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Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code

Application Platforms
Published 21 September 2021 - ID G00738188 - 35 min read

By Akash Jain, Kimihiko Iijima, and 3 more

Low-code application platforms (LCAPs) provide abstracted, guided development, automation

and governance capabilities, enabling professional and citizen developers to rapidly develop
digital solutions. Software engineering leaders should use this research to compare LCAPs.

Overview
Key Findings
■ The adoption of LCAPs is accelerating across industries and geographies, as organizations
demand new digital solutions in rapidly changing operational environments, where skilled
developers are often in short supply.

■ LCAP vendors are expanding their capabilities to support diverse developer personas, including
business technologists, citizen developers, software engineers, business analysts and
administrators.

■ Integration, user experience design and workflow automation capabilities offered by LCAP
vendors vary significantly in depth and breadth compared to specialist vendors in adjacent
market areas. These areas include business process automation (BPA), multiexperience
development platforms (MXDPs), citizen automation and development platforms (CADPs) and
integration platform as a service (iPaaS).

Recommendations
When evaluating LCAP technologies, software engineering leaders should:

■ Assess vendors on their ability to support different developer personas by prioritizing LCAPs
with governance, development productivity and platform ecosystem capabilities that align with
the skills of users.

■ Design clear requirements for LCAP usage by comparing your requirements to use cases
presented here. Ensure vendors’ pricing and licensing models are suitable for the use cases, as
these factors are as important as the technology fit to fulfill the long-term business vision.
■ Use LCAPs for their intended purpose by complementing their capabilities with other purpose-
built tools, such as iPaaS, BPA or MXDPs, particularly for use cases with sophisticated
integration, workflow automation and user experience design requirements.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code
technologies (up from less than 25% in 2020).

What You Need to Know

Our team of analysts evaluated 12 LCAP vendor offerings based on eight capabilities that are
critical to support evolving business needs. We rated these critical capabilities for each platform
across three primary use cases:

1. Custom business applications: Build and maintain modern enterprise applications that require
rich user experiences, complex integrations and robust monitoring, and handle large
transaction volumes.

2. Business workflow automation: Automate workflows involving multiple application systems

and human actors to accomplish business goals.

3. Collaborative app development: Enable different developer personas (professional and citizen
developers) and fusion teams to collaboratively build applications.

We also identified eight critical capabilities that enterprise LCAPs need in order to support those
use cases. Our team of analysts, all of whom field client inquiries and perform in-depth research
on low-code technologies, rated each platform on these capabilities based on the vendor’s
response to our evaluation questionnaire. During our assessment, we also included customer
feedback on the vendors’ capabilities from our inquiries and the Gartner Peer Insights portal. The
critical capabilities for LCAPs are:

■ Software development life cycle (SDLC)

■ User experience design

■ Development productivity

■ Business logic and workflow

■ Integration and APIs

■ Platform ecosystem

■ Governance

■ Security and quality of service

Software engineering leaders should use this research to understand the key use cases and
capabilities of enterprise LCAPs and to compare vendor offerings. They should evaluate each
vendor based on the vendors’ capabilities to meet the tactical productivity and application
development needs. They should also evaluate vendors’ product roadmaps and alignment with
long-term business goals.

Analysis
Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

Vendors’ Product Scores for Custom Business Applications Use

Case

Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Vendors’ Product Scores for Business Workflow Automation Use

Case
Source: Gartner (September 2021)
Drag and drop this image to sa
Vendors’ Product Scores for Collaborative App Dev Use Case
Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Vendors
Appian

Appian’s LCAP is the Appian platform. Appian can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud,
and customers may use a mix of environments. For example, a customer may have a test
environment in Appian Cloud while operating production in an on-premises Appian runtime.

Appian’s low-code environment provides process-driven automation and a user interface (UI)
design experience for web, mobile and conversational applications. Appian’s heritage in the
business process management (BPM) market lends to its strong capabilities in this area. The
Appian Process Modeler is a business process and model notation (BPMN)-compliant visual
designer that enables users to easily build out complex process flows. Appian’s Automation
Planner provides the ability to discover new automation opportunities and manage the entire
automation life cycle. It also enables users to build a prioritized backlog of automation
opportunities, track ROI and drive collaboration between IT and business teams.
Appian’s Interface Designer is a web-based IDE where multiple developer personas, such as
professional developers, citizen developers and business analysts, can collaboratively build an
application at the same time. Though applications developed in the Appian environment cannot
be deployed independently to any other environment, it supports embedding the UI into any web
or mobile application.

Appian plans to roll out its new microservices deployment architecture, where customers can
build interfaces, rules and integrations and deploy them independently of the Appian platform in
serverless architectures (such as Amazon Web Services [AWS] Lambda or Google AppEngine).
Appian has created a portable container for its self-assembling interface layer (SAIL) architecture
and business rule execution language. It can run locally on mobile devices to enhance the user
experience with local processing of application logic.

