Key Takeaways
- Low-code development allows for fast and cost-effective app creation: the pre-built functionality doesn’t require large teams of developers.
- 39% of businesses have adopted the low-code approach to deal with costly tech talent and the emergence of hybrid workforces.
- Low-code platforms facilitate prototyping, A/B testing, and deployment of feature-rich software required for traditional SaaS development.
- Embracing low-code development accelerates application creation, streamlines workflows, and empowers non-technical users to contribute effectively.
Let’s be honest: we all want to save money. You’ll be glad to find a cost-effective solution whether you own a small business or represent a big company. And if that solution is quick and easy, that’s your jackpot. Low-code application development can be your lucky number.
Indeed, each low code example proves that this approach is a fast (thanks to pre-built functionality) and cost-effective (because you don’t need a fleet of software engineers) way to develop apps.
Forrester reports that 39% of firms currently use low-code development to empower developers outside of IT, and 27% plan to do so in the next 12 months. In addition to that, Gartner predicts that using low-code or no-code technologies for building new enterprise apps will increase from less than 25% in 2020 to 70% by 2025.
Low-code sounds nice, but how can you personally use it for your business or industry? This article shows 15+ low-code use cases based on Acropolium’s experience developing different low-code applications.
We split these low-code app examples according to industries, explaining the prominent use cases of low-code for various SDLC stages. Curious if these no code examples are suitable for your industry? Keep reading to find out.
❓ What Is Low Code Development And How To Use It
Low code application development is an approach that uses visual, drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built components, allowing non-technical specialists to create functional, lightweight solutions without writing code. So what are the main reasons for its growing popularity?
- According to Gartner, the high cost of tech talent and the rise of a hybrid or borderless workforce significantly drive the adoption of low-code technology.
- Another advantage of any low-code platform is its model-driven development environment. It provides an intuitive UI that lets developers easily visualize what they are building and rapidly create custom applications.
- More agile and resilient software solutions need modular components and PBCs — and citizens can compose and decompose these technologies to create adaptive custom applications.
However, it’s important to note that low-code platforms still require technical expertise and may not be suitable for all applications or complex business processes.
Here are five low code no code examples of use cases that work for businesses from virtually any industry:
- UI design. Building an appealing AND functional user interface is hard. A lot depends on the user’s operating system, browser version, libraries, toolkits, and various dependencies between them. No code development tools help quickly generate and easily update code for a variety of devices and platforms, from mobile to web to desktop.
- Integration. This is one of the most requested no code use cases, which includes seamlessly combining different CRMs, CMSs, and other applications into a cohesive system.
- API generation. Many legacy systems do not provide APIs for modern tools. Low-code API generators help automatically build APIs based on the existing application code.
- Business project management. BPM systems might lack some built-in features you need, like data analysis or management. But low-code tools can help you quickly add the necessary functionality.
- Docker containers. Putting a low-code system into a container run on Kubernetes allows the quick building of the needed development environment, from bare-metal servers to VPS, on-prem cloud, or public cloud platforms.
Whatever your company does and whichever type of application you develop, using low-code tools can help you create the required functionality with ease.
But don’t take our word for it — here are some examples low code business applications.
⭐ Top Low Code Use Cases For Solving Business Problems
No code application development approach minimizes the effort needed to solve smaller business problems and frees up the tech department to handle critical issues. Allow us to show you several examples, some of which come from Acropolium’s portfolio, of how using the low-code approach has helped real-life companies.
B2C Mobile App
Developing and maintaining a B2C mobile application no longer requires a team of software engineers. With low-code, you can build a cross-platform mobile app, providing rich functionality for users.
Here’s how we did it for a healthcare provider. The app helped with quick and easy user grouping and treatment plan management using a simple questionnaire for patients with various addictions.
Web-based Customer Portal
Self-service customer portals are a great way to add a revenue stream. They reduce your customer support team’s workload by letting users perform basic actions themselves — without contacting your team and minimizing the waiting time. A user can get a quote for a product or service, look up an article in the knowledge base, adjust their profile details, or quickly browse through your range of offerings.
Acropolium built a self-service portal to help a popular restaurant digitize and adapt to post-COVID-19 reality. Its customers can now browse the menu, add their orders to the cart, pay, and order delivery through a chatbot within a messenger app.
Social Network
Instead of trying to build a new Facebook, market players deliver turnkey social network solutions that serve a specific purpose. Meet Hango, a proximity-based geolocation low-code application that helps people find events nearby and form groups to discuss them, locate each other, and communicate if they get lost in the crowd.
