What you should know about SaaS Products vs Custom Business Apps
Recognizing the type of software you will be building is the key to choosing the correct tools to solve a problem. So let’s discuss software products and business applications and how to approach each.
In the software development world, we can differentiate two types of apps:
- Products: these are apps that are targeted to a broad audience. They usually have a very specific purpose, and they do it very well. UI is highly optimized and the developer needs full control during the development. Because the application needs to work well for all different types of users, adding a simple feature can take months. Quickbooks, Salesforce, DocuSign, JIRA, and Trello are products, to name a few.
- Business apps: these apps are oriented to a small group of people to support and automate business workflows. Business apps require continued adjustments to evolve with the business. While the user interface (UI) should be simple, business apps are more focused on functionality and automation than a highly optimized UI.
Usually, when we decide to automate business processes, we reduce risk by selecting off-the-shelf products. However, many businesses are unique, and therefore not well-served by packaged products. More and more companies are finding the need for custom solutions.
Fortunately, you have more choices than ever for custom solutions. You can choose to build it from scratch using traditional tools like Java or .Net, or you can use a low code platform, like SLINGR, to create custom business automation.
With SLINGR you get:
- Speed: with SLINGR you can do in days/weeks what takes months using traditional technologies. Speed is a critical factor in developing business apps in order to translate valuable user feedback into ongoing application improvements.
- Lower risk: when you use SLINGR, you rely on well-tested components which shortens the time-to-market and mitigates the risk.
- Automated DevOps: no need for database management, servers, scaling, etc. You can just focus on the business problems and rely on SLINGR to do the rest.
- Built to evolve: business apps are in a constant flow to react to the changes in the processes. Thanks to the high level of abstraction, data model, automatic refactorings, adjustable UI and generated API and documentation, SLINGR makes it easy to add new fields, automations, notifications, and integrations.
- Maintenance: one of the biggest hidden and underestimated costs of custom apps is maintenance. When you create a custom app, you must have a production support plan for the entire lifecycle of the application, including monitoring, backups, technology upgrades and database management. SLINGR manages the complexities of technology stacks that are always in motion.
Of course, using a low-code platform imposes some guardrails around what you can do (vs. custom code) — but for most business cases the trade-off is with it. No more reinventing the wheel (infrastructure code), managing every aspect of the app, and managing the UI at the pixel level. With SLINGR you can address a business problem with automation that is fast, adaptable, and affordable.
Sign up here to build a free SLINGR app! You can also follow this tutorial to understand the basics of the platform
You might be wondering if SLINGR is a good platform to create products? Yes and we will talk about that in another article, so stay tuned.
SLINGR is a low-code rapid application development platform that accelerates development, with robust architecture for integrations and executing custom workflows and automation.