Appian received its highest use case score for business workflow automation. It also received
good scores for the custom business applications and collaborative app development use cases.

Creatio

Creatio’s LCAP is Studio Creatio. It is available as SaaS, and also supports both on-premises and
private cloud deployments.

Creatio offers low-code, process-based application development for its CRM SaaS and other use
cases. Studio Creatio has strong capabilities for automating business workflows, especially
customer-facing workflows. It provides a web-based development environment for citizen
developers and professional developers to collaboratively build process-centric applications.
Professional developers can extend the data model, business logic and UI by using C# and
JavaScript, either using the built-in IDE or with integrations with popular IDEs, such as VS Codeor
Webstorm. The platform uses the Apache Cordova framework to support the development of
vendor-branded mobile applications with native features, such as offline mode, camera
photo/video access and GPS access.

Studio Creatio provides role-based access controls to support granular management of object- or
field-level user permissions. However, its data encryption and application security capabilities are
limited to encryption of backups or encryption of data by cloud providers. It lacks support for
advanced capabilities such as attribute-level encryption or support for customer-managed
encryption keys. The platform provides detailed operational and usage data, but does not offer
robust application, infrastructure or security monitoring. Application testing capabilities are
limited to third-party test automation systems. Though applications developed in the Creatio
environment cannot be deployed independently to any other environment, it supports embedding
the UI into any web application using an iframe.

Creatio continues to enhance its platform extensibility by revising its UI using the popular Angular
toolkit. It also plans to improve its application life cycle management and security capabilities by
adding support for OpenID Connect (OIDC) and system for cross-domain identity management
(SCIM), and enhancing its support for OAuth 2.0 flows. To enhance its process automation
capabilities, Creatio plans to add a process design assistant to provide recommendations for best
practices and popular use cases.

Creatio received its highest use case score for business workflow automation. It also received fair
scores for the custom business applications and collaborative app development use cases.

Kintone

Kintone’s LCAP is the Kintone platform. It is available as a vendor-managed platform in the cloud,
deployed to either Kintone’s cloud in Japan or AWS outside Japan.

Kintone is a no-code data application and workflow platform with communication capabilities. It
primarily focuses on capabilities for business users and citizen developers. Its SDLC supports
intuitive no-code development by providing capabilities such as turning existing applications on
Kintone into templates, faster data import and providing recommendations and reminders to
users for next actions. It has a robust platform ecosystem, which includes a vibrant developer
community, 100+ prebuilt application templates offered by Kintone and a portal with plugins
contributed to by more than 300 partners.

Kintone scored relatively low in terms of the security and QoS, UX design and governance critical
capabilities. It does not offer automatic scaling or security checking, and it provides limited
support for traffic encryption (TLS1.2 only and VPN optional), certifications (GDPR) and activity
tracking. It lacks design compliance checks and native support for chatbot, voice, augmented and
virtual reality experiences. Though applications developed in the Kintone environment cannot be
deployed independently to any other environment, it supports embedding the UI into any web
application using an iframe.

Kintone plans to continue investing in improving its app development experience for citizen
developers. It also plans to enhance its developer ecosystem for professional developers by
adding more APIs and native plug-ins and augment its governance capabilities to provide
improved reporting dashboards and export options for application structures. In addition to these
improvements, Kintone plans to continue enhancing its security features and marketplace in an
effort to expand its developer ecosystem and geographic coverage.

Kintone received its highest use case score for custom business applications. It received poor
scores for the business workflow automation and collaborative app development use cases.

Mendix

Mendix’s LCAP is the Mendix Platform. It is available as SaaS and supports public, private, hybrid
or multicloud deployments. Mendix also supports deployment on both the SAP and Tencent
clouds via partnerships.

Mendix provides application governance and purpose-built IDEs to support numerous developer
personas, enabling fusion teams to collaboratively build applications. Mendix Assist provides
contextual logic, configuration and performance-related suggestions to help developers as they
build applications. Mendix has its own Atlas framework for UI design and offers out-of-the-box
templates to support SAP Fiori’s design system. Mendix leverages its ReactNative client
architecture to support the development, deployment and management of stand-alone, cross-
platform native mobile applications. It also supports hybrid mobile applications using Apache
Cordova wrappers. Applications developed on the Mendix platform can be deployed
independently to other environments.

The recently introduced Mendix Workflow Builder enables users to build business process flows
and long-running workflows. These business rules are defined using Microflow constructs, so
customers will need third-party add-ons for declarative business rules and decision management.
Likewise, Mendix leverages its partners’ solutions to support intelligent document processing. For
platform administrators, Mendix does not automatically flag unused applications in an
environment. Mendix supports OAuth, and security assertion markup language (SAML), and has
recently introduced support for OpenID Connect (OIDC) as well.