Social Media
Instead of creating a one-size-fits-all product, it’s best to solve a specific customer problem. Acropolium helped a client build a wellness social media app, providing stress-less browsing for its users. The cross-platform application allows users to stay up-to-date on niche topics across a variety of sources and consume content in a healthy manner.
Splitting A Monolith App Into Microservices
Containerization is one of the low or no code examples we mentioned above. Splitting a mission-critical app into separate microservices enables rapid development and updates, independent reboot on-demand, and improved cybersecurity. With 49% of businesses using microservices, low code is poised to help them save time and effort.
SaaS Development
Building an app to digitize sales can seem intimidating if a company has always concentrated on providing mainly physical products or services. Low-code platforms help quickly prototype, A/B test, and roll out feature-rich software at a fraction of the time it takes to develop a traditional SaaS.
Low-code tools let us develop an MVP for multi-tenancy accounting software in just five months. Today, users can set up in five clicks to conduct and track transactions, pay with Stripe and other methods, and generate financial reports. The solution also guarantees platform security, scalability, and performance.
Supply Chain Management
Users enjoy ordering goods using mobile apps. However, when it comes to managing the supply chain, most businesses still have to deal with disparate data storage systems, a ton of spreadsheets, and manual workflows. Mobile-based supply chain management portals allow for flexible field operations.
With a low-code application, you get real-time tracking of inventory levels, automated low-stock alerts or delayed shipments, and the ability to generate purchase orders and invoices.
IoT Integration
Using low code development, organizations build applications that integrate with IoT devices quickly and easily, allowing them to capture, analyze, and act on data in real time. They can monitor the performance, identify potential issues before they become critical, and trigger automated maintenance requests to prevent downtime.
We upgraded a GPS fleet tracking solution, optimizing the backend code and integrating it with 1000 IoT devices. It enriched the system with real-time video streaming, easy and fast reporting, data visualization, and remote command processing.
Capital Request Apps
When running a branched-out business, you have to order and approve various expenses. And there, of course, are tools for that. But the problem is that most are riddled with complicated forms and many input fields. Low code applications ensures mobile-friendliness and suitability for smart devices.
Such tools help streamline capital management and budget approvals while ensuring scaling on demand. Add the ability to build API connectors to centralized data storage systems, and you’ll see why businesses turn to low or no code development.
Regulatory Compliance
Many organizations must enforce internal rules and policies to comply with GDPR, ISO, HIPAA, and other regulations. Admins should quickly create and introduce new requirements so the staff can easily navigate that data and find appropriate rules. Low-code development allows you to rapidly build such applications and keep operating under the laws.
Consulting on a HIPAA-compliant medical app for sexual health, we faced poor documentation and extensive technical debt. We conducted an audit, optimized the code and infrastructure, and added a new function subject to US law. It helped increase customer loyalty by 38% while reducing the IT budget by 40%.
Booking Corporate Resources
Companies may need more meeting rooms, projectors, or other equipment to book specific dates and times. With the low-code app, organizations automate management processes and reduce errors and double bookings, improving operational efficiency. Forget manual booking management and integrate with Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.
To manage 80 websites annually, our client needed event management software handling high-load pages. A developed CMS solution allowed the company to increase user flow by 60% and reduce subscription expenses by up to 80%.
Citizen Development
A low-code platform offers easy and quick development — from drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built templates to automated workflows. So, you can leave the engineers to do more complicated tasks and allow citizen developers to build simplistic apps that solve specific problems. This way, you’ll reduce costs, increase agility, and improve collaboration.
Operational efficiency
Processes like accounting, business intelligence, and real-time ops monitoring significantly affect the operational efficiency of your entire organization. While off-the-shelf solutions for solving these challenges can be costly and time-consuming, low code app development provides flexible tools.
We created a staff operation solution for the German airport to optimize workflow management and improve the communication flow between departments. Today, upgraded software can handle access control, operation diary, and task-setting panel. As a result, it minimized response time delay by 90% and lowered staff expenses by 40%.
Business Unit IT Tasks
All business units tend to have internal routines they still perform manually. If you’ve been putting off automating them because your software department was busy, go low-code. With low-code application development, you can empower your teams with simple tools that are easy to deploy and adjust on request.
This applies to anything from automating HR toil to managing office lunch orders. Most importantly, it is done at a fraction of the time and cost full-scale software development would take. And sometimes, such pet projects can grow into products and open new revenue streams for your business.
Omnichannel Endpoints For Core Systems
Capturing data from a variety of endpoints (from APIs to cloud-based storage, databases, or even legacy mainframe systems) and structuring it can be a tall task.
