Report:

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms

Top Vendor Products for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms in 2023

• Appian
• Mendix
• Microsoft
• OutSystems
• Salesforce
• ServiceNow

Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Appian - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Business logic and workflow: Appian aims to be a single-vendor solution for multiple digital business technology needs. Clients are expected to place the core LCAP capabilities of business logic and workflow development at the center of their application design. This is to orchestrate business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA) and interfaces for B2C or B2E experiences supported by advanced features like AI, data fabric and process mining.
  • High-volume scalability: Appian supports multiregion high availability, FedRAMP compliance, data encryption and a variety of certifications. It also supports container-based deployments on Kubernetes and horizontal scalability for larger use cases. As a result, Appian can support large user volumes with high concurrency.
  • Ecosystem: Appian AppMarket includes more than 900 listings covering solutions, connectors, functions, task automation and other utilities, notably an OpenAI plug-in.

  Cons:

  • Product: Customers report a steep learning curve and a need for specialized developer skills when the Appian Platform is used for delivering automation of complex business capabilities. These include enterprisewide data structures, sophisticated logic scenarios and highly parameterized dynamic UIs.
  • Sales execution and pricing: Clients are reporting high license costs as an impediment to extending platform usage, even though Appian Community Edition helps with the initial adoption.
  • Market strategy: Appian is nearing a half billion dollars (USD) in annual revenue, yet it continues to be a loss-making business. Appian continues to invest in its partner channels, which influence 70% of new sales. It has over 600 partners including technology leaders like Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as key alliances with global SIs. Appian is aligning its salesforce vertically and expanding into Japan and India. As a result, SG&A expenses have increased 7% from last year.


• Creatio - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy: Creatio's new Freedom UI Designer (and support for design systems like Figma) delivers value for both professional and business unit developers. The Creatio no-code composable architecture enables the co-development of applications with different developer personas. Business unit developers rely on visual, model-driven approaches, while professional developers can fall back to traditional development practices like using the .NET framework.
  • Marketing strategy: Creatio's marketing strategy is its vertical focus on 20+ target industries, largely through an expanding global partner network. Creatio continues to host innovative marketing events (70 in 2022) such as its No-Code Playbook book launch featuring Steve Wozniak, as well as No-Code days and webinars.
  • Customer success management: Creatio has a customer care program to maximize customer success, including the assignment of a dedicated 'customer success manager.' Creatio Academy conducts corporate training, guided learning and e-learning courses for LCAP developers.

  Cons:

  • Product: Studio Creatio is primarily a 3-tier-architecture BPA tool with a focus on workflow and case management. It therefore has limited capabilities for professional developers when compared with the market leaders. Its cloud version doesn't support development with external databases, although external data sources can be accessed via APIs.
  • Innovation: Creatio provides limited AI-assisted development. Its roadmap does, however, include both AI-assisted development and AI-driven, GPT-powered app development, and the enhancement of Creatio's Freedom UI. Much of Creatio's innovation investment targets verticals, partnerships and promotional events.
  • Business model: Creatio's all-access license model limits revenue growth. This may be beneficial for existing clients that have access to all Studio Creatio capabilities without paying for additional licenses. However, it could limit the innovation and growth of the platform in the future.


• Globant (GeneXus) - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution and pricing: GeneXus' developer-focused licensing is beneficial for clients developing custom and complex applications at scale. While the growth of GeneXus' customer base is below 10%, success with customer retention and upselling initiatives indicates a successful strategy and opportunities for future growth.
  • Product strategy: GeneXus is aligning its platform strategy with the evolution of software engineering, and the renewed demand for rapid application development tools among professional developers. Investment in features for building superapps and unified user experiences aligns with strong customer demand from Gartner clients.
  • Partner network expansion: Globant became the No. 1 partner for GeneXus after the acquisition, but it also opened doors for significant expansion of the partner network. The current partnership model is healthy and beneficial for GeneXus expansion, though business growth and scaling of the platform are somewhat overdue.

