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Top 5 Zoho Creator alternatives

Not all low-code internal tool platforms are equal. For that reason, I’ve prepared a list of 5 leading low-code platforms for you to choose from, so you can tackle unique business challenges.

After reading through, you’ll not only understand the differences between these software solutions but also know which one is the best option for your current situation.

The Zoho Creator alternatives that I’ve tested and analyzed were:

1. DronaHQ
2. Retool
3. Bubble
4. Mendix
5. Quickbase

DronaHQ: Zoho Creator Alternative for Production-grade Internal Tools

DronaHQ is a low-code internal tool builder that allows teams to build powerful internal tools on top of existing data sources at super-fast speeds.

It enables you to rapidly build and deploy cloud-based apps like internal admin apps, custom tools, dashboard apps, and frontend apps for databases using a simple drag-and-drop interface similar to that of Zoho Creator and connect blocks and build custom-tailored yet powerful apps, intuitively.

With a huge spotlight on enterprise readiness along with a 12-year legacy of enterprise mobility solutions, DronaHQ has proven to be a secure platform that is used by Fortune 500 companies and SMBs alike. for business developers, citizen developers, and professional developers to build, deploy, and manage custom applications.

Customer reviews suggest that the platform is ideal for a fast time-to-market and then scaling the app as per changing requirements or adding additional features and capabilities. DronaHQ offers many ready connectors to popular enterprise applications and databases like Zendesk, Airtable, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SendGrid, Pipedrive, Trello, Twilio, and more. DronaHQ also boasts a comprehensive workflow management tool that allows you to send emails, database update tasks, trigger notifications, and switch to another app.

Developers can extend DronaHQ capabilities with front-end JavaScript and other extensibility options.

DronaHQ Pros:

1. A drag-and-drop UI builder for creating apps using ready blocks
2. The interface is intuitive and easy to use as pointed out by customers
3. Comprehensive ready-made templates available on the platform
4. Extensive backend and frontend logic builders available even in the Starter plan
5. Suitable to build complex systems like custom CRMs
6. Allows flexible customizations to match your app with your guidelines
7. ISO 27001 and SOC-II certified, GDPR compliant.
8. A Pay-per-User pricing model

DronaHQ Cons:

1. No free plan, 15-day free trial available.
2. Limited support 24*7 as per customer reviews
3. Tricky data formatting
4. The platform can be quite robust so you may not be able to fully leverage your subscription without insights
5. Only about 50 ready API and DB connectors are available (but more are on their way)

https://www.dronahq.com/zoho-creator-alternative/

What kind of apps can you build with DronaHQ:

With DronaHQ, you can build a range of cloud-based apps like internal admin apps, custom tools, dashboard apps, frontend apps for databases — Salesforce apps, database apps. Customers have also built apps for sales enablement, inspection management, virtual training and developments, field service apps, and IoT asset tracking apps. (https://www.dronahq.com/showcase/)

DronaHQ Pricing Plans https://www.dronahq.com/pricing/

The FREE trial is just right to get the whole grasp over the tool’s capabilities before taking it live to more end users. DronaHQ’s free trial covers a wider range of the platform’s capabilities right from its UI builder to frontend logic builder and ideal for all teams evaluating low-code platforms. You get app, user, and workflow analytics in all pricing tiers which is something missing in the alternatives in the list you see here.

The STARTER plan is suitable for teams who are just starting their digital journeys. It is suitable for daily business process automations, approval workflows, internal tools and dashboards. It also comes with DronaHQ Sheets which is the platform’s advanced spreadsheet-like database that teams can use as an alternative to more complex database solutions. However there is a limitation on the number of connectors you can use.

If you need the flexibility to customize and create branded applications with your own code, you will need the BUSINESS plan where you can use the platform’s custom code blocks to create components and widgets that are reusable and also get your apps whitelabelled.

For businesses that need more strict access control permissions to control organization wide access, database access, use capabilities like SSO, you will need to get the ENTERPRISE Plan which also unlocks access to dev, beta, and prod environments on DronaHQ.

DronaHQ sports pricing plans suitable for both small and large businesses and stands as a more affordable and intelligent Zoho Creator alternative. Customers with undefined number of end users can find value in the tool when they want to evaluate the capabilities before rolling out to a large number of users. Enterprise customers get additional benefits like unlimited apps, makers, and records.

