Review: Appsmith shines for low-code development on a budget
The low-code or no-code platform market has hundreds of vendors, which produce products of varying utility, price, convenience, and effectiveness. The low-code development market is at least partially built on the idea of citizen developers doing most of the work, although a 2021 poll by vendor Creatio determined that two-thirds of citizen developers are IT-related users. The same poll determined that low code is currently being adopted primarily for custom application development inside separate business units.
When I worked for a low-code or no-code application platform vendor (Alpha Software) a decade ago, more than 90% of the successful low-code customer projects I saw had someone from IT involved, and often more than one. There would usually be a business user driving the project, supported by a database administrator and a developer. The business user might put in the most time, but could only start the project with help from the database administrator, mostly to provide gated access to corporate databases. They usually needed help from a developer to finish and deploy the project. Often, the business user’s department would serve as guinea pigs, aka testers, as well as contributing to the requirements and eventually using the internal product.