  Cons:

  • Deployment options: GeneXus doesn't offer fully managed production environments. It supports fully managed developer and test deployments, but no production. Clients need to host and manage the application instances in production, which requires relevant I&O expertise.
  • Vendor lock-in: A combination of the GeneXus LCAP product and Globant services for custom application development may bring additional risks of vendor lock-in. The customer's opportunity to use alternative vendors diminishes and the move to another platform becomes nearly impossible.
  • Global operations: Significant investment in effort and resources is required to make the GeneXus platform a truly global solution. This includes developer capacity, public cloud expertise and GeneXus-managed deployments with multitenancy, global scalability and regional certifications.


• HCLSoftware - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Geographic and sales strategy: The global presence of partners, customer success resources, and sales and development workforces all support the steady growth of HCLSoftware and accelerate Volt MX product development.
  • Product: Feature-rich tooling, which targets multiple developer personas, and a diverse product portfolio allow HCLSoftware to satisfy the requirements of a wide range of clients — from small and niche businesses to global industry leaders.
  • Market understanding: The market positioning of Volt MX and platform features are aligned with the most popular trends and customer demands, such as multiexperience applications, composable platforms, superapps and rapid application development.

  Cons:

  • Vendor lock-in: HCLSoftware is both a product and services company, so a custom development service is offered at extra cost to close platform feature gaps or compensate for lack of technical expertise on the customer side. This results in an increased risk of deeper vendor lock-in.
  • Innovation: HCLSoftware expands its innovative technology portfolio through acquisitions that bring technology and architecture fragmentation. Technology harmonization is required to ensure a consistent developer experience for HCLSoftware clients.
  • Revenue: The financial performance of HCLSoftware platforms and services should not be considered an indicator of success of the LCAP business, because revenue for the Volt MX product is not reported. We are lacking indicators like inquiry data, public internet sources or social media analytics that we use in case LCAP-specific revenue is not disclosed by the vendor.


• Huawei - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Platform ecosystem: Astro Zero is part of Huawei's cloud services portfolio, along with Huawei's iPaaS and multiple SaaS application products. Astro Zero developers get native tooling support for access to Huawei's IoT, database, serverless and AI technology stacks, as well as more esoteric technologies such as digital twin models and blockchain.
  • Product strategy: Huawei has shown good progress toward its target of becoming a one-stop shop for no-code, low-code and pro-code development. It has strengthened Astro Zero's integration with the Huawei Cloud ecosystem, and has introduced into the product AI-enabled conversational flow autogeneration, support for fusion team collaboration and a 'SaaS as a platform' model.
  • Sales execution: Huawei is not only a major cloud provider, but also has a significant base of paying customers for its Astro Zero LCAP and a revenue growth rate of over 30%, despite limited geographic distribution of its LCAP customers.

  Cons:

  • Customer experience: Customers report that Astro Zero's development features, documentation and training materials are too modest compared with market competitors, while Huawei is leading the market in other lines of business.
  • Vertical markets: Astro Zero industry coverage is still limited to a few segments, with 70% of revenue collected from e-government and education, banking and manufacturing.
  • Geographic strategy: Huawei primarily supports customers in China and APAC, with small Astro Zero usage in Latin America and the Middle East. Global clients will need to consider carefully any local support arrangements, including SI support, and that standard pricing is only provided for the domestic China market.


• Kintone - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution and pricing: Kintone has continued to significantly increase its customer base and license revenue during the past year, driven by expanding demand for citizen-developer-centric no-code development and a very aggressive pricing model. Its channel partners have also played a significant role in this growth. Kintone has added a large Japanese systems integrator for global enterprise reach, and 17 Japanese regional banks that support local SMBs as new sales channel partners.
  • Customer experience: Kintone has received positive customer experience ratings on Gartner Peer Insights relative to other LCAP vendors. Its ratings for evaluation and contracting and for integration and deployment have remained high.
  • Overall viability: Both Kintone and its parent company, Cybozu, are profitable and capable of funding future expansion. Kintone has established a healthy and rich partner ecosystem, and its large customer base provides a robust user support community.

  Cons:

  • Product: Compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Kintone is missing multiple features, including UX capabilities, intelligent automation and integration. It also lags in supporting advanced professional development features, or emerging AI-assisted development features. Kintone does not publish a clear and specific product roadmap.
  • Market responsiveness: Although Kintone updates regularly to enhance its ease of use and governance-related management capabilities for citizen developers, it is slow to add advanced features. Kintone does not support the modern architecture sought by skilled developers (business technologists/professional developers) for complex enterprise application development.
  • Geographic strategy: Kintone's geographic reach has still much room for improvement in regions such as EMEA and Latin America, although some global partnerships have been established recently, including a white-label partnership with Ricoh Group.


• Mendix - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation: The Mendix Platform supports AI copilot development (MxAssist Logic Bot, Best Practice Bot, Validation Bot, Performance Bot), AR- or VR-enabled UX, IoT, digital threads, digital twins and edge computing. The new Mendix Solutions Kit targets ISVs building adaptive/sustainable SaaS applications with IP protection and built-in metering/billing capabilities.
  • Product capabilities: Mendix rated highly across most key capabilities, especially on integration and APIs, security and governance. This is confirmed by the reviews on Gartner Peer Insights.
  • Viability: Siemens keeps fueling Mendix portfolio growth by extending the Mendix Platform market reach and integration across its IT and OT. Mendix plays an important role in the software portfolio of Siemens, a conglomerate with over $70 billion in annual revenue.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: Some customers complain about the price of Mendix being too high for their budgets and Mendix's pricing model lacking the flexibility to satisfy the broader spectrum of client sizes and use cases.
  • Partners and community: Mendix has less capacity in its partner delivery network compared with its competitors and relatively small user communities. Customers mention that they face difficulties with finding skilled developers, which becomes a stumbling block for complex enterprise implementations.
  • Marketing: Mendix's marketing message remains too technical and thus misses opportunities to effectively target business leaders as one of the LCAP top buyers. Since last year's assessment, Mendix has held a relatively low number of developer events/webinars as its primary marketing initiative, and the total number of attendees was small compared with its main competitors.


• Microsoft - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Business model: Basic Power Apps capabilities are included in Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 Enterprise plans. Microsoft 365 users can access standard prebuilt connectors for a wide range of data sources and APIs, utilize custom connectors in Teams, and build APIs on Dataverse. Dynamics 365 users can utilize all connector types, build on Dataverse and create stand-alone applications in their licensed Dynamics 365 environments.
  • Product strategy: Power Apps supports API-driven, internal business solutions with over 1,000 connectors for many common enterprise applications and cloud-based data sources. Custom connectors can be developed and used as wrappers around external APIs unavailable as prebuilt connectors. Microsoft is among the leading market players for generative AI capabilities, with capabilities such as AI Copilot, Power Apps Ideas and the support of Microsoft 365 Copilot plugins.
  • Governance: Governance capabilities continue to expand for the Power Platform. Native capabilities like sharing limits, tenant isolation, enterprise policies, data policies, and application life cycle management (ALM) are available through the Power Platform Admin Center and Managed Environments. The open-source Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit offers additional capabilities, such as establishing a business justification process and identifying unused apps and workflows.

  Cons:

  • Pricing and licensing: Gartner clients continue to report concerns about high costs and complex licensing, especially with licensed versions of Power Apps being required to access enterprise data sources and additional governance capabilities.
  • Product consistency: Not all developer tools and options are available for all types of applications (canvas apps, model-driven apps and Power Pages), so Gartner clients have expressed difficulty rationalizing and unifying standards and best practices.
  • Integration and APIs: Power Apps' support of providing custom APIs for other applications to integrate with them is restricted to Power Platform's common data layer of Dataverse, while it's an integral feature in other leading LCAPs. As a workaround, Power Automate HTTP triggers or webhooks can be used by external applications to push events and data to applications developed with Power Apps.


• Newgen - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution and pricing: In the past year, Newgen's LCAP has grown in line with the overall growth in the LCAP market. Clients praise the cost-effectiveness and ease of use of the NewgenONE platform.
  • Market responsiveness: NewgenONE upgrades include a modernized UI, enhancements for mobile app development, especially using native mobile features, and improved support for application monitoring.
  • Integration and APIs: Newgen provides a wide range of prebuilt connectors to enterprise applications (such as SAP, Salesforce, Temenos and Guidewire), especially in the banking and insurance sector, to enable rapid integration with the platform.