Mendix is extending its data hub capabilities to add a Kafka-based broker. This feature will
establish event-driven data sharing between Mendix apps and across enterprise landscapes.
Mendix continues to invest in its AI-assisted development services and its marketplace. It also
provides first-party support for deployments on the Tencent cloud in China.

Mendix received the highest score of all vendors in the collaborative app development use case. It
also received an excellent score for the custom business applications use case and a good score
for the business workflow automation use case.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s LCAP is Microsoft Power Apps, which includes entitlements for Power Automate and
Dataverse. Together, these form part of the Power Platform. Its market differentiation is based on
its complete Power Platform offering, with Power BI for business analytics and Power Virtual
Agents for chatbots, which complements Power Apps with Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365
and Azure services. The platform is available as a cloud-only offering on Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Power Apps provides various enterprise-grade security features, such as deep
integration with Active Directory (AD), a wide range of data loss prevention (DLP) policies and
data encryption. Being deployed on the Azure cloud, it also brings a wide range of security
certifications, such as SOC1, SOC2, PCI DSS and FEDRAMP, to support government cloud
deployments. The recently introduced Power FX provides an open-source and Excel-based
formula language to enable development by citizen developers. Power Apps offers a drag-and-
drop interface to build apps, and professional developers can extend these apps using .NET
development for complex logic, data integration and custom UX controls. For concurrent app
building, developers can leverage component-based development and build tools, such as Azure
DevOps and GitHub.

Gartner sees Power Apps mainly being used for simple web and mobile app UI use cases for
internal applications. While its built-in governance capabilities are improving, it does not yet
provide granular control and visibility into all aspects of the platform. Microsoft has added task
discovery capabilities with Process Advisor, but more complex logic and workflow use cases may
require investments. Applications developed in the PowerApps platform cannot be deployed
independently to any other environment.

Microsoft plans to add its OpenAI GPT-3, a natural language-based AI model, to Power Apps
Studio to enable the automatic generation of Power Fx formulas based on natural language input.
Microsoft continues to improve its application life cycle, quality and governance capabilities.
These enhancements include the release of Power Apps Monitor and Test Studio, and
improvements to its onboard solution system for application life cycle management (ALM),
including data source environment variables that allow for one-click deployments. Microsoft also
expanded its IT administrator controls to enable tenantwide governance, including deeper
analytics and more granular control over DLP policies.

Microsoft received its highest use case score for collaborative app development. It also received
good scores for the custom business applications and business workflow automation use cases.

Newgen

Newgen’s LCAP is part of its Low-Code Digital Transformation Platform that includes Intelligent
Process Automation, OmniDocs Content Services, Enterprise Framework for Mobile Applications
and OmniOMS, a customer communications platform. The platform is available as SaaS, a cloud-
hosted managed service or a client-managed public or private cloud.

Newgen provides comprehensive process orchestration, decision modeling and case

management capabilities to automate complex business processes. It provides process insights
tools that analyze the cost and performance of processes against KPIs. The platform provides
out-of-the-box connectors for popular enterprise applications and iPaaS solutions, such as
MuleSoft and Zapier, through REST endpoints. It also enables users to create custom integrations
by developing REST/SOAP APIs and messaging services, and it supports GUI-based integrations.
Newgen’s platform integrates with IDEs, such as Eclipse, to enable professional developers to
customize applications using CSS, Java and JavaScript. The platform provides comprehensive
data modeling and connects data between popular cloud and on-premises databases.

Newgen’s platform has limited native CI/CD capabilities, but it supports integration with code
repositories like Apache Subversion and Git, and also with Jira for agile project management.
Autoscaling is primarily handled by the autoscaling policies of the cloud provider where the
platform is hosted. The platform supports visual debugging and testing of process models, but
not entire applications. Newgen’s support for designing user journeys is basic, and it does not
provide support for incorporating third-party design systems. Applications developed in the
Newgen platform cannot be deployed independently to any other environment, such as PaaS or
VM. It requires Newgen server components at the back end to run these applications
independently.

Newgen plans to enhance its application development capability by creating a fully automated
CI/CD pipeline, modernizing its UI for both developers and end-user applications, and adding
prebuilt design components for progressive web applications. It also plans to add AI-based
journey orchestration for next best action suggestions and enhance its document processing
capabilities.

Newgen received its highest use case score for business workflow automation. It also received a
good score for the custom business applications use case and a fair score for the collaborative
app development use case.

Oracle (APEX)

Oracle’s LCAP is Application Express (APEX). APEX can be deployed wherever the Oracle
database can be deployed — Oracle Cloud, AWS Relational Database Service for Oracle, private
cloud or on-premises environments.

