Choosing Between SaaS and Low-Code Platforms: What’s Best for Your Business?
Choosing Between SaaS and Low-Code Platforms: What’s Best for Your Business?
Ensuring that your business or department is a well-oiled machine requires software tools that enable your critical business processes without adding drag. The tools you use can either give your team more leverage or sabotage them every step of the way — whether those tools are CRMs, messaging apps, calendar management apps, reporting dashboards, or any other internal tool for your business.
A question facing many business leaders today is when it's best to use conventional SaaS products for these tools and when it’s best to build their own tools in-house. While there’s an entire argument for choosing between building from scratch (high code) and using low-code platforms for in-house tools, for this article, we’ll only focus on comparing SaaS products to low-code platforms.
Modern low-code platforms are versatile and capable of handling large-scale, production applications for any industry, but there are still advantages to SaaS products. We walk you through the pros and cons of each approach and when to use each.
What is SaaS?
SaaS (software as a service) has been the standard way of selling commercial software for the last 10–15 years. SaaS products are usually commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS), meaning that they are ready-made products available for purchase or license, which have been designed to meet the needs of general users rather than being tailored to a specific use case.
As you might imagine, companies usually prioritize the features of these tools based on what will make them the most money — or, in other words, what will appeal to most users. The built-for-many aspect of most SaaS products can be both a strength and a weakness depending on the situation. Companies often choose SaaS products for their business because they’re generally more affordable (at least at the beginning) and quicker to implement than a custom solution. However, that comes with some potentially detrimental tradeoffs.
One tradeoff is that the tool may not always match the nuanced and specific workflows of your business and industry. There’s also the concern about vendor lock-in: if you rely on off-the-shelf software for a key function in your business that is hard to replace, then that provider has leverage over you and may increase their prices over time knowing that you're stuck with them. It’s also important to consider the risk of them dropping support for a solution you depend on or going out of business altogether.
What are “low-code” software platforms?
Low-code platforms are a “best of both worlds” approach between traditional software development (which requires you to write everything from scratch in a programming language) and no-code solutions (which let you build simple applications without any programming knowledge). They have the speed and simplicity of no-code without the extreme lack of flexibility that comes with those tools, letting you quickly and easily build applications for any purpose.
Low code achieves this by providing user-friendly, drag-and-drop development tools, while still giving you the option to write custom logic in familiar languages like JavaScript. That way, you can fully tailor your queries, data integrations, and front-end logic to meet your own requirements.
Low-code tools are popular among developers and businesses that want to create full-fledged business applications much more rapidly than they could with traditional development. They do this by providing features like out-of-the-box integrations for different datasources, drag-and-drop UI builders, and one-click application deployments. This way, you can focus on refining the logic of your app without getting bogged down in the monotony of constantly implementing boilerplate code for menus and buttons that are standard across most apps.
When to use SaaS and when to use low code for your internal apps
Realistically, there’s no single answer here. Almost every business has different use cases that would be best served by each software category. The most important thing you need to do is identify the right tool for the job at hand while also considering your future requirements as your business scales. That way, you can choose the right tool for where your business is going, rather than just where it is right now.
If you have a standard, undifferentiated process that is common across your industry, an off-the-shelf SaaS product will likely fit your needs and require less up-front work. For these use cases, it doesn’t matter if your software is the same as everyone else’s. This includes basic problems that all businesses have to deal with like calendar management, email, messaging, processing payments, etc.
One thing to look for in SaaS solutions is if there are multiple competitors that provide a similar service so you always have the option to go elsewhere if your first provider doesn’t work out. You should also seek products that let you export your data if you decide to move elsewhere in the future or your requirements change.
On the other hand, if you have a process or function that is a key differentiator in your business, you’ll likely want custom software to support it. With low code, you have complete control over how your tools behave, the data they can store, and how much you can alter them whenever your requirements change. Low code is especially useful for startups with evolving requirements and bigger enterprises with more complex workflows.
The following decision-making framework can help you judge whether you should use SaaS or low code for each use case within your business:
When building your own internal apps, a key aspect of the decision is whether your business has the resources (in terms of time, money, and skill) to build a functional in-house solution. Low code can drastically reduce the amount of resources required to build custom applications.
However, you should still investigate whether appropriate SaaS products exist (even if you only use them as the template for your own in-house designs that can be extended). Check out our more in-depth discussion on the build vs. buy decision to get a better idea of what the exact tradeoffs are with this approach.
Appsmith is the developer-centric low-code platform that fills the gaps in your business left by SaaS
Appsmith is a low-code platform that is built for developers and businesses. It has all of the features expected in any low-code platform, like streamlined data integrations with thousands of popular SaaS products to extend their functionality, API builders, drag-and-drop UI builders, and sections to write code for your front-end logic.
Appsmith also has other key features that are lacking in many low-code tools. It’s open source and free forever, has native integration with Git source control, and supports Appsmith AI natively in the platform for free with no API key required. You completely control the applications you build on Appsmith so that the rug can never be pulled out from under you.
In fact, we’ve personally used Appsmith to save upwards of $80k/year by switching from expensive, inflexible off-the-shelf tools to Appsmith for our test suite. Many others have solved major issues in their own organizations as well by quickly spinning up and rolling out internal apps using Appsmith.
In addition to our free and open-source cloud and self-hosted versions, we also offer more in-depth Enterprise support. If your business could benefit from this type of support, reach out to us today!