We recommend DronaHQ if you want to build internal tools that are complex and expand over your existing databases or business apps. If you have used Zoho Creator and found limitations with its capabilities to create complex enterprise apps at a fast pace and reduce the reliance on engineering teams, you should explore DronaHQ. The platform is currently being used at companies who do not have to rely on development support.

Retool: Zoho Creator Alternative for Developers and Web Apps

Retool is a robust tool for building internal tools fast without needing to know a lot of code to operate it.

Retool is also a low-code platform that helps startups and Fortune 500 companies create internal tools for their teams. Within the platform’s editor, you can combine Tables, Lists, Charts, Forms, Wizards, Maps, and more out of the box. Retool emphasizes on connecting with data sources and assumes that you have a base level knowledge of SQL, databases, Excel and it enables you to connect with many databases or “pretty much anything with a REST, GraphQL, or gRPC API.” This makes Retool an ideal platform for IT departments who have a stronger understanding of database queries. Typically, the IT team develops the tools and launches and shares them with their non-technical colleagues that may include project managers, customer support teams, operations managers, and others.

Retool Pros:

1. Pretty user friendly and good for simple data gathering application
2. Intuitive UI platform
3. Many integrations with both databases and APIs
4. Plenty of documentation
5. They offer a free plan

Retool’s Cons:

1. The deployment options are limited to web apps. So the internal apps won’t run on for Iphones, Androids, or Windows OS.
2. Retool customers need to rely on experts to implement desired customization through JavaScript queries
3. Free plan offered but limited as compared to those offered by the alternatives here. You cannot go public with your app in free plan
4. Not always reliable and sometimes the dashboards don’t load as reported by some users
5. Questionable speed as it Can become slow and you have to open multiple tabs to keep working at speed
6. Not suitable for branded and complex front end

What kind of apps can you build with Retool:

With Retool, you can build web-based internal tools on top of your databases like MongoDB admin panels, Slack notification apps, PostgreSQL admin panel, internal tools for customer support teams. (https://retool.com/templates/)

Retool’s Pricing https://retool.com/pricing/

The free plan is good enough to get a feel of the platform but that is about it. Limitations will start to surface in capabilities soon as you cannot test anything fully without a paid subscription.

With Retool’s startup plan, you can share your application with your colleagues. However if you need to grant user based or role based access permissions, you need the PRO plan.

You need the PRO plan if you want to integrate with business systems like Salesforce, Oracle, or other database or API endpoints.

The Enterprise plan gives out greater control over security, management, deployment and priority support needed to operate at the enterprise level.

If you absolutely need version controls, integrations with Okta, Active Directory, etc., or even custom connectors built just for you, then go for it, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re just starting out or aren’t at that stage.

Retool is a great product but it aimed at developers to build the tools for your team. It may not be the best solution for teams that lack development resources or people who have knowledge of JavaScript and Database management to be able to use this platform to its capabilities.

Bubble: Zoho Creator Alternative for building web apps, tools, or websites

Bubble (https://bubble.io/) is a no-code industry leader and has incredible capabilities to offer. It offers a powerful drag drop web editor and allows users to build and host web apps, workflows, SaaS products, websites, and more. It allows users to create tools that have features like Facebook and Airbnb and a fully custom backend database with front-end building capabilities. Bubble handles deployment and hosting and has no hard limits on the number of users, traffic volume, or data storage.

Bubble Pros:

1. Good to design and launch MVPs and full-fledged web apps with mobile-friendly design.
2. An intuitive interface with a drag-n-drop editor.
3. A variety of free and paid templates created by Bubble designers.
4. About 1,000 plugins to connect to external services.
5. A large community of builders active both on Youtube and their Forums
6. No-code; thus, no need for engineers or developers
7. Every plan includes a backend database, workflow system, API publisher, connections to third-party services
8. 100+ templates for free and for purchase by third party creators.

Bubble Cons:

1. Limited functionality available according to a free plan.
2. An additional plan is needed to build each new app.
3. Has a complex interface that may slow down onboarding
4. Lacks the simplicity that many alternatives here like DronaHQ and Retool offers
5. Lacks various database integrations
6. Isn’t suitable for creating internal tools, with its focus being on creating web apps and prototypes for end-users outside of your organization.You do not get many enterprise-grade capabilities like permission controls, SSO.

What kind of apps can you build with Bubble:

With Bubble, you can build a range of personal and customer facing apps like Social Network, Booking App, Personal Finance Tools, Community and Review Sites, and some Internal Management Tool, Jobs Boards and Educational Tools.

