What is Low-code? A Comprehensive Guide

by Richard Farrell

Businesses are constantly pressured to innovate, optimise processes and provide better user experiences in today’s fast-paced digital world, all without going over budget or overtaxing their IT departments. Low-code is the concept that enables rapid development and improvement of software applications and is the key to innovation.

Whether you’re a business leader exploring digital transformation or a developer looking for ways to accelerate delivery, this comprehensive guide to low-code development will provide you with everything you need to know, from what it is to how it works, to choosing the right platform for your organisation.

In this article, we’ll answer the following:

1. What is low-code?
2. What is a low-code platform?
3. Low-code, no-code vs. traditional development: A comparison
4. Who can use low-code?
5. Why businesses should use low-code
6. When to use low-code: 4 examples and use cases
7. How to use low-code
8. How to choose the right low-code platform for your business
9. The future of low-code: Market growth and Generative AI
10. Explore low-code development with Netcall’s Liberty Create
11. Frequently Asked Questions

Low-code is a software development methodology that enables the creation of applications through visual interfaces and minimal hand-coding. By utilising drag-and-drop components, low-code platforms accelerate the development process, making it accessible to both professional developers and non-technical users.

What is a low-code platform?

A low-code development platform lets you create applications by mapping the process you want to create – including steps, actions and endpoints – and the software takes care of the rest. Once you have developed an application, you can test, refine and improve it on an ongoing basis.

Organisations can use a low-code development platform, like Liberty Create, to develop applications in weeks rather than months without sacrificing customisation or quality. It is reported that 70% of new business applications will use low-code technologies by 2025 (Gartner).

Netcall’s Liberty Create comes with the following features:

1. A visual development interface
2. Built-in connectors to databases and APIs
3. Workflow automation tools
4. Governance and security features.

The exact features of low-code platforms vary by provider, though you will typically find features that include:

1. Drag and drop interface to help design and build applications
2. Business rules engine to create and manage information, relationships and logic rules. And be able to collect data at each point to give you a complete history.
3. Widgets such as tables, charts, maps and forms. That can all be used to create responsive interfaces that work for desktop, tablet and phone.
4. Automatically triggered notifications to users or customers. Using SMS and email templates, social messages and in-app push notifications.
5. Dashboards with real-time data to create bespoke reports based on user needs.
6. A central controller is needed to support IT governance with built-in security and encryption levels.
7. Integrations with pre-built connectors for standard enterprise systems. And generic rest API adapters to connect to other systems, particularly legacy systems.
8. An app store that includes pre-built applications and widgets. These can be downloaded and easily configured to avoid having to build from scratch.

A low-code development platform can come with advanced features, such as connecting artificial intelligence (AI) to your applications and for example, using a chatbot or virtual assistant to answer common questions. Or allowing developers to use bespoke code if needed, to ensure you are not limited by the technology. It also includes automated regression testing, which can be scheduled or triggered as part of your deployment process.

The exact features of low-code and no-code platforms vary by provider, though you will typically find features that include:

While low-code and no-code both use visual interfaces and templates to simplify development, they serve distinct roles.

No-code is a ‘closed system’ for non-technical business users to build standalone tools without writing any text-based code. In contrast, low-code is an ‘open system’ for professional developers. It automates foundational elements, like databases and UI layouts, allowing engineers to focus on complex custom logic and proprietary integrations.

Read more: Low-code vs. No-code: Choosing the best platform for your business

Who can use low-code?

Compared to traditional coding, working in a low-code platform enables both professional and amateur developers to design and create more quickly.

Non-technical users can easily learn to utilise a low-code development platform because it requires no prior coding knowledge. Users can visualise and create business applications using features such as drag-and-drop components, guided process modelling and templates.

Professional developers can also use low-code to extend an application faster, integrate data from multiple sources and translate business requirements into custom solutions.

Furthermore, the low-code development approach is designed to empower the Citizen Developer: a non-professional developer (e.g., a business analyst or power user) who builds applications for internal use using IT-approved LCNC tools. Low-code provides guardrails and scalability, enabling these users to deliver applications quickly without compromising security or governance.

