In the fierce market competition, digital means have become a winning weapon for enterprises to improve operation efficiency, improve management ability and speed up business expansion. For smes, first of all, they should start digital transformation and reconstruct data, processes and businesses by digital means to achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase. For large enterprises, it is also necessary to carry out digital innovation, enhance innovation ability by digital means, and drive business transformation and upgrading. In this process, enterprises must first face the S-113N 3BHB018008R0001 problem of insufficient supply of IT capabilities: relying on finished software, software updates or customized efficiency can not meet the rapidly changing business needs, but also will bring high costs; Relying on independent development, IT teams find it difficult to cope with complex business requirements and lengthy development and testing processes. The application of low code/no code development platform will become the key means to solve this problem.

After years of development, China’s low code/no code market is entering a period of rapid growth. According to the latest data from IDC, the market size of China’s low code/no code software in 2022 reached 2.62 billion yuan, an increase of 24.2% year-on-year, showing strong market demand. It is estimated that the market size of China’s low code and zero code software will reach 3.47 billion yuan in 2023, an increase of 32.4%. The market size is expected to reach 10.63 billion yuan by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.3% in the next five years.

At the same time of the rapid development of the market, different suppliers and different users have gradually deepened their cognition of the product positioning and landing scene of the low-code/no-code development platform, and the connotation is continuously enriched. In this context, IDC conducted a vendor evaluation of China’s low code/no code development platforms and recently released IDC MarketScape: China’s low code/no code development platform 2023 vendor evaluation (Doc# CHC51303423, December 2023), through more than ten representative manufacturers and dozens of users of interviews, research and evaluation, the market development and competitive landscape were combed. IDC selected a group of excellent low-code/no-code development platform manufacturers to participate in this study, mainly including Aozhe, Baidu, S-113N 3BHB018008R0001 Defan Information, Jiandao Cloud, Kingdee, Tidal Softsoft, Mendix, Mingdao Cloud, Pegasystems, Winestown, Puyuan Information, Light flow, Salesforce, and Yiyi Sufan, etc. This paper analyzes these manufacturers and their products from the two dimensions of capability and strategy, hoping to provide suggestions for the development of products and technology for manufacturers, and provide a comprehensive technical reference for technology buyers to choose suppliers.

The IDC study found:

The landing effect of the low-code/no-code development platform: for professional developers in the enterprise IT department, the low-code/no-code development platform can simplify the development process and significantly improve development efficiency; For citizen developers in the business sector, the low-code/no-code development platform can lower the development barrier and enable them to independently develop simple applications, thereby solving the problem of insufficient IT supply and quickly meeting the IT needs of long-tail scenarios. For some consulting companies or small and medium-sized ISVs, the low-code/no-code development platform can empower product managers, project managers, consultants, business experts and other roles in the team, and combine their business understanding and project management capabilities to achieve efficient landing and closed-loop from business consulting, application design to application delivery, thus enhancing enterprise competitiveness. Even corporate transformation.

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The main challenges to the implementation of the low-code/no-code development platform: from the technical level, the pre-built components and templates improve the development efficiency, but most of the product components are not strong in customization, which objectively brings the decline of development flexibility, but also restricts the application scenario of the low-code/no-code development platform; At the same time, most of the products mainly provide capabilities in the application development stage, but have weak capabilities in the testing, deployment, S-113N 3BHB018008R0001 operation and management stages. It is difficult to integrate with the original development process of users, and it is difficult to meet the needs of users for the whole life cycle management of applications. From the management level, the talent model required by the low-code/no-code development platform is familiar with both business and technology, and such talents are relatively scarce in the original IT and business departments of the enterprise, so the cultivation and reserve of relevant talents has become a major challenge for the enterprise. At the same time, the promotion of the low-code/no-code development platform within the enterprise will bring about changes in the functional boundaries of the original IT department and business department, and how to better carry out cross-department collaboration and process optimization is also a big challenge for the enterprise.

Different positioning of low code/no code development platform: Overall, low code/no code development platform generally has three positioning for large enterprise application platform, development tools for professional developers, and traditional software replacement for small and medium-sized enterprises. Positioned as a large-scale enterprise application platform, the S-113N 3BHB018008R0001 product application and data integration capabilities and service capabilities are stronger, while providing the ability to develop from zero code to low code (some also provide high code) to match the needs of different developer groups within large enterprises. Products positioned as development tools for professional developers generally provide richer programming interfaces, more complete development tools, stronger expansion capabilities, and provide application lifecycle capabilities to help professional developers improve development efficiency. Products that are positioned to replace traditional software for smes are generally code-free products in the form of SaaS, which are more easy to use, and can provide one-stop enterprise digitization software templates to help smes quickly realize enterprise digitization at a lower cost. These products are also suitable for the business units of large enterprises and are aimed at business developers to help solve the long tail IT needs.

Core capabilities of different customer groups: large enterprises pay more attention to the platform’s ability to integrate applications and data, the integration degree with the original development system, the ability to develop large and complex businesses and processes, and the flexibility and customization of the platform to adapt to the complex business scenarios, business personnel S-113N 3BHB018008R0001 and developer groups of enterprises; Small and medium-sized customers pay more attention to cost effectiveness, ease of use and scalability, so as to support enterprises to quickly realize business digitization at low cost, and continue to expand capabilities with the rapid development of business.

Wang Yanxiang, senior market analyst at IDC China, said that problems such as insufficient IT supply capacity, low efficiency of application development iteration, and slow response of long-tail demand on the business side are restricting the digital innovation ability of enterprises, and low-code/no-code development platform has become a key tool to liberate the digital innovation ability. However, the capabilities of such platforms in the current market are mainly concentrated in the application development stage, and users still face challenges in the follow-up links such as testing, deployment and management. And because each manufacturer’s product technology system is relatively closed, objectively easy to cause the problem of manufacturer locking; In addition, the learning cost and ease of use of the product have also become important factors restricting the promotion of the platform. With the development of AIGC technology, the gradual improvement of industry standards, and the improvement of product application lifecycle management capabilities, low code/no code development platforms are expected to more fully meet the needs of enterprises, help them respond more efficiently to market changes, accelerate innovation and enhance competitiveness.