12 cool tools that will save you time and money

NoCode development is growing by leaps and bounds. There are more than 600 tools for now, and new ones keep turning up day by day.

They are used by many companies from small to large: up-and-coming startups and market leaders such as Spotify, Adobe, Uber and others.

Today we, LowCode-development studio 021, will tell you about the most useful and popular of them.

And, of course, there will be examples.

What tasks can be solved by NoCode-tools

NoCode tools can be divided into several categories:

1. For website development
2. For application development
3. Marketing NoCode tools
4. NoCode automation tools

Even if you’re not a web developer or marketer, you’ve probably come across at least a couple of the tools we’ll talk about next.

NoCode-tools for web development

Bubble

It is a platform used by entrepreneurs and developers all over the world. In general, Bubble is easy to use, but it has its own nuances. But first things first.

Benefits:

• You have the entire workspace at your disposal. You can easily resize it, add elements to any place on the frame, drag and drop them freely, and overlay them on top of each other. So, in a few hours you can draw the interface, build the internal logic of the site elements and run it.
• A large number of tools. You can add and customize text, buttons, maps, create forms and popups, drop-down lists, etc.
• It has internal tools for working with user data (logins, passwords, linked accounts in social networks, etc.)
• Integrates with other NoCode tools via JS-plugins or API
• There are templates
• There’s a trial
• There is interactive training for new users

Disadvantages:

• It takes time to learn the platform
• Sometimes you might need to use code after all: Bubble is more of a LowCode platform

Rates range from $25 to $475 per month (per year); the higher the rate, the longer the period of time you can back up your data and the more space you have on your servers. There is a free plan.

Webflow

This tool will probably be more familiar to those who are faced with the interface of Adobe products: there is a toolbar on the left and the settings window on the right, presented visually. And a nice dark theme also resembles the interface of Photoshop, for instance.

Benefits:

• Easy organization of elements: you can add different types of containers — horizontal, vertical, grid — and the whole blocks, quickly manage their content; create text, immediately formatted for a header, subheader, paragraphs and quotes; add forms, checkboxes, captchas, drop-down lists, buttons, sliders, etc.
• Clearly configures the element logic;
• Ease of adapting the interface to different devices;
• You can create “symbols”: templates for individual elements (e.g., typical buttons) so that you can quickly insert them wherever you want;
• You can create your own page templates. This would be useful, for example, for a blog site or an online store with a large number of articles or products.
• There is a separate category of blocks for online store: templates for cards and product categories, shopping carts, payment pages, etc;
• You can connect the fast page load function;
• There are patterns;
• There’s a trial;
• There is interactive training for new users.

Disadvantages:

• Some tasks require at least a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Prices: they differ depending on the purpose of use. For websites it’ll cost from $12 to $36, for online-shops — from $29 to $212 per month (when paying per year); with increasing tariff you get more projects, server space, new features, etc.

NoCode-tools for application development

Adalo

Adalo is intuitive, easy and fast to use, so you can work with it without having to know a thing about programming and build complete applications.

Adalo can serve as a starting point for entrepreneurs in their business, allowing them to create products without any restrictions. Buying concert and airline tickets, restaurant reservations, book and sports clubs, creating e-commerce applications — with Adalo, many things are possible.

Benefits:

• Clear UX;
• Wide base of training materials;
• A large number of prefabricated elements;
• Ease of working with databases;
• Easy customization of the application logic;
• There are patterns;
• Funny plugs in the form of registration.

Disadvantages:

• Perhaps only the high price for the Business rate

Plans:

• Free: unlimited applications, Adalo domain;
• Pro: $50/month; you can use your own domain, publish apps in AppStore and Play Market, create an unlimited number of your own item scripts + more storage capacity;
• Business: the storage capacity is even larger, you can work in teams.

Glide

The main feature of this NoCode tool is the ability to create applications from Google Sheets.

Other benefits:

• Wonderful UX;
• A huge number of tutorials;
• Easy to work with data: all changes are made in Google Sheets and uploaded directly to the app;
• Rates;
• Lots of ready-made templates.

Disadvantages:

• It may be too easy and straightforward for some :)

Plans:

• Free: you can make up to 1000 changes in Google Sheets, store up to 100MB of data, create up to 100 actions in Zapier;
• Pro App: $32 per month: unlimited changes in Google Sheets, no Glide copyright in your app, you can use your own domain and use 1GB of data storage, create unlimited actions in Zapier;
• Private App: $40/month; all the benefits of the Pro-rate + the ability to work in a team (up to 20 people — included in the tariff, but for each subsequent member of the team will need to pay $2);
• Corporate plans: the cost is tailored individually, the same as in Private, and a few more tricks.

Marketing NoCode tools

This group includes services for CRM-marketing, in particular — tools to create e-mail directories and chat-bots.

MailChimp

MailChimp is probably familiar to many people: many marketing agencies, online stores, online schools and so on use it all over the world.

At first, MailChimp was created specifically as an email marketing tool: for creating email templates and setting up mailings based on a database. But now it’s more than that: you can use the site and app to create landing pages and multi-page sites, set up ads and publish posts on Facebook and Instagram, and so on.

