About This Constellation ShortList™

Citizen development is the enablement of the typical worker with low-friction tools to create useful applications on their own, with as little outside assistance as possible. Citizen developer low-code tools are designed to provide highly consumable tools for the rapid development of applications, usually through a visual process, with little to no coding.

Citizen developer low-code solutions, as distinct from more enter- prise-oriented low-code solutions, are specifically designed for use in average business environments and are aimed at the specific requirements of the medium-to-small organizations, though they can usually be built and used anywhere. Less focus is paid to requirements such as manageability, support, and governance and more toward extreme ease of use and rapid results.

Citizen developer low-code tools can be used to realize self-service in application development and deliver digital enablement at scale, and tap into distributed innovation. While such tools and platforms are often less sophisticated than enterprise low-code tools, there is considerable gray area and overlap in the middle.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

  • 250+ customers live
  • Customers on at least three continents
  • Support for customers on all continents
  • Extreme ease of use with minimal coding or technical expertise
  • Very short learning curve with great user onboarding (docs, videos)
  • Low-friction application development model
  • Good integration capabilities with local databases and cloud-based services
  • Useful range of integration types and sources
  • Richness and robustness balanced with a focus on short time to value
  • Good desktop and responsive web user experience, with native mobile nice-to-haves
  • Security features to protect access to the app and its data
  • Ability to deploy code assets to public cloud platforms
  • Good variety of prebuilt use cases that are easily customized
  • AI app-gen features and intelligent in-app services
  • Support for organization branding and application sharing
  • Limited support for some version control and application lifecycle management (ALM) tools

The Constellation ShortList™

Constellation evaluates more than 40 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.

  • CLARIS FILEMAKER
  • CREATIO
  • GLIDE
  • IFTTT
  • MAKE
  • MICROSOFT POWER APPS
  • NINOX
  • RETOOL
  • QUICKBASE
  • KISSFLOW
  • SALESFORCE LIGHTNING APP BUILDER

Frequency of Evaluation

Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.

Evaluation Services

Constellation clients can work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this Constellation ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.

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