  Cons:

  • Marketing execution: Gartner clients looking for LCAPs rarely mention Newgen among the top contenders. Primary interest in Newgen continues to be among clients looking for BPA or content services solutions.
  • Innovation: With its product strategy, Newgen is catching up the leaders in this market. Capabilities like citizen developer features, UI design tooling and integration with OpenAI to introduce generative AI into the solution remain on the NewgenONE roadmap.
  • Geographic strategy: Newgen's primary customer base is in India, the Middle East and Africa. It has increased its number of customers in North America and Europe, but these regions still remain a small part of the overall business. Also, Newgen's support for the internationalization of applications is limited to a relatively small number of languages when compared with market leaders.


• Oracle - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Overall viability: Oracle is a major worldwide vendor, with a proven track record in revenue retention, growth and profitability. This combination of viability and the vendor's 'free with Oracle Database licenses' pricing strategy (APEX Service is a separate paid-for offering, however) makes APEX extremely competitive for database-colocated workloads.
  • Operations: Oracle is a major dbPaaS, IaaS and SaaS vendor running on its own 50+ data centers — more than any other LCAP vendor. It supports a global community of 700,000 APEX developers and offers many preloaded data assets/schemas for multiple industries.
  • Product strategy: Oracle is proving its commitment to APEX development with the 'customer zero' approach for complex application modernization cases of Oracle Cerner and Oracle CRM. This undertaking includes notable investment in upgrading platform architecture and improvements for developer experience and productivity.

  Cons:

  • Third-party support: APEX lives within the ecosystem of Oracle Database development. It has limited support for third-party agile planning and collaboration tools for developers and does not support native mobile app development for Android or iOS, outside of progressive web app (PWA) support.
  • Product: APEX's dependence on Oracle Database limits architectural choices to those supported by Oracle's database team. APEX is still reliant on third-party tooling for business process orchestration (with APEX's own workflow due in a late 2023 release). Managed APEX is limited to Oracle Cloud today, although Oracle is planning multicloud-managed LCAP services in the future.
  • Innovation: APEX remains in catch-up mode for features such as connectors to external data sources, development of custom APIs and creation of SaaS. Oracle hasn't announced its generative AI strategy. However, Oracle is aggressively addressing many of these issues in part due to the use of APEX in the Oracle Cerner healthcare system.


• OutSystems - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product: OutSystems offers advanced low-code capabilities such as AI-augmented development, native plus third-party continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), enterprise agile planning, and governance. Customers can choose between O11 and ODC based on their business and technical requirements.
  • Marketing execution: OutSystems runs both top-down and bottom-up engagement initiatives. These include events for senior leaders (like thought leadership webinars, CIO roundtables and clinics), developer channels (like the Decoded podcast, tech talks and demos) and partnerships with global systems integrators (GSIs).
  • Operations: With the release of ODC, many of the scaling limitations of the OutSystems platform — such as the speed of scaling a solution up and down — have been addressed with a new cloud-native, containerized architecture with independent runtimes for environments. ODC is also 'evergreen,' meaning it is always on and always up to date.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: Customers often complain about the cost of licenses being an obstacle to extending the platform usage to additional business cases, or even keeping the OutSystems platform for accelerated application development. The pricing based on Application Objects (AOs) is a good idea for 'taxing' the technical debt and promoting reusability. However, customers whose license was based on an unlimited option may see the cost increase after switching to AO-based pricing. Customers need to practice app sizing to plan the target budgets based on the number of AOs their subscriptions will use.
  • Operations: Gartner clients have expressed concerns about the change of skills and effort required by the new deployment model and, in rare cases, the need for supporting both O11 and ODC.
  • Vertical industries: OutSystems' LCAP lacks vertical industry capabilities, meaning GSI partners and ISV engagement will be required for some customers to meet their business requirements. Customers seeking industry-specific domain expertise, native integrations or solution accelerators may find that other LCAP vendors offer more direct solutions.


