Low Code Challenges: What to Expect and How to Overcome Them

Low-code platforms are gaining popularity, which is proven by statistics. Almost 80% of organizations have joined the group of their users. But why do so many businesses choose low-code development tools for their projects? The reasons are hidden in the optimal combination of the benefits that such platforms offer and the resources that they require. They allow companies to build efficient solutions for addressing complex business tasks with minimal effort and time investments. Isn't it exactly what any organization needs?

In this article, we are going to talk about the challenges that low-code tools help to solve and mention some examples of their practical use.

Low-code platforms: What can they offer to users?

Let's start with a very quick overview of the low-code automation software and its typical features.

Such platforms allow their users to build powerful business applications and automate multiple processes with zero or minimal coding.

Here's what low-code tools can provide:

• Visual development. App creation is executed with the help of drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built components.
• Customization. Low-code platforms usually enable users to customize available components and templates for advanced features in their business apps with custom code.
• Collaboration features. They are often enriched with version and role-based access control for team development, as well as tools for collaboration between IT specialists and business users.
• Security. All reliable low-code platforms of this type are equipped with compliance features and support powerful security mechanisms to address security risks.
• Low entry barrier. Quite often, even non-technical users can work with low-code platforms after minimal training. However, in some cases, the learning curve for building complex applications can be rather steep.

You can read more about low-code platforms and the available features on our blog by following this link.

With their rich functionality and flexibility, low-code tools can be helpful in dealing with all the most common challenges that businesses have.

Challenge 1. Slow development cycles

Teams that rely only on traditional development methods may need months or years to create new applications. This can cause delays in the launch of critical business solutions. Moreover, the business world is pretty dynamic. The competition in many markets is too high. Due to the late release of solutions, businesses may lose their market share if their competitors are faster.

Solution: Low-code platforms enable rapid prototyping and application development. It is possible thanks to pre-built templates, drag-and-drop interfaces, and visual workflows. As a result, development time can be reduced from months to days or weeks.

For example, our low-code experts needed just 1 month to create a UI Bakery PDF editor app. The client wanted to launch a solution for designing and printing personalized badges based on the available templates.

The delivered application pulls data from Snowflake, merges it, designs badges, and helps to automate the verification and printing processes. Without relying on the low-code platform, the app development team would have needed much more time to create a solution with similar functionality.

Challenge 2. High application development costs

It can be rather expensive to hire and further retain skilled developers. Given the rates that professional programmers with specific expertise may have, custom development projects often exceed budgets. Moreover, every update or modernization initiative may become a serious investment.

Solution: Low-code tools help to cut costs. First of all, it is possible thanks to reducing app development time. Secondly, such platforms democratize software development. They enable even business users without tech backgrounds (so-called citizen developers) to build and modernize apps. Users of low-code tools can reduce reliance on large development teams and avoid higher costs for creating software.

Challenge 3. Process inefficiency

Manual processes and separate workflows are common business challenges. Such repetitive tasks as data entry, approvals, or status updates can consume a lot of employee time. What's more, manual processes are typically prone to errors.

Solution: Intelligent business process automation is one of the low-code examples. Such platforms can help users successfully optimize their workflows and minimize manual intervention.

Quite often, companies rely on low-code solutions to automate such processes as:

• employee onboarding;
• customer support;
• invoice processing;
• report generation;
• sales approval workflows, etc.

One of the cases we worked on was the development of a Retool app for a travel agency. It is a feature-rich app for managing the company's scheduling system and client information. For example, it has tools for capturing personal information for each customer.

Moreover, it can automatically generate reports based on different templates. This helps the company to save 120 employee hours every month. More info about this low-code project can be found here.

Challenge 4. Complex regulatory and compliance requirements

Regulations frequently change. To remain compliant, organizations need to continuously monitor, update, and adapt their processes. If they fail to do it, they may face fines, reputational damage, and operational disruptions. The task of keeping up with all possible changes becomes more complicated when businesses operate in multiple regions or markets. In such a case, they need to handle diverse regulatory standards.