Bubble Pricing https://bubble.io/pricing

Though every plan includes core platform features to create and host web apps, only the paid plans include email support, white labeling, real-time analytics, and more. As the plan size progresses the amount of storage, support you get, back up facilities, and enterprise grade feature increase.

The Hobby plan, similar to other platforms’ free trial, is for users to test the platform, although with limited functionalities. The apps cannot be published or tested for an end user. You get limited support and branding options.

The Bubble Personal plan becomes more interesting as you can start testing your app and additionally take it to your intended end users with your own branding. This plan however is limited to how much storage you get or how many admin users you can have. This plan is good for freelancers starting out a project but not suitable for businesses in my opinion.

The Professional plan is suitable for medium to large teams who need to create multiple apps. The limit on admin users increases to two along with some more flexibility in storage, backup and workflow capabilities.

The Production plan is the closest Bubble can get to an enterprise plan that can serve larger teams and departments that need custom apps. Greater storage, more days of data backup, more admin users, more apps.

If you are looking for a platform that doesn’t focus mainly on database and API integrations to create a GUI of your data — Bubble can be the right choice to jump-start your idea as a prototype.

Many users are building websites and complex web apps for customer-facing use cases. This blog evaluated Bubble for business facing apps and processes only.

Mendix: Zoho Creator Alternative to speed up development with a team

Mendix is a powerful platform that a lot of large enterprise businesses currently use to build applications faster as a service tool. Mendix aims at the professional developers as well with its Studio IDE. Designed to accelerate enterprise app delivery across the application development’s entire lifecycle, Mendix offers both low-code web-based studio for business domain experts and low-code desktop-based studio for professional developers. Mendix App allows to quickly build web and mobile apps, instantly deploy and manage them.

Mendix excels in building customer-facing applications, mobile experiences, and replacements for shadow IT. Development teams can leverage backlog management, version control, testing, and deployment capabilities or use integrations with tools like Jira, Jenkins, and soon Git. Developers can extend Mendix capabilities with Java actions, front-end JavaScript and TypeScript pluggable widgets, and other extensibility options.

Mendix Pros:

1. The platform delivers good speed of delivery for seasoned users
2. Scalable and flexible development
3. Secure platform for creating (mobile) applications.
4. Can be used to create Front-end for any back-end

Mendix Cons:

1. Expensive; their pricing model could be improved for medium-sized enterprises.
2. SAP on premise v.s. SAP Cloud connectors
3. Performance decreases as the number of apps built increases
4. Mendix is a licensed system which make it inaccessible for smaller budgets.
5. Some versions contain annoying bugs.
6. Needs more flexibility to improve application performance through query optimization

What kind of apps can you build with Mendix:

With Mendix, you can build a range of transactional, event-driven applications like supply chain systems, field service apps, asset maintenance, insurance apps, retail solutions, IoT tracking apps and more (https://www.mendix.com/solutions/ )

Mendix Pricing https://www.mendix.com/pricing/

Mendix offers a per user per app pricing plan making it the most expensive among the listed alternatives. It has two categories, a one-app pricing plan and a multiple-apps pricing plans.

With the Free plan, users evaluating Mendix can take this complex platform for a spin. It is a platform known to have a longer learning curve so it would be easier for more seasoned developers to try it out first and then citizen developers can be onboarded.

The Basic plan offers better platform stability (99.5% Uptime Guarantee as the vendor writes on its website).

The Standard plan offers greater support to customers, more deployment options, more development environments, and IDP and project dashboards.

The Premium plan removes the cap on environments app developers can use. It provides greater vertical and horizontal scalability for apps and an advanced infrastructure control.

The entire pricing page suggests that the Mendix platform is speaking to only enterprise customers and developers who understand the technical requirements going behind app development.

While the platform has been helpful for large enterprises with dedicated teams of developers, smaller teams with limited budgets have difficulty in fully realizing the product’s capabilities.

Quick Base: Zoho Creator Alternative for Developers and Web Apps

Quickbase, with its low-code, wizard-guided application development platform, is positioned both non-technical users and expert developers are able to quickly create, design, customize as well as connect secure and scalable cloud apps.

Quick Base is popularly used to provide real-time visibility into the dynamic operational processes. It has an entirely integrated stack that automatically generates and hosts applications. Developers can test functionality with the QuickBase sandbox, extend functionality with the RESTful API, and leverage Quick Base Pipelines for drag-and-drop integration and automation capabilities.