APEX provides a rapid application development environment that natively integrates with SQL and
includes extensions to support all LCAP use cases. Through SQL, APEX users can access all the
functionality of Oracle’s relational database management system (RDBMS), including its
autonomous database features. Oracle provides a public GitHub repository for various starter
apps and app components. It also provides extensive training materials in various languages and
built-in functionality that enables users to build simple applications without recourse to SQL.
Applications developed on APEX can be exported to other Oracle database instances. The UI
developed on APEX can be embedded into other web portals using iframes. Oracle also provides
additional services, such as integration and BPM, in its integration platform.

APEX users can develop PWAs using the underlying JET framework. However, it does not support
stand-alone deployment to app stores, nor does it support offline or disconnected use. APEX
does not yet provide complex process automation or case management capabilities, as it does
not support native process or decision modeling, although it plans to develop these capabilities.
Developers frequently use the procedural language for SQL (PL/SQL), JavaScript or Java-stored
procedures for business logic.

Oracle plans to add mini-SaaS solutions based on APEX, including its survey/dynamic forms
service and a discussion forum service. It also plans to release visual and graphical application
logic editors and improve its existing CI/CD capabilities to identify and promote application
changes from development to production.

Oracle received its highest use case score for collaborative app development. It also received a
fair score for custom business applications, and a poor score for the business workflow
automation use case. In all use cases, scores were in the lower range due to the focus on Oracle
database customers in the past.

OutSystems

OutSystems’ LCAP is the OutSystems platform. The platform is available as SaaS, a cloud-hosted
managed service or a client-managed public or private cloud.

OutSystems provides broad capabilities to accelerate application development across various

stages of the SDLC. It has various web and desktop-based IDEs, AI-based smart development
guidance and architecture discovery. OutSystems provides native CI/CD and application,
infrastructure and security monitoring capabilities. For security, OutSystems provides design-time
guidance to help developers protect against common vulnerabilities. It also offers advanced
security options, such as an embedded security operations center and advanced mobile app
shielding protections. Applications developed on the OutSystems platform can be deployed
independently to other environments.

OutSystems has limited capabilities to support complex business processes, as it lacks support
for standards such as BPMN 2.0, case management model and notation (CMMN) or decision
model and notation (DMN). However, its workflow builder and expression-based DSL can enable
nontechnical developers to design workflows. These features provide the guardrails required to
automate the development of scalable workflows. Integrating the platform with a wider DevOps
tool chain is complex and time-consuming.

OutSystems plans to add AI-powered automated unit testing, more granular monitoring, enhanced
integration capabilities (to support frictionless data ingestion) and data cataloging capabilities. It
also plans to replace Apache Cordova with a new modern mobile framework, which is currently
used to support the development of native mobile applications.

OutSystems received the highest score of all vendors for the custom business application use
case. It received good scores for the collaborative app development and business workflow
automation use cases.

Pega

Pega’s LCAP is the Pega Infinity platform. Deployment options include Pega Cloud (on AWS),
Cloud.Gov, Client Cloud Choice (AWS, Azure, GCS, Pivotal), hybrid cloud and on-premises.

Pega supports process-centric, low-code application development for multiple developer

personas, including professional developers, citizen developers and fusion teams. Pega’s no-code
development environment provides end-to-end SDLC capabilities (including versioning, source
control, automated testing, quality dashboards, visual debugging, guardrail compliance scoring
and single-click deployment). Pega provides strong capabilities to automate complex business
processes with sophisticated decision and state management requirements via the Pega Infinity
platform. Rules-driven, straight-through processing and human-in-the-loop automations enable
users to automate even highly adaptive processes. Pega’s Cosmos Design has added the digital
experience API (DX-API), which enables users to implement external design systems like Sketch,
Material and Fluent while still using Pega’s model-driven, low-code authoring capability.
Applications developed on the Pega platform can be deployed independently to other
environments.

Pega provides separate native web based IDEs to target professional and citizen developers, but
neither provides a fat client IDE, nor do they support integration with popular IDEs, such as VS
Code or IntelliJ. Pega has strong support for the use of AI for process and decision automation,
but has limited capabilities to provide AI-assisted application development.
Pega released a new React-based version of its Cosmos Design System, enabling citizen
developers to configure their UX in a more intuitive manner. Other new capabilities include
Kubernetes as the default runtime platform and the introduction of multitenant storage and
backing services (such as Kafka, Elastic Search, Cassandra, NoSQL, Mongo/Atlas). These scale
up and scale down to help clients address even simple use cases cost-effectively.

Pega received the highest score of all vendors for the business workflow automation use case. It
received good scores for the custom business applications and collaborative app development
use cases.