Low-code helps solve this problem by providing tried and tested routines that ensure predictable and fail-proof operations of various endpoints. After properly securing such connections, they greatly enhance your organization’s operational efficiency.
Can you see what a huge potential low-code has? We’ve just listed 15 low-code app examples that solve different business problems across many markets. And now, let’s take a deeper look into the benefits each industry can get from low-code project examples.
📱 Industries That Benefit Most From Low Code Development
We’ve demonstrated that low code apps benefit virtually any company. However, industries that win more from this approach vary from finance to hospitality. Let’s overview the most popular options.
Education
The education industry can benefit from low code development services by automating administrative tasks, supporting distance learning, and providing real-time feedback to teachers and students. The most popular use cases include attendance and performance tracking solutions or learning management systems.
Healthcare
Healthcare providers run complex IT systems and must provide patients access to data across various platforms while ensuring HIPAA compliance. A low-code for healthcare approach can help by providing HIPAA-compliant code from appropriate frameworks when developing simplistic patient-facing apps.
For example, deploying a self-assessment and visit scheduling app using low-code will take much less time than developing such functionality from scratch — while also ensuring data security and regulatory compliance.
Logistics
Logistics companies often deal with complex processes, which can be time-consuming and costly when managed manually. No code software development offers logistics vendors an efficient and budget-friendly way to digitize their operations and improve overall performance.
You can create solutions for tracking and managing inventory, optimizing supply chain routes, and automating logistics-related tasks such as invoice processing and delivery scheduling. Additionally, low code web development can enable businesses to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands.
Finance
Financial institutions can benefit greatly from using simplistic low-code apps to streamline loan processing, automate credit scoring, and create interactive dashboards for real-time data analyses. Providing timely insights and tools for better decision-making is crucial for a highly data-driven industry.
ECommerce And Retail
There are many tasks an online or offline merchant must accomplish daily — from order management to supply chain monitoring and delivery tracking. Sure, you can use the functionality provided by big eCommerce platforms for that, but you are limited with its set of features.
And if you don’t want to stick to eBay or Amazon, you have to go with Magento, WooCommerce, or any other ready-made software since developing something like this from scratch is very demanding. However, you can achieve great results using low-code apps to deal with all your everyday eCommerce or retail business challenges.
Now that you’ve heard enough of how great low-code development is, let’s look at the other side of the coin.
📌 When No-code Development Is Not Your Best Choice
Despite the numerous benefits of the products you can build with a low-code app, the approach isn’t right for every situation. Avoid low-code development if you don’t want problems with:
- High security demands. As most of the code is auto-generated, many developers rely on frameworks to cope with security requirements. However, such apps should later undergo an additional stringent security check. Compliance might require adjusting the automatic code quite heavily, so it’s best to write such apps the traditional way, focusing on security.
- High performance. When execution time is key, it’s best not to rely on auto-generated code, as it will not be optimized for performance. So if you need your app to deal with heavy loads rapidly, think of performance from the start and build the app accordingly.
- Lower TCO (total cost of ownership). Auto-generated code will consume more resources due to underoptimization. This is barely noticeable at first, but when your apps work at scale (especially in the cloud, with its PAYG model), the difference in TCO becomes massive.
- Accessibility. While a low-code application will not necessarily neglect the accessibility requirements, you might need to optimize it to work with voice input, screen readers, and other accessibility tools. The best way is to prototype your app using a low-code platform and then additionally optimize it for accessibility.
These are examples of low-code use cases that might need additional consideration — or have to be totally avoided. Still, a broad range of low-code use cases saves development time and costs while providing reliable code quality.
🌐 Benefit From Low Code Development Solutions By Acropolium
As you can see, low-code use cases cover a wide range of business applications for multiple industries. While there are some cases when low-code apps are not ideal, they do solve a variety of problems, the main ones being operational efficiency, cost reduction, and time-to-market. The question is, how do you ensure this all works for your business? Find a reliable technology partner, obviously!
Acropolium offers end-to-end software development services, including low-code and BaaS, or Backend-as-a-Service, approaches. We have nearly two decades of experience developing MVPs and enterprise-grade systems, mobile and web apps for companies big and small.
This knowledge allows our dedicated team to select the best approach to any bespoke software development project, choose the most relevant technology stack and delivery model that provides the most value for your business.
The great quality of our work is proven by multiple customer reviews on Clutch. Five of our customers have been staying with us for over ten years.
Contact us for more IT outsourcing details! We’re always glad to help turn your project into a successful product or service!
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