”

If you aren’t familiar with Airkit, or Low-Code in general, here are the benefits:

1) Reduce Cycle Time

In a “high code,” or traditional workflow, one typically does UI designs or mockups in a tool such as Figma, then those designs, plus a requirements document are handed to developers for implementation, something gets built, and it is reviewed. 

One of the major challenges with mockups is that they tend to describe the “happy path,” meaning they sometimes miss edge cases, and a design inherently has some deviations from a fully implemented application. By building a working application in the same time it takes to do a design, Low Code reduces the design-implement-iterate cycle and allows for businesses to launch with high confidence.

2) Improve Employee Satisfaction and Retention

Low code is more approachable to less technical or less experienced developers, empowering a wider audience to solve problems while keeping your more senior engineers engaged on core technical business objectives.

Improve retention and job satisfaction by giving a new tool to employees that delivers the satisfaction of building, deploying, and iterating on tangible workflows. Now your business app users can unlock the power of the platform they are familiar with, such as Salesforce, for new uses. One example is embedding your customer dollar volume (from Salesforce) into Zendesk or other support system, for helping to prioritize your most important customers. 

3) Lowers the Cost of Experimentation

By lowering the cost to implement new ideas, low code platforms allow for more experimentation. Many business people have thought “I wish this google forms survey could hook back to a real database instead of just a google sheet,” or something similar, and Low Code platforms allow for that.

With Airkit you can tie front-end forms to backend databases or data APIs with just a few clicks.

4) Fast and Reliable with Pre-made Components and Libraries

With low-code, you can get building quickly using example code, tutorials, and application guides. Instead of starting from scratch, you can customize ready-to-ship code to make it work for your business in your context, either at an application or component level.

Example components you should look for include calendar pickers, maps, credit card payment modules, and the like, as well as rich connectivity to third party APIs and local.

The reason these components are important is that they are pre-tested and ready to ship. Why go through the hassle of PCI validation to take a credit card, when a pre-certified, tested module is ready for you to use? 

Beware of vendors – typically considered “no code” – that don’t let you customize, extend, or create your own components – they will only get you “part of the way.”

5) Easily Implement New Integrations and Adapt to Changing Requirements

If you are a large enterprise in a regulated industry, it is a common occurrence to have some new system that needs to be tied in, some new requirement about data handling and classification, or purely a desire to refine and optimize an existing application. GDPR, PII, Compliance, and Accessibility can be a real challenge, and the leading low code vendors provide tooling to address these requirements.

6) Lower Maintenance Burden

All PaaS/SaaS vendors handle things like upgrades, patches, and the like, but you should do your diligence on what upgrades of your specific flows entail. The best keep you fully in control of your versions, provide separation of duties, and support ‘one click’ upgrades:

7) Compliance and Security Out of the Box

Many enterprises have experienced “let’s build a simple form to collect some information,” but then found out due to GDPR, Accessibility, PII, or other requirements that increase the scope, from a simple project to something much larger?

8) Build Real Applications

Low code isn’t just for internal tools or simple digital form applications anymore and is ideal for reaching out to one or millions of users.