However, until now MailChimp is most often used as an e-mail distribution tool

So, the benefits:

• Flexible editor for email templates;
• Detailed statistics on mailings: base coverage, control of delivery and opening of emails, click-maps;
• Useful hints when creating email headers: what to write to make it work for your recipient base.
• Convenient CRM: you can divide your mailing list base into segments, find out where new contacts come from, tag and send targeted emails.

PuzzleBot

This is a visual builder of chatbots for Telegram with a huge number of features. PuzzleBot allows you to create communication scenarios of varying complexity, integrate the bot with a channel or chat, set up multi-posting and much more in a couple of hours.

It’s quite simple: you sing up, create your bot through chatbot settings @BotFather, go to the constructor on the site — and the magic begins :)

Benefits:

• Intuitive message and script builder;
• Hints to your actions throughout the bot creation process;
• Detailed statistics on user interactions with the bot;
• There is an opportunity to segment the audience;
• Sales can be set up via Telegram: product cards can be created, designer of payment and delivery options, notifications on order status, etc.
• There is a detailed knowledge base;
• There is a termless free tariff. Price for others — from 472 rubles/month.

Intercom

Picture borrowed from intercom.com

The service is used in e-commerce, marketing, online education, user support teams and other areas.Intercom helps create chatbots and embed chats into websites for real-time communication.

The service is used by Microsoft, Udemy, Shopify.

Benefits:

• Intuitive setup of the chatbot;
• Ability to customize the tone and content of chatbot messages depending on the specifics of your business and customer portrait;
• There are video tutorials;
• You can set up integration with social networks and other tools;
• It is possible to create e-mail messages based on the chatbot database;
• Open API.

Disadvantages:

• Customers will not be able to order a callback;
• The setting interface language is English.

Rates: starting from $49 per month. There is a trial period, but no free rate.

NoCode automation tools

Integromat (Official partner of our studio)

Picture borrowed from www.integromat.com

The service allows you to combine dozens of applications to work for the common good. You can create scenarios along the lines of “if A happens in one application, then B must happen in the second”.

For example, a customer places an order on your site and pays for it. You need to upload order details and user data to Google Sheets, send him an email that the order has been accepted. With Integromat you can create a scenario when after confirmation of the transaction the customer’s data will automatically fly into your database and he will immediately receive an order confirmation email.

Every day Integromat helps large companies such as Airbnb, Uber, Adidas, and others to align their websites and applications, which is no small testament to its reliability.

Benefits:

• Over 1,000 apps for integration;
• Scripts can be easily created using features and visual tools;
• Possibility to process different parts of data in different scenarios. For example, you need to receive an email with attachments that need to be uploaded into separate archives. You set up the necessary scripts in advance and you’re done.

Prices:

from $9 to $299 per month. There are also personalized plans and, of course, there is a free plan.

Automate.io

The second popular tool for creating integrations between applications and plugins. Automate.io is used by dozens of companies of different scale. Among them are Adobe, Intel, Uber, Atlassian.

Benefits:

• Creating scripts in the traditional NoCode drag-and-drop method: you simply drag and drop elements on top of each other and literally create integrations in one click;

• There are integration templates for the most popular applications;
• Large list of supported applications;
• Ability to use API if you need to solve more complicated tasks;
• There are video tutorials on the YouTube channel and tutorial articles with great gifs right on the service website.

Prices: $9.99 to $159 per month, there’s a free 7-day trial.

Auxiliary NoCode tools

This can include services for organizing work within the company’s team, for backend maintenance.

• Coda. The motto of the service is “One doc for all. And all in one doc” (“One doc for all. All in one document. Coda is a true salvation for those who are used to use everything at once. With this service you don’t need to be bothered with a bunch of browser tabs consuming RAM, running between text documents, tables, presentations, checklists and task trackers. Coda collects everything in one place and helps to work with information much more efficiently.

Coda allows you to add votes, task trackers, calendars, write notes, and more to your document.

The page organization system deserves special attention. If you use the service for teamwork, in Coda you can create personal pages for each employee, as well as general pages. On personal pages, for example, it is convenient to create notes and keep a plan for the day. Corporate pages are very handy for tracking project progress, voting for new ideas and even planning corporate events.

Coda use Spotify, Uber, the New York Times.

• Stripe. Stripe’s popular partners include Amazon, Spotify, Slack, Google, Zoom and others.
• Obviously.ai. It’s a data analysis service that allows you to predict just about everything about your business: conversions, optimal subscription prices, LTV, etc. For instance, you can upload data from CSV file, database or CRM and ask “how many customers will come back to us in the next month?” or choose the desired forecast from the list. Obviously.ai will automatically recognize the question, ML algorithms will analyze the information and give a forecast.

Summing up

With such a variety of NoCode tools, every company and entrepreneur can find NoCode solutions that help make the hard work a little easier. With NoCode, you can create a website or an application from scratch, automate data handling, and effectively build marketing processes.

And if you’re going to launch a product our development studio 021 can help you with this :)

Contact us on Twitter or sign up for a free consultation on the website.

We’ll answer all your questions, find the right solutions for your idea, estimate the cost and timing in just 30 mins.