• Pegasystems - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Pega Infinity provides strong capabilities across UX design, application logic and workflow, and security for developing complex business applications. It has advanced capabilities to build chatbots, supports external popular design systems, and has a visual case designer to support modeling complex processes.
  • Market understanding: Pegasystems showcases a good understanding of the market needs and has constantly evolved its product to support the emerging needs of the low-code market with a strong focus on the security and scalability of applications. It is also planning to strengthen the platform with generative AI to support AI-assisted workflow and data object authoring.
  • Governance: Pegasystems provides strong capabilities for governing application development. It offers detailed audit logs for development by different developer personas, granular component-level access rights, and a wide range of administration roles to support fusion team development.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution: Pegasystems' sales growth is slower than that of most other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Gartner enterprise customers have reported concerns about return on investment (ROI) for some use cases, suggesting the cost of Pega Infinity's licenses and operations is too high for the benefits delivered.
  • Market uncertainty: Some customers continue to express concerns about the long-term effects of Pegasystems' ongoing legal battles with a competitor. Until the conclusion of the open appeal, the uncertainty may continue to negatively affect prospects' buying decisions and investors' appetite.
  • Marketing execution: End users continue to be less aware of Pegasystems' low-code capabilities than those of its main competitors in this Magic Quadrant. Many IT leaders view Pega Infinity as a proprietary BPA solution.


• Retool - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Overall viability: Retool has established a very large developer community made of paying customers and an even larger community of nonpaying developers that can be targeted for sales leads. Revenue growth year over year and total funding raised put Retool in a strong market position.
  • Marketing strategy: Retool is targeting professional developers, a market segment traditionally known for its poor awareness of or interest in LCAPs, but still a segment that has potential for growth. Software engineering leaders seeking improvements in productivity, as well as low-code approaches addressing more technical app use cases, will increase interest in this segment.
  • Market responsiveness: Retool has released products for mobile applications (Retool Mobile), workflows (Retool Workflows) and a hosted PostgreSQL database (Retool Database) within the last year. It also has released a generative AI feature called Smart Block within Retool Workflows. Retool plans to release additional GenAI capabilities to improve the developer experience.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: Retool can be complex for citizen developers as it targets professional developer audiences using low-code approaches to building internal software. The supported languages (such as JavaScript and SQL) make it easier for traditional developers with these skills.
  • Developer experience: According to customer conversations with Gartner, the performance and ergonomics of Retool's browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) can be limiting, especially when building larger applications with complex queries and screens. However, Retool has rewritten its core application building runtime within the last year, which, it claims, improves page load time performance by up to 75% for complex applications.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: Most of Retool's customers are in the technology and retail business, with a notably smaller portion in the financial services domain.


• Salesforce - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Industry strategy: Salesforce has become the largest platform vendor and a market leader through layering Salesforce Platform and LCAP features on top of its industry cloud solutions. Many vertical market solutions and SI partners further increase its industry coverage. This coverage and vendor size are attractive to many organizations and have led to continued growth.
  • Marketing execution: Despite its size — 90% of Fortune 500 companies are Salesforce customers — Salesforce continues to push for the growth of its developer communities by investing heavily in developer relations and events such as Dreamforce, TrailblazerDX and various World Tours. These events touch very large numbers of customers and prospects.
  • Platform ecosystem: The Salesforce ecosystem includes a number of significant technology and community aspects across iPaaS (MuleSoft), business intelligence (Tableau), messaging (Slack), AI (Einstein) and data (Data Cloud). The Salesforce marketplace (AppExchange has over 7,000 resources) and community (Trailblazer Community has 70,000 developers and over 2,000 community groups across 100 countries), combined with more than 900 workflows in the Flow library, create the largest low-code ecosystem at this time.

  Cons:

  • Customer experience: Salesforce Platform is seen as complex and difficult to learn, according to customer reviews and interactions. Multiple acquisitions have also led to concerns about multiple workflow engines including MuleSoft, MuleSoft RPA, Flow Orchestration, OmniScript and Slack.
  • Innovation: There is a lack of priority and urgency for low-code platform features. Apex language programming on the Salesforce Platform may no longer be the ideal low-code abstraction level for business technologists who are looking for accelerated, model-driven, simplified yet powerful enterprise-level tooling.
  • Pricing: Important features such as the Apex language debugger are available at an extra cost, and the freemium model is applied to encryption features.