Why modern businesses use low-code

The core value proposition of low-code development is its ability to deliver enterprise-grade software faster, more cost-effectively, and with significantly fewer resources than traditional development methods.

Instead of writing thousands of lines of complex text-based code, builders use intuitive visual designers to assemble applications using pre-configured components and drag-and-drop models. Complex business logic, such as a loan approval workflow or a customer onboarding journey, is mapped out visually rather than translated into dense scripts. This visual blueprint serves as both the documentation and the executable application, ensuring the final product aligns perfectly with operational needs while dramatically minimising coding errors.

Key advantages of low-code

For organisations looking to modernise legacy infrastructure and accelerate innovation, adopting a low-code architecture offers five distinct advantages: 

Drastically Reduced Development Time
By abstracting the foundational layers of coding, businesses can build and deploy applications in days or weeks instead of months. Research from Red Hat shows that low-code can reduce total application development time by up to 90%.

Rapid Process Iteration
Because visual applications are built to be malleable, teams can continuously test, refine, and adapt workflows on the fly in response to shifting market conditions or business requirements.

Reduced Burden on IT Departments
By providing intuitive guardrails, low-code enables non-technical business users to safely build localised tools and workflows tailored to their roles, relieving the massive backlog of routine requests that sit with central IT.

High Customisation and Versatility
Modern low-code platforms, such as Liberty Create, offer extensive configuration flexibility. Teams are never locked into rigid out-of-the-box features; they can easily extend capabilities to meet unique operational rules.

Enterprise-Grade Security and Trust
Leading low-code technology puts security and privacy first. Platforms come equipped with built-in compliance frameworks and robust access controls, ensuring that all deployed apps align with security protocols and legal data mandates.

1. Operations: Custom order and inventory management

Order processing often involves siloed emails, spreadsheets and manual data entry across multiple systems, leading to delays and errors. Businesses in this industry can simplify the order process by creating a low-code application that everyone in your company can use. The app allows sales, production and finance teams to view, process and track orders in real-time. That way, there’s no endless cycle of (unread) emails and everything syncs up nicely.

2. Customer Service: Shatter data silos

Customer data is fragmented across legacy CRMs, billing systems and contact logs, preventing a holistic view of the customer journey. Businesses can eliminate data silos by creating a single system to rule them all. Pull all your customer data into a central repository that updates automatically and retain complete control over who sees what and when.

3. Financial Services: Offer a new service in days

Traditional application processes are slow, manual and expensive to update due to strict compliance rules. Our low-code development platform, Liberty Create, helps you create apps 10x faster by giving business users the tools they need to build products themselves. Say someone wants to make a mortgage application app. They drag and drop the necessary components, get IT to test it,and then (pending approval) upload it to your site (pending approval). It’s as simple as that.

4. HR and Admin: Cut out the virtual clutter

Spend less time in your inbox by rapidly building an app with low-code development to store admin documents. Meeting minutes, action lists and related content – you can drop them all in the app and upload them to your intranet. You can even automate email alerts so people know when you’ve uploaded something relevant to them.

While traditional development involves months of coding, debugging and infrastructure setup, low-code focuses on four simple, accelerated steps. First, to start using a low-code platform, your business needs to define the goals and problems the application needs to solve. Then, identify the users and the data it needs to function. The following steps include:

1. Design model and workflow.
2. Connect to and integrate with existing systems (such as ERP, CRM or external databases).
3. Develop and deploy: You then visually define the application’s business rules and workflows, for example, “If approval status is ‘Pending,’ send notification to Manager”. The low-code platform then automatically generates the necessary code and handles the technical setup (compiling, testing, staging). With one click, the application is deployed to the cloud or on-premises environment.
4. Manage: Once live, you continuously monitor performance, gather user feedback and make changes instantly using the visual tools.

If you want to see how to use low-code in the simplest way, contact us to schedule a Liberty Create demo.

Choosing the right low-code development platform depends on your business goals, team and existing infrastructure. Here, we provide a list of criteria and questions for you to consider when picking a low-code development tool for your business:

1. Ease of use:

1. Is the interface intuitive for non-developers?
2. Can multiple developers work on the same project? How?

2. Integration support:

1. Will it support growth and increasing user demand?
2. How secure is it to integrate data?

3. Scalability:

1. Is the interface intuitive for non-developers?
2. Is the platform open and extensible with custom code and APIs?
3. Can developers override defaults for more complex needs?

