Why create this no-code industry map?

At Baserow, our love for no-code is no secret (pun intended). We understand that the landscape of visual development is constantly changing and evolving, bringing about new players, products, features, and requests. It’s all very fresh and exciting, but newness also means lots of questions, especially from those who are new to the space.

We’re excited to share this landscape as a compass to the community, so that everyone—at all levels—can learn, understand, and contribute to the ever-growing no-code landscape.

The industry map is not a static document. In true community fashion, we ask the community to ensure the map remains relevant, accurate and useful to you. Although we’re hosting the map, we welcome your input for changes, removals, or additions.

The companies in the landscape

With 100+ companies in the no-code landscape (and growing), our biggest challenge was determining the right criteria for developing a subset of companies to display on the graphic. After all, with limited real estate, and so many companies to display on the map, we knew our efforts had to be a blend of both an art and a science to it.

One of our key considerations was the product maturity level. While there are tons of new and exciting products being launched and iterated on every day, we believe it is important to capture companies with products ready to de deployed in production, can serve business critical use cases and are enterprise ready to a large extent. Whilst we love cutting edge technology, we have left out products who are still in experimental or very early stage of their development.

With that said, we didn’t want the landscape to be represented purely by the “big” or “bigger” players in the space. As an emerging company ourselves, we wanted to have a healthy mix of established, rising, and early players who are eager to empower everyone through visual development.

This leads us to another one of our considerations, which focuses on developing in an open source manner and preventing vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in is consistently mentioned as one of the biggest (if not the biggest) hesitations when it comes to the adoption of no-code tools and platforms.

Because of this, we felt it’d be beneficial to highlight some of these open source platforms. Vendor lock-in is also a very valid concern, and highlighting platforms that are addressing this growing concern paves the way for lively, constructive discussions in the spectrum of visual development, as well as demonstrates that this issue is being addressed by a handful of entities.

The categories and groupings

Determining categories was tricky business. Ultimately, the category represents the platform’s core service. The reason the category represents the core service is because there is/can be quite a bit of overlap across features and functionalities.

Bubble, for example, is a full-stack visual development platform with a focus on web apps. And while it is possible to also build mobile apps using Bubble, there are other platforms that are more (or entirely) mobile focused. A good example of this would be Draftbit. Draftbit is entirely focused on native mobile apps, rather than web apps.

Another example would be Baserow. While we eventually plan on building native automations, our core focus remains on being an open source, extensible, and flexible database for your no-code stack. In other words, while automation functionality might exist within Baserow, a platform like n8n or Zapier would be better suited for the Automation & integrations category, given that those platforms are primarily focused on automating and integrating various apps and services.

The goal of categorizing all the different platforms is to display the respective core service and functionality.

The future of the no-code landscape

Since the landscape is constantly evolving, it’s only natural that this image does as well. We encourage everyone in the community to help us shape it and refine it together. Open source is at the core of what we do, which includes projects such as this one. We always appreciate your feedback, input, and contributions with everything that we do.

If you like this post, please follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or sign up to our newsletter.