Quickbase Pros:

1. Scales easily as your organization grows
2. Can be customized by an experienced QuickBase solution provider to handle almost any process within your organization.
3. Flexible platform so you are never “stuck” with a software version
4. Quick Base has an active and growing user community where sharing solutions and easily addressing any questions or stumbling blocks is easy.
5. Quickbase is highly extensible, with APIs you can connect it to other systems, do customizations, plug-ins etc.

Quickbase Cons:

1. It does not have a flexible licensing model making it rigid for teams of smaller size
2. Customer reviews suggest it cannot handle super large data sets
3. Reports are not easily formattable.
4. Quickbase does trade off some ability to customize the look of the apps for speed
5. It is not fully brand-able out of the box.

What kind of apps can you build with Quickbase:

Quickbase is used by customers across a variety of industries and use cases, including process and project management, asset and order tracking, customer and contracts management, time and expense, sales and HR applications.

Quickbase Pricing https://www.quickbase.com/plans-and-pricing

The Premier plan is good for smaller teams starting their digital journeys. Users can create upto 50 apps and access capabilities like Workflow Automations, Data and app integration, Mobile-ready applications, Flexible licensing options. Even though the 50 number of apps seems to be attractive, you cannot use these apps offline or have enterprise app features like encryption, SSO, and advanced security controls.

The Platform plan is suitable for businesses as it offers advanced security and permission controls. Customers can create upto 100 apps that are offline enabled.

The enterprise plan is ideal for customers with very unique app requirements. These plans can be curated as per the customer app needs and have flexible licensing options. Overall, the capabilities offered under the enterprise plan are the same as the platform plan.

Quickbase has not revealed pricing on its website, making it difficult for evaluators however you do get a 30-day free trial which is longer than what the alternatives offer.

Now, let’s talk about Zoho Creator.

Zoho Creator: Multiplatform Apps for BPA

Zoho Creator is a pretty powerful tool to build custom apps for business without having to write a lot of code, however, it has its own shortcomings. As I had covered in this top low-code tools to explore article, Zoho Creator is all about workflows and business process automation. It is the preferred choice of small and mid-sized companies and is one of the few low-code platforms that offers a huge array of features for business developers to digitize simple workflows.

As it states on the website, the platform is an ideal solution to build multiplatform applications however customers have observed a varied experience judging by the complexity of the app, so let’s look at Zoho Creator’s Pros and Cons.

Zoho Creator pros:

1. Many ready-made apps for simple use cases
2. Plenty of documentation
3. Extensive features for sharing and protecting your data (in premium plans)
4. Good to use along with Zoho’s other tools
5. Mobile and Web App solution
6. Easy csv exports
7. Easy to update apps after publishing

Zoho Creator’s shortcomings and problems:

1. Not suitable for complex business apps
2. No workflows in the free trial or basic plan
3. Some users have experienced consistent issues on platform
4. Slow support team as per user reviews
5. While the platform promises data security, customers have observed serious issues when controlling data access permissions
6. Overwhelming customizations
7. Expensive user-based pricing

What kind of apps can you build with Zoho Creator:

With Zoho Creator, you can build a range of simple business processes automation apps like leave approvals, employee time and attendance, quotation management, visitor management, onboarding apps, and more (https://www.zoho.com/creator/apps/).

Zoho Creator’s Pricing Plans

• Zoho Creator sports a Free Plan on its comparison page but it is referring to the capabilities you get in their 15-day free trial. It lets you publish one app, however, its good enough only if there is one end user who will be accessing the app. This plan is ideal for testing basic low-code platform capabilities.
• The Basic plan has a more flexible end user base (it has a fixed per user per month charge) without any caps but the plan lacks offline and workflow capabilities. It is good for a limited number of apps (3) that will be used by a known user base, without requiring any workflows.
• So if you need workflows for approvals notification, a Premium plan becomes a must. This offers more user permissions and is suitable for simple apps.
• It’s only in their Ultimate plan that customers get necessary enterprise-grade capabilities to make business apps. So if you have to make apps for your entire organization, I recommend waiting till the end of this blog to make the decision.

If you take a look at their pricing plan here in depth, you’ll notice that the BASIC plan is limited while considering the steep per user pricing. So, my take is, if you are sure you will be building straightforward process digitization apps for a known number of users, go with Zoho Creator.