Ranking Low-code Development Platforms

Measuring the popularity of low-code development tools and databases.

Although the global economy is slowing, software developers and technical talent remain in high demand. What can companies do to broaden their technical talent pool and make their current developers productive so that they can accelerate time to market? The most common approach to upskilling is investing in training, which usually involves both internal training and external trainers and instructors.

Beyond training and retraining existing staff, there are promising new technologies that help bridge the skills gap and relieve talent shortages.  While low-code tools augment developers and staff who do some coding, a new set of tools eliminates coding altogether (“No-Code”). Even though they present their own challenges, there are compelling business reasons to adopt low-code and no-code tools: they have the potential to vastly expand the pool of people who can build software applications and products. 

Figure 1: Common types of low-code and no-code development tools.

In this post, we compare popular enterprise low-code development platforms. These platforms enable rapid application development and deployment using low-code and no-code methods, and some platforms enable simplified one-button deployment.

As with our previous post on BI tools, we use an index that relies on public data and is modeled after TIOBE’s programming language index. Our index is comprised of the following components:

  • Search: We used a subset from TIOBE’s list (Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon) and added Reddit into the mix.
  • Supply (of talent):  This component is based on the number of people who have listed a specific low-code development tool as a skill on their LinkedIn profiles.
  • Demand (for talent): We examine the number of U.S. online job postings that mention a specific low-code development tool.

Using the metrics and data sources described above, here are the inaugural results of our Low-code Platform Index. Note that these scores are for a single point in time (mid June 2022). The top four slots are occupied by established software vendors who have a strong presence in large enterprises. The next tier is dominated by startups who will continue to grow in popularity in the years to come:

Figure 2: The Low-code Platform Index – an indicator of the popularity of low-code development tools.

Next, we analyze the supply and demand sides of the labor market for each tool. The solutions in the top right quadrant of the following diagram are the most popular from a talent perspective, and, therefore, have the most developed user ecosystems.

Figure 3: Ranking low-code development tools using two talent pool metrics – [Supply (size of worldwide talent pool)] and [Demand (number of online job postings)].
In a future post we’ll analyze the landscape of low-code and no-code tools for data engineering, machine learning, and AI. For now, here’s a quick view of the user ecosystem for some low-code databases. Low-code data management is an area where startups are thriving:
Figure 4: Ranking low-code/no-code databases using two talent pool metrics – [Supply (size of worldwide talent pool)] and [Demand (number of online job postings)].

Next Steps

We plan to use our index to monitor trends in low-code/no-code development platforms. We’d love to include emerging low-code development platforms from startups in future iterations. Let us know (using the form below) what tools you want us to include in future editions. 

Suggestion Form

Use this form to suggest companies to include in future editions of the Low-code Development Platform Index.

Index Suggestions


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