Welcome back to the Protocol Power Index, a ranking of the most powerful companies by tech industry subsector, as well as the companies best positioned to challenge them. This time: low-code/no-code .

If time is money, then little is more precious than a developer’s time. Good developers are in low supply , and the skills needed for the job are constantly changing . On top of that, software development for enterprise applications often takes months , and while some combination of continuous integration/continuous deployment tools, automated testing and cloud-based development has helped shorten development cycles , good software continues to be a bottleneck for dozens of industries. That’s where low-code and no-code software companies come in, albeit with different approaches.

Low-code toolmakers like Pegasystems and Appian are aiming to minimize the amount of custom code developers have to write by offering pre-built templates that can be modified to meet an application’s specific needs. With both visual designs and powerful APIs, these companies have thrived as enterprises seek to make their developers more efficient while maintaining full functionality of their applications.

On the other hand, no-code companies like Unqork and Bubble are targeting non-developers by offering a toolkit that eliminates the need for any coding at all, vastly expanding the pool of people who can build an application on their own. By going after marketing, sales, HR and finance teams with drag-and-drop functionality, no-code companies increasingly put the power in the hands of end users who don’t want to wait months for others to build software for them.

The differing solutions to a similar problem — the need for shorter development cycles — mean that while both types of companies are often lumped together as competitors to traditional development tools, they are also at odds with each other. As a result, each company on this list falls somewhere along a low-code/no-code spectrum, and how each company has positioned itself — either as firmly on one side or straddling the middle ground — says a lot about how it sees the future of the developer experience and its continued evolution in the years to come.

You’ll notice we haven’t included large companies that built no-code and low-code extensions of their software, like Salesforce and Microsoft, or large tech companies that bought up low-code/no-code vendors, such as Google (AppSheet), because it’s not possible to tease apart these divisions from their larger parent company. We have, however, written about what these companies mean for the industry in the “What happens next" section after the leaderboard.

So, which approach is leading the pack, no-code or low-code? Which companies are winning the market? And who is prepared to cater to the next generation of enterprise customers?

Ranking	Company	Score
1	Airtable	55.78
2	OutSystems	49.99
3	Pegasystems	48.55
4	Appian	40.48
5	Webflow	39.51
6	Unqork	38.90
7	Retool	28.87
T-8	Anima	27.81
T-8	Builder.io	27.81
10	Bubble	26.71

Explore the Data

The Protocol Power Index is designed to view power through a holistic lens that reflects how modern tech companies amass and exercise their strength. To do so, the Power Index takes into account 30 metrics across five categories — Economics, Leadership, Innovation, People and Politics & Policy — and synthesizes them into a single Power Score. Read our full methodology statement here .

What happens next?

Several forces stand to influence how low-code/no-code companies operate in the coming years: the increasing importance of speed in business decisions, a push “up the stack” by the big cloud providers and a proliferation of industry-specific software.

Momentum Ranking	Company	Score
1	Airtable	82.4
2	Anima ↑	75.3
3	Webflow ↑	71.8
4	Builder.io ↑	69.4
T-5	OutSystems	61.2
T-5	Unqork ↑	61.2
7	Bubble ↑	55.0
T-8	Retool	43.0
T-8	Appian	41.0
10	Pegasystems	21.0

Companies need tools to help them move faster. According to research done by McKinsey, companies with higher developer velocity outperform the market by four to five times. Low-code and no-code tools could help companies improve their development speed.