• ServiceNow - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution: App Engine has seen significant growth in the adoption of its premium tiers, with more than 3,000 existing ServiceNow customers using App Engine to extend ITSM, HR or customer service management offerings. This showcases the success of the vendor's 'SaaS as a platform' strategy.
  • Geography strategy: ServiceNow is rapidly expanding its footprint beyond its core North American geography to APAC (excluding China), with dedicated sales and marketing focused on this region.
  • Market responsiveness: Responding to the market needs, ServiceNow has strengthened its governance capabilities for fusion teams, invested in a wide-scale training program to address the need for growing ServiceNow application development professionals, and invested in ERP modernization solutions.

  Cons:

  • Application logic and workflow: ServiceNow doesn't support standards such as BPMN 2.0 or DMN, which are associated with process and decision modeling. These are often prominent requirements among enterprises focused on complex BPA scenarios.
  • Pricing: ServiceNow SKU price levels and the complexity of its pricing are the concerns that Gartner clients repeatedly report in inquiries and on Gartner Peer Insights. ServiceNow is planning to add more sophisticated subscription management capabilities to enable enterprises to have more control and visibility into the cost of applications being built.
  • UX design: Though ServiceNow offers a sophisticated Now Experience UI framework, it does not allow enterprises to use their own design systems or import design elements from tools such as Figma or Sketch. This restricts the development of applications where clients need more control over the UI elements.


• Unqork - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Unqork's vision of the LCAP market is solution-centric, rather than focusing on the amount or type of code generated or prevented. Composability principles define platform and application design, with customers noticing the platform's flexibility and ease of use as the main benefits.
  • Marketing execution: Unqork has a strong media footprint that helps to position it well in the enterprise customers market. Despite being a small company, Unqork manages to attract attention from global financial institutions and government agencies.
  • Customer experience: Unqork's approach to LCAP is one of an open platform where developers should be able to customize the platform itself, not just the applications created with it. Unqork also invests in productivity features like formula autocomplete and real-time configuration analysis, laying a foundation for predictive configuration powered by AI/ML. Unqork features bidirectional integration with Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Trello and Asana using out-of-the-box plug-in components.

  Cons:

  • Ecosystem: Unqork is a small and ambitious startup with only a small fraction of the customer base of LCAP Magic Quadrant Leaders. The two-year-old Unqork Marketplace, which offers applications, templates, integrations and snippets primarily built by Unqork, is considerably smaller than those of its Magic Quadrant competitors.
  • Geographic strategy: North America, specifically the U.S., dominates the Unqork customer base. The company needs to accelerate geographic expansion and build region-specific marketing and sales strategies to maintain progress toward its ambitious growth targets.
  • Pricing: Customers' ROI may become a challenge for simple and small applications because Unqork cost is based on the number of applications running on the platform. Price also includes implementation support.


• Zoho - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Zoho Creator provides the development tooling expected of an LCAP. This includes graphical process, data and UI designers, with additional extensibility enabled by Deluge, its low-code application development language, along with support for Java, JavaScript, XPath and Node.js. The application development capabilities of Zoho Creator are supported by developer platform components of the Zoho suite, which help to automate deployment, configuration and monitoring tasks.
  • Pricing: Zoho is one of the few vendors that reviews pricing strategy to maintain affordability and democratize the adoption of LCAPs. Most other vendors in this Magic Quadrant show a tendency to increase their platform prices to take advantage of the low-code/no-code hype.
  • Industry strategy: Zoho remains agnostic to industry verticals while offering a wide range of business-specific capabilities useful to, and even critical for, most corporations. Zoho Creator inherits this approach, getting close to the specifics of business automation but maintaining its position as a general-purpose application development tool.

  Cons:

  • Business model: SMBs are dominant in the Zoho customer base, and Zoho Creator often remains unseen by many Gartner clients. Success with large enterprises requires further changes in Zoho's business model, product strategy and approach to the development of its partnership network.
  • Innovation: Zoho Creator updates since May 2022 have mostly focused on functional enhancements and integration, while multiple innovation initiatives were completed for BI & Analytics and other products in the Zoho suite. The recent additions of NLP and RPA features strike as catching up with the industry.
  • Product strategy: As a low-code application development tool, Zoho Creator is subject to a certain discord between the typical user profiles. Users of SaaS features would struggle to get on board with Zoho Creator due to their own lack of technical expertise. At the same time, primary users of Zoho Creator don't value SaaS offerings due to the lack of flexibility and control.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, 17 October 2023, ID G00785824

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