No code? No problem. These ten no-code tools make it easy to build apps and websites, manage projects, create automations and more.
With no-code tools, you can do things that used to require lots of skills—and lots of time. That makes it easier to work more efficiently, scale businesses, and make anything you can imagine.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to make something on the internet, you had to have an extensive skillset, including frontend development skills. Since then, creating on the internet has become increasingly accessible. From sharing your thoughts (and memes) on social media sites to creating simple websites, people with minimal technical skills have lots of options for putting things online.
However, a lot of the more complex tasks were out of reach of designers without coding skills until recently. Enter no-code tools.
Before we get to our top ten, we’ll first briefly explain what a no-code tool is. If you’d like to skip ahead to a certain section or tool, simply use the clickable menu:
1. What are no-code tools?
No-code tools allow users to accomplish tasks that used to require coding. They use Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools to let anyone (that means you!) create quite simply, often with familiar drag and drop interfaces. While many of these tools have some learning curve, particularly for more difficult tasks, all allow you to jump right in and learn as you go. And they definitely take less time to master than coding languages!
There are no-code tools for almost everything. In this article, we’ll be looking at tools for building websites, apps, membership sites, conversation design, and automations. But if you have other needs, there is probably a tool out there for you.
2. Ten of the best no-code tools out there
1. Airtable
Pricing: Free for individuals and small teams, $45 per month for the premium business plan
Airtable may look like a very well-designed spreadsheet, but it’s capabilities go far beyond a humble Excel sheet. This powerful no-code tool makes the features of a database available in a simple and accessible way. Airtable allows you to connect and view your information in any way you want.
The product is highly customizable, with views to let you see the same information in a variety of ways, and automations to integrate with hundreds of other apps.
Use cases
Airtable can be adapted for pretty much any workflow, so there are many ways that both teams and individuals can use the product, for businesses and personal use.
- Marketing teams: keep campaigns on schedule by tracking content and milestones, get feedback on creative assets directly in the product, use automations to speed up work, and share results with stakeholders.
- Sales CRM: Airtable has a Sales CRM template for real-time access to accounts and customers. With this tool, everyone on the team can view exactly the information they need in the way they want to see it.
- Product teams: Airtable offers templates for user research, product launches, and more.
Airtable is an endlessly versatile product; check out more examples of their use cases.
Want to learn more about how Airtable can benefit your work and life? Sign up to be placed on the UX Writing Hub’s waitlist for their No-Code course.
2. Make (formerly Integromat)
Pricing: Free for individuals and small teams, up to $29 per month for premium teams account
Make is my personal favorite no-code tool. This tool allows you to create automations that make your workflow run itself. It’s the glue of the internet, and is capable of amazing things. It’s similar to Zapier, another automations tool, but Make can run multiple systems at the same time in a non-linear way.
Make offers a visual approach to integrations. With a simple drag and drop interface, this no-code tool makes automations feel more like art. You can create integrations for all your existing workflows, or design new ones from scratch. Make offers templates to help you get started—all are customizable, so you can tweak them to suit your workflow.
Use cases
- Customer support teams can collect survey feedback automatically by connecting survey tools to Google Sheets or Airtable.
- Marketers can add leads from Facebook ads to Google Sheets, then share that data to Slack.
- Online course creators can connect a wide variety of learning management systems to spreadsheet tools.
3. Softr
Pricing: Free for individuals and small teams, up to $269 per month for the premium team business plan
Once you’ve mastered Airtable, you can combine it with Softr to build an app. This innovative no-code tool allows you to build full-stack web apps from your Airtable data.
You can design your app in any way you want, using Softr’s many list layouts and pre-built blocks. And you can create custom forms to communicate with your users. At the UX Writing Hub, we’re big fans: we used Softr to build a learning management system for our students. The product helped us scale our company.
And Softr is only growing. The company recently raised a 13.5 million Series A to develop an extensive eco-system of no-code apps. It looks like this great tool will be around for a while, and the company will have even more to offer in the future. Why not learn it now?
Use Cases
Softr lets you build all kinds of web apps. Available templates include the following and many more.
- Client portals
- Internet tools
- Marketplaces
- Online communities
- Resource directories
- Websites
4. Bubble
Pricing: Free for the basic starter plan, up to $399 per month for the premium team business plan
Another great no-code tool for building web apps. Bubble lets you develop without being a developer. I don’t have much experience with Bubble yet, but people in the industry are using it to build impressive apps, so it’s definitely one to try.
Want to check it out? You can play with Bubble right from the website, making basic edits on the home screen. Even before you start the free trial. You can’t really make anything here, but if you want to get a peek at how the tool works before you hit “Get Started,” this is a neat way to do that.