• Low-code and no-code platforms eliminate routine development tasks and expand the number of people who can make applications in the first place. Low-code tools can reduce development time by up to 10 times , according to Forrester, freeing up developers to work on more features and applications. A similar estimate from Bubble’s No-Code Census 2020 found that no-code tools could speed up development time by 4.6x .
• However, those numbers aren’t exact, as developer mileage varies widely across companies with specific use cases and requirements. Once companies quantify their productivity gain with low-code and no-code development platforms through pilot programs, they can assess the return on investment that the tools provide.
• Developers are taking note: Forrester estimated that 75% of all organizations would use low-code or no-code tools in 2021, up from 44% in 2020. Furthermore, 60% of low-code/no-code users expected their usage to increase.
• However, the simplicity of creating an application leaves companies at the risk of creating “shadow IT” as different teams solve the same underlying problem on their own rather than working through central IT, potentially leaving security vulnerabilities and disconnected systems in their wake. This duplication of effort can slow down a company’s overall productivity even if individual teams’ needs are met.
• The need for speed isn’t going away: The pandemic was a prime example of how companies can benefit from staying agile , and low-code/no-code tools only stand to benefit from that trend. Gartner predicted that the low-code/no-code market would grow 22.6% in 2021 to $13.8 billion, with no signs of slowing down in 2022.

Cloud providers are increasingly entering the market. The likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google have often been criticized for their services being too complicated, and in response have been focused on releasing low-code and no-code versions of their tools in recent years. This could lead to increased competition with pure-play providers, which are still heavily reliant on their partnerships with the big cloud providers for joint sales initiatives as well as their cloud marketplaces.

• The Big Three have offered services “up the stack” for years that focus on areas from data engineering to streaming and machine learning, but these services still require hours of browsing documentation and studying reference architectures to put into practice.
• Low-code and no-code versions of this complicated software — from Google’s AutoML suite for low-code machine-learning applications to AWS Amplify Studio for low-code web development — make leveraging the complicated software significantly easier, threatening pure-play providers that struggle to integrate as closely with the underlying infrastructure as the big cloud providers do.
• Other companies have also started offering low-code and no-code versions that extend their core offerings, most notably Salesforce. The company’s Lightning platform lets users build custom CRM applications, and its deep repository of a company’s sales data makes it more difficult for competitors to offer rival services in this area.
• The Big Three also each have their own dedicated no-code platforms — Power Apps for Microsoft, Amazon Honeycode for AWS and AppSheet for Google — that directly compete with no-code pure plays in the application development space.
• This makes co-opition the name of the game for the low-code/no-code industry. Companies must continue to integrate with cloud infrastructure and leverage cloud marketplaces to sell their services, but will have to find ways of creating niches for themselves that differentiate their underlying capabilities from their much larger competitors.

Will low-code/no-code tools focus on specific industries? Companies in industries from health care to financial services have clamored for industry-specific solutions that meet their strict regulatory requirements and unique demands, but so far low-code and no-code companies have largely targeted cross-industry problems like web design and workflows rather than solving for a particular industry’s issues.

• The Big Three have heard this complaint for years and all offer products to serve specific industries, like AWS’ health care-focused software HealthLake , Google Cloud’s Visual Inspection AI for identifying product defects on the production line and Microsoft’s Cloud for Retail .
• However, low-code and no-code providers have largely remained industry-agnostic thus far, preferring to promote themselves for specific functions like marketing or HR rather than to industries like life sciences or entertainment.
• That strategy has made sense. Teams like finance and operations have similar needs across different sectors, so cross-industry solutions have a broad audience. While some companies like OutSystems have industry-specific offerings, they tend to market their team-specific functionality more than their vertical-oriented software.
• There are a few exceptions to this trend: Unqork has set itself apart by focusing on the health care, financial services and public sector specifically, and Bubble only builds ecommerce solutions for now. What’s unclear is if these companies are leading the pack or only carving out a niche for themselves.
• It’s possible that we’ll see more low-code and no-code companies follow the cloud providers’ vertical-specific strategy rather than double down on their current paths.

Methodology

To rank the competitors, we've developed a formula that encapsulates 30 criteria. Those criteria span five groupings that factor into power: Economics, Leadership, People, Innovation & Politics and Policy. We then developed two systems for weighting the criteria — one for measuring power and the other for measuring momentum — such that companies can be scored on a 0–100 scale. Read our full methodology here .