Quickbase

Quickbase’s LCAP is the Quickbase platform. It can run as a cloud service on Quickbase’s own
data centers, and it is also available on AWS and Google Cloud Platform for some customers in
the EMEA region.

Quickbase Pipelines technology supports direct integration with about 50 popular SaaS and
enterprise applications, and its Gartner Peer Insights rating for integration has improved during
the previous year. It can directly access data residing in a customer’s private cloud instance or on-
premises systems via its new prebuilt on-premises agent (in limited release until September).
Quickbase offers both RESTful and XML APIs that enable reading and writing both data and
schema. The platform provides audit log capabilities that cover user activities, builder activities
and data changes in the application. It also provides a full runtime audit log for Pipelines,
providing users with visibility into how data is moving across the platform and enterprise
systems. Quickbase extended this visibility into platform usage, including APIs, directly from its
admin console. This approach enables customers to quantify and evaluate the value they are
deriving from the platform.

Quickbase plans to extend its platform-only SDLC capabilities into supporting common SDLC
tools. Its visual data flow and Pipelines business logic capabilities meet most customer needs,
but it does not support more advanced capabilities like BPMN or process mining. Quickbase is
planning to upgrade its UI architecture over the next year, which will improve its fairly basic UI
design capabilities. Applications developed in the Quickbase environment cannot be deployed
independently to any other environment.

Quickbase has improved its reporting and dashboarding capabilities with a series of new features,
such as real-time table reports and more data aggregation features. This capability supports
fusion team development by providing operational insights into data across systems and teams.
Quickbase is also adding predictive and prescriptive analytics to its platform analytics capability.

Quickbase received its highest use case score for collaborative app development. It received fair
scores for the business workflow automation and custom business applications use cases.

Salesforce

Salesforce’s LCAP is the Salesforce Platform. It runs on Salesforce data centers around the world
as a multitenant cloud service. Salesforce also supports deployment on AWS in certain regions.
Salesforce’s Lightning Design System provides a rich library of tools, documentation and
components for collaboration among designers and developers. Salesforce extends its platform’s
capabilities through AppExchange, which offers thousands of prebuilt apps, components and
flows that enable composability on the platform. The Salesforce Platform supports the SDLC
across fusion teams with native low-code approaches, such as application testing, and with code-
centric tools, such as a VS Code extension, unified command-line interface (CLI) and smooth
integration with CI/CD pipelines.

Salesforce Flow is capable, but may not currently be suitable for more complex use cases. It
plans to enhance Flow by adding capabilities to design decision models involving multiple people,
as well as approvals, which are needed to automate complex processes. Salesforce provides
Sandbox and Scratch orgs as temporary environments to support different users during
independent and collaborative team development. These environments support modern
application life cycle management (ALM) and governance, such as source-driven development,
continuous integration and automated testing. Applications developed in the Salesforce
environment cannot be deployed independently to any other environment, but developers can
render Salesforce Lightning Web Components in remote web containers outside Salesforce
servers.

Salesforce is increasing its investments in automation under the umbrella of Einstein Automate,
which includes new prebuilt workflow options, an expanded array of testing tools and new
capabilities for RPA delivered via AppExchange. It has launched MuleSoft Composer as a low-
code integration tool that links the Salesforce Platform with MuleSoft. It also released Salesforce
Data Pipelines, a low-code ETL solution for aggregating, transforming and writing data back to
Salesforce objects. Data Pipelines includes more than 50 prebuilt data input connectors to
sources like Snowflake, AWS S3 and Redshift. In the coming year, with its new Hyperforce
multicloud substrate, Salesforce plans to support deployments across major public cloud
infrastructure providers.

Salesforce received its highest use case score for custom business applications. It also received
good scores for the collaborative app development and business workflow automation use cases.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow’s LCAP is the ServiceNow Now Platform App Engine. The platform is primarily
delivered as SaaS running on ServiceNow’s enterprise cloud infrastructure, but it can also be
deployed on-premises or in a Microsoft Azure environment (in some regions).

ServiceNow provides separate web-based IDEs to enable different developer personas to build
applications. It supports integration with Visual Studio Code to extend applications or customize
UIs. IntegrationHub provides 150 out-of-the-box connectors to popular SaaS applications. It also
provides capabilities to develop custom integrations with applications and databases through
APIs and events. The platform provides Workflow Builder, Flow Designer and Process Automation
Designer to support natural-language-based approval management and collaborative process
modeling. The ServiceNow Store is a rapidly growing ecosystem of applications, industry
solutions, connectors and independent software vendors (ISVs) developed to assist in the rapid
development of digital solutions.