Solution: Platforms for low-code development often include compliance tools and features that help businesses meet regulatory requirements more easily. Libraries on some platforms contain pre-configured templates and frameworks compliant with the most common regulations like GDPR or HIPAA.

For instance, HIPAA-compliant platforms can provide secure workflows for patient data handling and can automatically generate audit logs for healthcare-related transactions.

Apart from this, low-code platforms can offer real-time insights into the compliance status of the built apps. If any areas of non-compliance or risk are detected, a team will get a relevant notification.

Challenge 5. Limited scalability

Legacy systems are often built on outdated tech and rigid structures, which makes them hard to update or adapt to new business needs. Upgrading them isn’t easy—it usually takes a lot of time, effort, and resources.

The process of upgrading such solutions often requires significant resources, time, and effort.

Apart from this, traditional development approaches that are used for interacting with legacy systems greatly slow down all related tasks.

Solution: Many low-code platforms are built on cloud infrastructure. This allows them to offer on-demand scalability to address increased workload challenges without additional hardware or infrastructure investments.

Modern low-code platforms are often equipped with features like auto-scaling. Thanks to this, resources can be dynamically allocated during peak demand periods. At the same time, they can be scaled down when they are not required.

This feature can become highly valuable in various domains, including eCommerce. A lot of online marketplaces experience a surge in demand during holiday seasons. Low-code software can ensure seamless changes based on real-time load jumps and drops.

If you want to learn more about the capabilities of such platforms, you can read low-code case studies on our website.

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Low-code tools: Trends to watch out for

The low-code space is evolving rather fast under the influence of the broader tech market trends. That's why, if you are considering using such low-code tools for your project, you should understand what is happening in this field and what features you need to pay attention to.

Wide adoption of low-code services

Today, the use of low-code platforms is not limited to niche markets. Given the opportunities that such platforms can provide, they can bring value to any domain.

Increased demand for intelligent business process automation

More and more companies are turning to automation to boost productivity and cut down on manual work. It’s a key step toward staying competitive in today’s digital world. That’s why low-code platforms are becoming so popular—they make it easier and faster to automate business processes without a heavy lift.

Seamless interoperability and integration

These days, most organizations rely on a growing mix of tools and apps to get work done. But the more systems you use, the harder it gets to keep everything connected and running smoothly. That’s why there’s so much interest in low-code tools—they offer practical ways to bring it all together without overcomplicating things. Many of them provide a wide range of pre-built connectors for third-party systems as well as allow users to create custom integrations in their existing projects and new applications, even without coding.

Integration of AI-powered tools for creating apps

AI can greatly enhance the interaction with low-code platforms. It can provide recommendations to citizen developers based on the app type and users' individual preferences. Moreover, the most advanced platforms are enriched with natural language processing (NLP) tools. Such AI tools can create reusable components or offer logic flows based on requests made in a human language.

Combination of traditional coding methods and low-code platforms

Mixing no-code and low-code tools with traditional development is changing the way teams build apps and features. It lets you move faster while still giving you the flexibility to customize things with hand-written code when needed. It reduces reliance on specialized developers (non-tech users can now greatly contribute to the process of building custom applications with minimal coding), lowers costs, and enables fast innovation.

We analyzed these and some other important low-code trends in more detail in one of our previously published blog posts. If you want to learn more about them, we recommend you read it.

Wrapping up

Low-code platforms can be efficiently applied to solve various business tasks. With the help of such software development platforms, you can build applications of different types, including simple apps and enterprise-level applications. Of course, all of them have their own peculiarities, strengths, and low-code challenges like limited customization options for complex applications, some performance issues, security risks, and a learning curve for non-technical users.

While considering available low-code options, you need to analyze various platforms. Low-code automation tools provide developers with a good balance between flexibility and simplicity.

If you need any professional consultation related to low-code development projects or you are looking for experts who work with such tools, at Akveo, we can always help you. Don't hesitate to contact us. Our specialists will find the best solution to support you in reaching your business goals.

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