4. Security and governance:

1. Are data privacy, role-based access and audit trails built in?
2. How does the platform ensure application security?

5. Community and support:

1. Is there an active user base and strong vendor support?
2. What is the vendor’s strategic vision?

A low-code development platform can come with advanced features, such as connecting artificial intelligence (AI) to your applications and for example, using a chatbot or virtual assistant to answer common questions. Or allowing developers to use bespoke code if needed, to ensure you are not limited by the technology. It also includes automated regression testing, which can be scheduled or triggered as part of your deployment process.

The future of low-code: Market growth and generative AI

1. Explosive market growth

The low-code market is expanding rapidly, securing its place as the dominant methodology for modern enterprise application delivery. The global low-code development platform market was valued at approximately $28.75 billion in 2024 and is projected to skyrocket to over $264.40 billion by 2032, maintaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.2%. Furthermore, analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of new applications developed by organisations worldwide will utilise low-code or no-code technologies.

However, this growth is not happening in a vacuum; it is being fundamentally reshaped by the evolution of artificial intelligence.

2. The generative AI evolution of low-code

In previous decades, low-code vendors competed on a straightforward premise: traditional software engineering was too slow, expensive, and specialised, so businesses needed visual, drag-and-drop abstractions to build apps without manual coding. Early platforms provided development velocity, but often at the expense of granular technical control.

The introduction of Large Language Models and generative AI has completely disrupted this dynamic. Instead of manually assembling visual components, developers can now use natural language prompts to describe a solution, such as a complex customer portal with multi-factor authentication and database schemas, and AI systems can automatically generate the underlying project framework, API connections, and interface layouts.

3. Mitigating the risks of ‘vibe coding’ and AI shadow IT

While this shift allows for unprecedented speed, it introduces severe risks for enterprise environments. The industry has seen the rise of ‘vibe coding’, the practice of prompting AI tools to spin up code without the user understanding software engineering fundamentals, architecture, or security compliance.

When employees rely on ad-hoc, standalone AI assistants without IT oversight, it creates an aggressive new wave of shadow IT. Ungoverned code snippets introduce security vulnerabilities, version-control failures, and large compliance risks.

Netcall counters this risk by embedding AI directly inside a governed enterprise low-code framework. Business teams can leverage the speed of natural language generation, but only within strict IT-defined guardrails, pre-approved data templates, and centralised compliance controls.

Explore low-code development with Netcall

As organisations look to improve efficiency, enhance communication and deliver more personalised support, choosing the right technology is key to driving customer satisfaction.

By partnering with the right provider, like Netcall, you can streamline processes, reduce costs and ultimately build stronger customer loyalty and advocacy. That’s why 9 out of 10 customers recommend us.

Get in touch to discover how Netcall’s low-code application development platform can help your organisation.

Tewkesbury Borough Council saved over £100,000 in their first 18 months using Liberty Create

Tewkesbury Borough Council transformed its normal online waste and recycling services and paper-based processes, with Netcall’s Liberty Create platform, achieving remarkable results:

1. Simplified systems have reduced officer admin time, enabling quicker customer response times
2. Better integration into existing legacy systems
3. Automated communications
4. Significantly improved council finances – their actions in the first 18 months saved over £100,000 net of investment
5. Increased capacity to drive service income, for example, a 35% revenue growth (>£300k) from garden waste over 3 years.

We have plenty of customer stories for your consideration. Contact us so our professional and supportive team can help you drive your business efficiently without adding complexity.

About the author

Richard Farrell

Chief Innovation Officer

Richard began his career in contact centres in the mid-1990s, building his expertise in customer contact management. Today, Richard is Netcall’s long-serving Chief Innovation Officer, having been with the company for an impressive 23+ years and serving as the company’s CTO for several years prior. He currently focuses on researching, innovating and delivering solutions that meet the needs and challenges that Netcall’s clients face.