Through App Engine Studio and Mobile Studio, ServiceNow supports the development of mobile
apps. The distribution of those files is currently carried out through private channels (corporate
intranet, mobile device management and Apple Business Manager). However, the company plans
to add support for developers to distribute custom mobile apps through their own private app
store accounts in an upcoming release. Though the platform provides native infrastructure
monitoring capabilities, it does not provide detailed application or behavior monitoring
capabilities, nor does it support integration with specialist monitoring vendors. Applications
developed in the ServiceNow environment cannot be deployed independently to any other
environment.

ServiceNow plans to enhance its decision management by simplifying user experience. It also
plans to add screen flows to App Engine, along with native RPA capabilities to integrate task
management into end-to-end workflows. It plans to add optical character recognition (OCR),
image classification and object identification capabilities. It also plans to augment its capabilities
for citizen development by adding a center of excellence (CoE) and a starter kit for citizen
developers.

ServiceNow received its highest use case score for collaborative app development. It also
received good scores for the business workflow automation and custom business applications
use cases. ServiceNow’s consistent performance across use cases aligns with its similarly
consistent technical scoring across all capabilities.

Context
This research evaluates and compares LCAP product capabilities to determine how well a
vendor’s product solves specific use cases. This Critical Capabilities concentrates on LCAP
product capabilities, whereas the Magic Quadrant for LCAP evaluates vendors based on a broader
set of strategic qualities such as corporate viability, vision, marketing and geographic focus.

The LCAP market is extremely diverse, with many vendors from different backgrounds offering a
range of low-code capabilities for application development and composition. Given the diversity
of LCAP solutions, software engineering leaders should map these product capabilities to popular
use cases to ensure that they select an LCAP solution that meets the needs of the application
creators and their end users. In conjunction with the above vendor analysis, software engineering
leaders must note that:

■ They may need to use multiple platforms for different developer personas and use cases. Many
enterprise organizations leverage several LCAP offerings to address specific requirements as
part of a multi-SaaS vendor strategy.

■ Many LCAP vendors have expanded their products to provide capabilities similar to Gartner’s
application composition technology framework (see Innovation Insight for Application
Composition Technology). When selecting vendors to deliver technology to enable application
 composition, software engineering leaders should select vendors that have strong AI, process
automation, application governance, data integration and management capabilities.

■ Many vendors are shifting to a cloud-first strategy to support hybrid cloud and multicloud
deployments of their platforms and the applications built using them. Software engineering
leaders should assess the sensitivity of data that is likely to be stored and processed using the
LCAP, and evaluate the granularity and completeness of the controls provided by vendors to
manage and secure the application data.

Product/Service Class Definition

A low-code application platform (LCAP) is used to rapidly develop and deploy custom
applications by abstracting and minimizing hand coding. At a minimum, an LCAP must include
low-code capabilities (such as model-driven and graphical programming model with scripting) to
develop a complete application consisting of user interfaces, business logic, workflow and data
services.

Enterprise LCAPs can be used to create enterprise-class applications that require:

■ High performance

■ High availability and scalability

■ Disaster recovery

■ Enterprise security

■ API access to and from enterprise and third-party cloud services

■ Application usage monitoring

■ Service-level agreements (SLAs)

■ Technical support and training from the vendor

Enterprise LCAPs should provide one-step application deployment, execution and management
using declarative, high-level programming abstractions, such as model-driven and graphical
approaches.

Advanced capabilities offered by some enterprise LCAPs include:

■ Front-end user experiences beyond web user interface (UI)

■ Complex business process automation and management

■ Event-driven architecture
■ AI augmented development techniques

■ Application composition

Critical Capabilities Definition

SDLC

How does the platform support professional developers in building applications faster?

Vendors were asked:

■ What software development environments do they provide?

■ What programming languages and native frameworks do they support?

■ What application testing and monitoring capabilities do they provide?

■ What DevOps capabilities do they support?

User Experience Design

How does the platform support the design, development and testing of user journeys, rich mobile
and web interfaces, continuous user experience and other user interfaces?

Vendors were asked:

■ What support do they provide to design user journeys and user personas?

■ What support do they provide for the design of PWAs, responsive applications and mobile
applications?

■ What UX design standards and systems do they support?

■ What capabilities do they provide to develop chatbots, voice-enabled applications, AR/VR and
wearable applications?

Development Productivity

How does the platform enable professional developers, citizen developers, business
technologists or fusion teams to collaboratively develop applications?

Vendors were asked:

■ What capabilities do they provide to nontechnical developers during the software development
life cycle?

■ What capabilities do they provide to support visual modeling of data and business logic?
■ What AI capabilities are provided to assist during development, testing and application
monitoring?

Business Logic and Workflow

How does the platform support the design, development and testing or simulation of stateful and
stateless business processes; the choreography of human workflows, services, documents and
user experiences; and the business logic for controlling processes and making business
decisions?

Vendors were asked:

■ What capabilities do they provide to model processes and business rules?

■ What capabilities do they provide to support case management?

■ What capabilities do they provide to support document processing?

■ What AI capabilities do they provide to support business workflow automation?

Integration and APIs

How does the platform support back-end integration with local and cloud services, service
repositories and databases? How does it provide and manage application APIs for the external
consumption of the data and business logic in applications built with the platform?

Vendors were asked:

■ What integration protocols and capabilities do they provide?

■ What support do they provide for complex event processing and event-driven integrations?

■ Do they support applying fine-grained controls over APIs?

■ What connectors do they provide and what iPaaS vendors do they integrate with?

Platform Ecosystem

How does the platform support developer ecosystems, including app stores, domain-specific data
models and processes, UX component and back-end service sharing, access to third-party
assistance and training services?

Vendors were asked:

■ How broad and deep is their app or component store (in terms of volume and accessibility)?

■ How broad and deep are their training and certification capabilities?

■ What are the management and governance mechanisms of their marketplace?

Governance

How does the platform support the governance of application development and deployment
(including development metrics and KPIs) and meet deployed application SLAs for distributed
professional developers, citizen developers and fusion teams?

Vendors were asked:

■ What capabilities do they provide to govern application development by fusion teams?

■ What application logging and monitoring capabilities do they provide?

■ What developer guardrails and alerts can be applied?

■ What administrative and operation capabilities do they provide?

Security and QoS

How does the platform secure applications and data? How does the platform support service
quality concepts such as scalability, low-latency practices and DR, including global coverage of
data centers?

Vendors were asked:

■ What deployment, HA, scalability and DR capabilities do they provide?

■ What capabilities do they provide to secure the platform and the applications developed on the
platform?

■ What security certifications and standards do they comply with?

Use Cases
Custom Business Applications

Build and maintain modern enterprise applications that require rich user experiences, complex
integrations, robust monitoring and handle large transaction volumes.

Examples include custom core business applications, applications to modernize legacy

applications or user experience, and composable applications built with SaaS, marketplaces,
existing data sources, event channels, cloud services and custom local services.

Business Workflow Automation

Automate workflows involving multiple application systems and human actors to accomplish
business goals.

This includes complex processes, simple workflows, document-oriented processes, human task
management and case management that require process modeling, orchestration, integration and
decision modeling capabilities.
Collaborative App Dev

Enable different developer personas (professional and citizen developers) as well as fusion teams
to collaboratively build applications.

This requires capabilities such as drag-and-drop development, proactive developer aids and
guidance, simplified integration and robust application development governance.

Vendors Added and Dropped

Dropped
We have updated our business and go-to-market inclusion criteria for 2021, because clients are
demanding greater long-term stability from their enterprise LCAP investments. Additionally, there
are even more LCAP vendors that have grown to meet the business inclusion criteria from 2020,
leading us to raise the bar for inclusion to ensure a reasonable number of vendors to evaluate.

Based on the changes, we have dropped the following vendors from this year’s evaluation,
because they did not meet one or more of the updated minimum requirements. These, along with
other LCAP vendors, should be part of a broader evaluation list for organizations, because they
often provide compelling value and some offer differentiating product capabilities.

■ AgilePoint

■ AuraQuantic

■ Betty Blocks

■ Oracle (Visual Builder)

■ ProntoForms

■ TrackVia

■ Zoho

Inclusion Criteria
To qualify for inclusion, vendors must:

■ Demonstrate a go-to-market strategy with specific pricing for their low-code application
platform (LCAP) for cross-industry or general-purpose application development.

■ The LCAP must not be used only or mainly for building specific industry applications, and it
must not only be a product bundled within some other solution or platform.

■ The LCAP must support development and deployment of applications by professional

developers in both central IT and lines of business, rather than being just for citizen developers.
■ Provide an LCAP offering with both no-code and low-code capabilities to:

■ Develop, version, test, deploy, execute, administer, monitor and manage applications and their
relevant artifacts.

■ Embed data storage features without relying on additional procured services (i.e., include a
database).

■ Support the design of data schema and application logic.

■ Create rich application UIs (i.e., not just include a form-builder or build an administration UI).

■ Enable the invocation of external third-party services via APIs or event topics.

■ Support some automation of platform patching and versioning.

■ Provide single-step deployment across environments (development, test, staging, production).

■ Access a platform repository or marketplace for sharing components, modules, connectors

and templates.

■ Offer an enterprise-grade LCAP solution aimed at enterprise-class projects and providing:

■ High availability and DR

■ Secure access to applications

■ Technical support to customers

■ Third-party application access to application logic or data, via APIs or event topics.

In addition to the above market and technical criteria, each vendor must meet the
following business criteria:

■ Revenue: The vendor must have revenue of at least $50 million for LCAP licenses and
subscriptions in the year ending 31 March 2021.

■ Growth: The vendor must have at least 20% year-on-year growth in revenue for LCAP licenses
and subscriptions, excluding professional services or other related product offerings, in the
year ending 31 March 2021.

■ Customer base: The vendor must have at least 100 paying enterprise customer

organizations (those with at least 1,000 employees) for its LCAP offering, excluding other
related product offerings, as of 31 March 2021.
■ International presence: The vendor must have direct customers (i.e., not through resellers) in
three of the following geographies:

■ North America

■ South America

■ Europe

■ Middle East and Africa

■ China

■ Asia/Pacific.

We have excluded vendors that meet any of the following criteria:

■ Require a specific, licensed, third-party component or product that is not already included in

their platform — that is, branded, sold and supported directly by the vendor.

■ Only sell their platform with, and for the use of, their professional services and consultants.

■ Require the purchase and/or installation of other unrelated products or platforms offered by
the same vendor (such as a CRM application or content management system).

■ Did not market a GA product prior to 2020 that was described as a distinct LCAP offering (e.g.,
a SaaS vendor that provided a low-code tool only as part of its SaaS license, and separated it
out in 2020).

■ Do not offer a commercially supported enterprise offering — that is, only offer the platform as
open-source software.

Table 1: Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases

Custom Business
Critical Collaborative
Business Workflow
Capabilities App Dev
Applications Automation

SDLC 30% 5% 5%

User Experience 20% 5% 5%

Design
 Custom Business
Critical Collaborative
Business Workflow
Capabilities App Dev
Applications Automation

Development 5% 5% 30%
Productivity

Business Logic 10% 40% 10%

and Workflow

Integration and 15% 20% 10%

APIs

Platform 5% 5% 10%
Ecosystem

Governance 5% 10% 20%

Security and 10% 10% 10%

QoS

As of 12 August 2021

Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Critical Capabilities Rating

Each of the products/services that meet our inclusion criteria has been evaluated on the critical
capabilities on a scale from 1.0 to 5.0.

Table 2: Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities

Critical
Appian Creatio Kintone Mendix Micros
Capabilities

SDLC 3.4 2.5 3.0 4.5 3.5

 Critical
Appian Creatio Kintone Mendix Micros
Capabilities

User Experience 2.9 2.7 1.5 4.5 3.3

Design

Development 4.4 2.9 1.9 4.3 3.7

Productivity

Business Logic 4.4 3.1 2.0 2.4 2.9

and Workflow

Integration and 4.1 2.8 1.9 4.7 3.7

APIs

Platform 3.5 3.3 2.9 3.6 4.1

Ecosystem

Governance 3.3 2.0 1.5 4.4 3.1

Security and 3.8 1.9 1.2 3.7 3.9

QoS

As of 12 August 2021

Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Table 3: Product Score in Use Cases

Use
Appian Creatio Kintone Mendix Microsoft
Cases

Custom 3.60 2.62 2.12 4.18 3.49

Business
Applications
 Use
Appian Creatio Kintone Mendix Microsoft
Cases

Business 4.00 2.76 1.92 3.56 3.33

Workflow
Automation

Collaborative 3.88 2.64 1.90 4.06 3.53

App Dev

As of 12 August 2021

Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Critical Capabilities Methodology

This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products or
services. Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative importance for specific product
or service use cases. Next, products/services are rated in terms of how well they achieve each of
the critical capabilities. A score that summarizes how well they meet the critical capabilities for
each use case is then calculated for each product/service.

"Critical capabilities" are attributes that differentiate products/services in a class in terms of their
quality and performance. Gartner recommends that users consider the set of critical capabilities
as some of the most important criteria for acquisition decisions.

In defining the product/service category for evaluation, the analyst first identifies the leading uses
for the products/services in this market. What needs are end-users looking to fulfill, when
considering products/services in this market? Use cases should match common client
deployment scenarios. These distinct client scenarios define the Use Cases.

The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities. These capabilities are generalized groups of
features commonly required by this class of products/services. Each capability is assigned a level
of importance in fulfilling that particular need; some sets of features are more important than
others, depending on the use case being evaluated.

Each vendor’s product or service is evaluated in terms of how well it delivers each capability, on a
five-point scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for all vendors, allowing easy
comparisons between the different sets of features.

Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:

1 = Poor or Absent: most or all defined requirements for a capability are not achieved
 2 = Fair: some requirements are not achieved

3 = Good: meets requirements

4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements

5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements

To determine an overall score for each product in the use cases, the product ratings are multiplied
by the weightings to come up with the product score in use cases.

The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not represent all capabilities for any product;
therefore, may not represent those most important for a specific use situation or business
objective. Clients should use a critical capabilities analysis as one of several sources of input
about a product before making a product/service decision.

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