Low-Code/No-Code or Traditional App Development?

Around 15 - 20 years ago, organizations brought many complex apps to solve multiple problems, from sales to accounting. But many of the times, these apps are so complicated that organizations often had to force themselves to fit into vendors’ boxes of description processes in order to adopt these applications.

They usually conformed to every requirement, hoping that these apps would be their salvation. However, several problems appeared: organizations had to rely heavily on individual, long processes, hard to maintain, overwhelming IT departments. This is when low-code/no-code applications were built to help organizations deliver better results and better customer experience.

During the booming of economy and business, there were huge gaps that needed to be filled in businesses’ processes and intelligent automation, the problem was the sum total of the front door (mobile app, web) everything had to be in sync. Moreover, organizations have to eventually transform themselves into digital businesses. For medium to small internal tasks, a fast and easy to use application is necessary. 



Low-code and no-code platforms completely change the concept of time in terms of developing apps. With various easy to use features like Drag and Drop, no wonder why these apps are handy and trendy in today's business world. Likewise, low-code and no-code platforms have a straightforward visual interface that is absolutely user-friendly, easy to understand, easy to use.

But before jumping right into low-code and no-code, let’s distinguish the traditional one and the low-code / no-code and know about each one advantage and disadvantages

Traditional Application Development

Traditional app development consumes a lot of time because of its complexity. To build a complete app, multiple professional software developers have to work together, following specific steps.

Depending on the project scale and the requirements that the phases can vary, nut the main phases can be summarized as follows:

• Planning phase includes discussing and documenting the requirements, as well as map out the timeline and budget
• Design stage is when the specialists draw out, build the overall system’s infrastructure based on the previous requirements
• Development is the main stage, this is where the whole team works together
• Testing stage is usually a very time consuming and tedious process, as it repeatedly fails and needs to be carried out again and again
• Deployment is when the application is finally developed, from this stage and beyond is when the IT department has to maintain, patch, enhance and fix any bugs
• Maintenance. One fact that you might not know is the IT teams spend most of their time maintaining existing applications within a business environment.

Pro: suitable for large scale projects; suitable for complex functions, mission-critical legacy apps; components are not always reusable therefore the project’s life cycle time will increase.

Cons: takes too much time, input from the end-users of the application is minimal, more testing after requests from users, more fixing/patching in the maintenance stage.

Low-code / No-code app development

Low-code and no-code application development platforms have become more popular in recent years. The non-professionals who use these platforms to develop applications are known as citizen developers.

Low-code / no-code platforms are more flexible and take less time than the traditional one. It also requires fewer human resources from the IT department because basically the purpose of this platform is to create a friendly and easy to use platform where anyone can be a developer.

And because it requires low-coding to no-coding experience and knowledge, errors in these platforms are easy to fix. 

The maintenance stage can also be done within just a few seconds. These platforms also have a straightforward visual interface that simplifies the process of developing any solutions.

Because little to no coding skills are needed, any departments in one business like marketing, sales, HR can do it by themselves without needing help from the IT department. This will save the company’s resources on other complicated tasks.

Pros: saving time, saving resources, tedious tasks become automated, everyone can develop their own solutions using the platform, and an end-user becomes a creator.

Cons: Can not or difficult to be used to build a large, complex application.

Now, let’s look at this example to see the biggest difference between both traditional and new platforms

When a business wants to run a donation campaign, after planning everything out, they have to build some of the features using Java language.

And in this specific campaign, they want the participant to leave their basic details on the homepage: names, emails, phone numbers and choose which category the participant’s interested in making a donation. 

First of all, they have to build the database and an end-server, write front-end design and then make the design and then design the database. This process can take up to three days to build this one simple feature. On the other hand, citizen developers can easily purchase a platform that allows them to do all steps within five minutes. 

But by saying, we don’t mean to deny and advise you to stop following the traditional way to develop an app.

What we’re telling you is traditional and low-code/no-code could and should work side-by-side.

Developers can spend the majority of their time on unique and complex features, or apps while low/no-code platforms let them create the core app quickly and easily.

By combining two, the business not only saves time but also saves their resources, money, and ensures that they deliver the best service following the timeline. Moreover, allowing citizen developers to involve in some simple tasks is very advantageous.

Side-Note:

In recent years in Vietnam, the no-code/low-code approaches are gradually being recognized and adopted by renowned software development vendors, including TP&P Technology, upholding that this new development method works. Contact us today to get started with your low-code/no-code application requirements!