Plasmic – the first no-code tool that enterprises will love

No-code solutions are on everyone’s lips. They seem to be the perfect solution for building prototypes or building simple solutions with lots of speed. You will find people that even tell you that with some more advanced tools it is even possible to build complex solutions. And they are not wrong.

But even the most advanced no-code tools come with a twist. To understand this better, we first need to talk about when no-code tools work and when they are not the best choice.

When does no-code work best and when do they reach their limits?

No-code works best if you need to build something very quickly with almost no logic. Something like a static landing page or a very basic web application.

The thing to emphasise here is the phrase “almost no logic”. What does that mean? It means, that you have more or less static elements like text, or pictures that do not change often.

There are of course certain no-code providers that specialised on standard pre-programmed solutions like a basic e-commerce shop. The most famous provider in that field would probably be Shopify. With Shopify you can build a shop without writing any code. But don’t they have logic under the hood, you might ask? Yes, of course but this logic is pre-built-in and cannot be changed by you. If you decide to do a certain process in a very different way that they have intended it to work, you will end up sooner or later in a dead-end.

Why are no-code solutions rarely used in enterprises?

No-code is seen in many places, but those places are often not enterprises. But why is that? Despite the fact that many enterprises have new business or innovation departments that almost operate like start-ups no-code tools are nowhere seen. In my experience the reason behind this is that these teams do not think like real start-ups but they think like start-ups within an enterprise. And this is a big difference. Then even if you try to operate like a start-up, you will always operate under the rules & regulations of your enterprise. This could include things like:

• Use technologies and tools known by the enterprise
• Software must be run in the private cloud or the cloud chosen by the enterprise
• Avoid technical dept
• Etc.

Needless to say that under such circumstances is almost impossible to use no-code software. Because those tools have many advantages, but all suffer from one big throw back in the eyes of an enterprise. They suffer from the vendor-lock in effect. Or in other words, once started with a no-code provider you have to stick with this provider until you decide to shut down your solution or completely rebuild it internally with your enterprise stack. And thus, up to this point, all no-code solutions could be interpreted as “technical dept”.

In my opinion this thinking lacks for two reasons:

1. Focussing on full speed, learning fast and failing early (if there is no potential) is a fine working approach. Because your product failing is also a possible outcome and finding this out sooner than later is also a big advantage for your enterprise. And if you built your product with no-code and therefore operating on full speed then this is not and was never technical debt in the first place.
2. When enterprise managers hear that a working product must be rebuilt away from the no-code provider into the enterprise stack, they most of the time only see work that could have been avoided, using the enterprise stack in the first place. But completely neglecting all the learnings that were made thanks to the blazing fast no-code approach. And this in the end is the huge advantage of no-code. If you care about learning fast – consider no-code.

But why are no-code solutions so fast?

This could sound like a pretty obvious question, but really think about it. In what are you really faster? Writing logic? For sure not – you are faster in dressing up your software and make it look pretty! In other words, building visual components. If you need to stich APIs together or build some logic, depending on the tool you are using you might be able to do that, but you are most likely not faster than your developers.

Also, if we think about how we work as a team, with different roles, most of the time a UX engineer starts first, building your product in Figma and afterwards the developer has the pleasure to turn that art into real working software. This process can be very time-consuming especially if your application should have a very pretty face.

But what if we could build the UI with a no-code tool and build all the logic with the developer framework of your choice?

This made me think of another big IT trend: headless architectures. They separate your visual components (UI) with your business logic (backend) by using APIs. But up to this point this was more of an architectonical pattern mostly used in huge commerce platforms or similar but never really served any use in the field of rapid product development.

Imagine we could use a no-code tool to build your UI (your head) and connect it with your developer framework (your body) in a headless fashion?

Let me introduce you to Plasmic!

Plasmic (https://www.plasmic.app) is a visual builder that let you build blazing fast UIs and integrating it into your codebase!

With Plasmic you are able to rebuild the UI that the UX built with a visual builder in no-time. Afterwards you can integrate the components into your codebase as if they would come from a component library like Material-UI or similar. Everything communicates with properties that the developer can pass into the components, and the developer is under full control of the state.

Some other benefits of Plasmic:

• You can import your Figma components directly into Plasmic with a plug-in
• You can even create your own “code components” that can then be used in the visual builder of Plasmic (the other way around)
• You can also use Plasmic as stand-alone tool and connect it to a code base once the time is right
• Full typescript support and other helpful developer stuff like ‘plasmic watch’ are already built-in

And the best part is, since you’ve connected Plasmic with your codebase you can build your solution like a normal React/Angular/Vue project and deploy it anywhere you like also in your private cloud. And that is why enterprises will love this no-code tool.

If you think this is all too good to be true (I thought it myself) then give it a try. So far it still has a free tier that is probably sufficient for most of your use cases.

Reach out to me if you want to learn more! I am happy to share my experience.

-- until next time