Use Cases: You can use Bubble to build any web app. But the company provides tutorials in how to create clones of many major products, so if you are looking to create any of these, Bubble is a great product to consider.
- Social media sites
- Travel sites
- Small business tools
5. Webflow
Pricing: Free for the starter plan, up to $39 per month for the premium business plan
Tools like Wix and Squarespace have made web design accessible to many more people. But Webflow takes it up a notch, allowing users to create powerful and customizable websites—no coding necessary. Just a quick glance at this gallery of websites created using Webflow will give you a sense of the difference. The sites look great—and extremely different from one another.
On top of this, the customization options in Webflow are unparalleled. You can even build web apps with it, if you connect it to the right apps. For example, you can create a database and connect it to your Webflow’s CMS.
Use Cases: Webflow is a great choice for both business and personal websites. If you use the design tool Figma, it’s easy to use the two tools together. (Webflow has a course to show you how).
- Create portfolio sites to showcase your work.
- Use templates designed for all kinds of sites: non-profit, entertainment, education, blogs, e-commerce, and more.
Pricing
- Starter version: Pay nothing while you learn Webflow and design your first site. You can also publish to the webflow.io domain.
- $12/month Basic version (billed annually): Essential tools for a simple site.
- $16/month CMS version (billed annually): For content-driven sites.
- $36/month Business version (billed annually): For businesses.
- Enterprise version: custom pricing.
6. Glide
Pricing: Free for individuals, up to $249 per month for the premium business plan
Just as Softr turns your Airtable data into a web app, Glide turns your spreadsheet into an app or website. We may not all be power users, but most of us have basic spreadsheet proficiency. Glide allows users to take that common skill and use it to create software—pretty amazing!
After connecting your data to your new app, you can customize the design. Editing is instant, so iteration is a breeze.
Use Cases:
Browse Glide’s template library for a better look at all the things you can make with this no-code tool.
- Websites include inventory, company CRM databases, landing pages, client portals, clinic scheduling for doctors, education platforms, and more.
- Apps include employee directories, expense report trackers, meal plans, and more.
7. Memberstack
Pricing: $29 per month for the basic plan, up to $99 per month for the premium team business plan
Are you considering starting a membership site or adding membership options to an existing business? Memberstack makes the complicated backend work of accounts, payments and more so simple you can do it without any coding skills at all.
The process is just three steps: insert a snippet of code (okay, there is some code—but you don’t have to write it), set membership pricing, and manage members through a dashboard. On top of this, Memberstack offers one-click Stripe integration for easy payments.
Use Cases
- Manage subscriptions and billing for SaaS products.
- Scale your fitness business.
- Create membership options for classes so you can turn students into subscribers.
8. Voiceflow
Pricing: Free for individuals, up to $50 per month for the professional business plan
If you’ve gotten assistance from Alexa or Siri, or tech support from a website’s chatbot, you know that conversation design is everywhere these days. But creating these products must be incredibly complicated, right? The answer is no. No-code, that is.
With Voiceflow, you can create chatbots, custom assistants, Alexa and Google tools, and in-car assistants. The familiar drag-and-drop interface makes designing contextual conversations surprisingly easy.
Use Cases
There are endless options for using conversational design in projects and products. Voiceflow has an extensive template library that includes the following.
- Build a chatbot assistant for banking.
- Create a company directory.
- Build a classroom assistant for teachers.
- Build an in-car assistant.
- Create reusable components.
9. Zapier
Pricing: Free for individuals, up to $69 per month for the premium team plan
We use so many tools in our digital lives, both for business and personal uses. Many of these tools work better together, and we often find ourselves repeating patterns of tasks, going from one tool to another over and over again. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Zapier is a no-code tool that lets you automate those tasks, allowing all your tools to work together without your oversight. When one action triggers another, it’s called a zap. For example, you could create a zap that triggers an email whenever a form is filled out. With over 3000 integrations, Zapier can vastly increase efficiency.
Use Cases:
- Designers can use Zapier to share content to social media, save files to the cloud, log files to a database, or send messages to new leads.
- Business owners can use Zapier to notify their team about leads, add leads to a spreadsheet or CRM, and more.
- Project managers can use Zapier to add tasks to to-do lists, get alerts for events, and share content to social media.
3. Final thoughts
Feel like you’re ready to try out some no-code tools? All of the tools on this list are easy to dive right into. But to get the most out of them, you may want some help first.
Dive in with our free UX design short course or speak directly with a UX program advisor.
If you’re looking to learn more about the world of UX and coding, these articles from elsewhere on our blog may be of interest: