No-code app builders are revolutionising the way businesses and individuals create applications. Without needing a single line of code, users can design, build, and deploy apps that solve real-world problems.

If you’re looking for a no-code solution, here are 5 of the top platforms you should consider, including a special spotlight on Squirrel365, a powerful tool that is starting to stand out in the no-code space.

1. Bubble

Website: bubble.io

Bubble is one of the most well-known no-code platforms, allowing users to build fully functional web applications with powerful database capabilities and integrations.

Key Benefits:

• Comprehensive logic builder: Use workflows to automate tasks and processes.
• Scalability: Handle complex databases and APIs.
• Responsive Design: Apps can be optimized for mobile and desktop views.
• Active community and ecosystem: Access a marketplace of plugins and templates to expand functionality.

2. Adalo

Website: adalo.com 

Adalo started as a mobile-focused no-code app builder that makes it easy to create native and web apps with a visual interface.

Key Benefits:

• Drag-and-drop editor: Simplifies the app-building process.
• Native app support: Publish directly to iOS and Android stores.
• Workflows & Logic: Automate interactions, user authentication, and dynamic content.
• Templates & Components: Includes pre-built templates for faster development.

3. Glide

Website: glideapps.com

Glide transforms Google Sheets into sleek mobile and web applications, making it a great choice for creating data-driven apps quickly.

Key Benefits:

• Google Sheets integration: Use live spreadsheet data to power your app.
• Fast deployment: Build and launch apps in minutes.
• Great for internal tools: Ideal for business dashboards, inventory tracking, and CRM solutions.

4. Thunkable

Website: thunkable.com 

Thunkable is a no-code platform tailored for building native mobile apps with a block-based logic system similar to MIT App Inventor.

Key Benefits:

• Cross-platform compatibility: Build once and deploy on both iOS and Android.
• Code logic with visual blocks: Use a simple drag-and-drop logic builder.
• AI and IoT capabilities: Integrate with AI tools and smart devices.

5. Squirrel365

Website: squirrel365.io

Squirrel365 is a no-code app builder that empowers users to create pixel-perfect applications using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. It uniquely combines spreadsheet logic with interactive design, making it an excellent choice for users comfortable using formulas to create web applications.

Key Benefits:

• Pixel-perfect design: Unlike many no-code tools that use templated layouts, Squirrel365 offers complete design flexibility and customisation of components

• Spreadsheet logic layer: Keep your existing calculations and models intact by using Excel-like formulas within your app.

• Integrate with other platforms: Connect to over 4000+ tools using Squirrel365’s zapier connector, or connect directly to Googlesheet, Excel Online and and RDMS database (via InfoBurst)

• Easy distribution: Publish apps effortlessly as standalone web app, embed them in websites, or integrate with business dashboards.

• Quick response support and community: Squirrel365 provides responsive customer support. Additionally, its active community serves as a valuable resource for guidance, problem-solving, and idea-sharing.

Which No-Code App Builder is Right for You?

Choosing the right no-code platform for your project depends on what you need. 

If you need a fully customisable, spreadsheet-powered app with pixel-perfect design, Squirrel365 is the ideal choice. For mobile apps Adalo and Thunkable are great options to try.

We recommend that you carefully compare and test each tool yourself and assess the compatibility with your app building needs.

If a particular tool is already standing out to you as the one most suitable for your requirements, then that’s great – get yourself building right away! If not, then why not give Squirrel365 a go – it’s a very cost efficient no-code tool and you can start building your app on a free plan.

With no-code platforms becoming more powerful than ever, there’s never been a better time to build an app—without writing a single line of code!

Start building with Squirrel365 now

Squirrel365 v1.18 has been a while in the making! It has been driven by our desire to keep feature parity between the client tool/desktop designer experience and the new browser based designer experience that we are about to roll out. It’s full of exciting new features designed to streamline your app building workflow.

Expanding cloud platform capabilities

Versions and Autosave

We’re about to release the next build of Squirrel (1.18).  As part of our release process, we write the release notes, a blog and host a webinar to talk about all the new things we’ve added and fixed.  Whilst collating this “what’s new” information, it got me thinking about a feature which hasn’t quite made it into 1.18.

As part of the webinar we will be announcing a soft release of Designer in the Browser or DIB, as we call it internally.  DIB is a browser-based experience for the Squirrel design tool. We have put a lot of effort into DIB and we were aiming to fully release it as part of 1.18. However, whilst testing we noticed that for browsers with slow internet connections, the loading experience wasn’t great. We needed to fix that experience, but did not have time to fully test the changes without impacting the 1.18 release schedule.  Instead, we’re going ahead with a soft launch in 1.18 (with the known performance behaviour) and will address load times as part of the next release due out in Q1/Q2 of 2025.

Loading Performance

So, what was the issue with loading performance?  Squirrel at its core is a web application.  It is made up of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

• HTML – tells the browser what elements to display on the screen
• CSS – tells the browser how to style the HTML elements
• JavaScript – adds all the interactivity to the HTML elements, and is the brains of the application.

When you launch the Squirrel Designer in the browser, the HTML loads first.  This then tells the browser what and where to download the CSS and JavaScript resource files the application needs.

Squirrel is an Angular application.  That means we create lots of HTML, CSS and JavaScript code.  When we produce a production build, the Angular compiler concatenates and compresses all that code into a small number of JavaScript files.  One of those files (our main JavaScript file) had grown to over 10Mb.

Up until now, because Squirrel has been a desktop installation, we’ve not really considered the size of these resource files. However, when moving the design experience to the web these file sizes can make a big impact. When opening DIB the browser has to download that 10Mb JavaScript file before it could render the application for the user.  This isn’t a problem for high-speed internet connections. But for low bandwidth scenarios (like when I was in a hotel in Arizona) you can really feel that loading delay.

Getting Lazy

This is where lazy loading comes into play.  In its current form, Squirrel loads all the JavaScript files as soon as the HTML page is opened.   When there are large files, this causes the UI to lock up until all of the file has been downloaded.  Once all the files have been downloaded in the browser the application becomes usable.  Lazy loading is a paradigm shift, so that the application only loads the JavaScript it needs, when it needs it.  Splitting that 10Mb file into multiple smaller files that are loaded on demand.  Our 10Mb JavaScript file is now a collection of smaller files. On average these files are around 150Kb in size, so much quicker to download even on slow internet speeds.

On the surface it sounds like this has solved all the performance problems, but it’s more complicated than that.  Lazy loading has increased the number of files that the browser needs to download.  Browsers have a restriction that throttles downloads to a maximum of 6 concurrent files. This means that the 7^th file requested must wait until one of the preceding 6 has completed before it starts the download.  So, we may have solved performance issues with downloading large files and replaced it with new performance bottleneck as the browser queues up downloading multiple smaller files.

Testing Testing Testing

The only way to know for sure whether lazy loading solves the performance issues is to test.  Refining our lazy loading implementation as we go, to find the right balance between file size and file quantity.  This all takes time and effort, which is why we couldn’t delay the 1.18 release to include this solution.

Our testing needs to not only account for different download speeds but geographic location, hardware specifications etc. as well.  We are leveraging tools like LambdaTest to allow us to test our updates from different geographical locations and on different configurations of hardware.

Switching to support a browser-based design experience has been a real shift to our development approach.  We now must consider things like file size, bandwidth, browser restrictions when building and testing.  However, this focus has resulted in improving the experience and performance of both the desktop and DIB design application.  We will be taking the lessons we’ve learned to see what we can apply to the runtime experience.

2024 in a nutshell

What an incredible year 2024 has been, so there’s no better time to do our first year in review!

Together, we’ve made remarkable progress in both our product and community. These achievements wouldn’t have been possible without the unwavering support of our amazing customers and community.

Thank you for choosing to build with Squirrel365. Your feedback and collaboration with our product and engineering teams have been invaluable, driving continuous improvement and innovation.

We’re excited to share our successes with you—from groundbreaking new integrations to the growth of our community and learning resources. Here’s to another year of innovation and collaboration!

Word is getting out

The number of people building apps with Squirrel grew by over 30% in 2024

An incredible 8,714 new apps were published

And published content got over 18 million views. That’s an app, created using Squirrel365, being viewed somewhere in the world every 1.75 seconds

Engaging our community

Throughout the year, the Squirrel365 team hosted webinars and posted articles and blogs sharing product updates, use case insights, and how-to’s with our growing community.

The Squirrel365 team use the platform to keep you informed of product updates and news, hints and tips etc. But far more importantly over 63% of the content in 2024 was generated by people like you. The number of members in our online community has grown by 53% in 2024, meaning a much bigger pool of like-minded Squirrel enthusiasts sharing their knowledge and experiences.

If you haven’t joined the community yet, what are you waiting for? Visit the community and log in with your Squirrel365 credentials.

Game changing features

We introduced a tonne of new features in our Winter and Summer releases as we continue to make app building accessible to more than just developers.

Automate PDF and PPTX document generation

In 2024 a primary use case emerged. You told us you were using Squirrel365 to build value calculators. With Squirrel365’s spreadsheet logic engine, it’s the perfect fit for bespoke/custom calculators using what-if style analysis interactive inputs and outputs. We created the PDF/PPTX generator to turn those ROI and pricing calculators into invaluable tools that can automate the creation of PDF documents, PowerPoint slides or Excel Workbooks. Think auto creation of business cases or quotations tailored to the user/prospect/customer.

OAuth for google sheets and Excel Online

A key milestone in democratising app creation is providing the ability to securely source data from online sources that we all have access to. By adding authenticated connectivity to Google Sheets and Excel, we made it possible to browse Google Drive, or One Drive to select a spreadsheet to be used as a live data source for your app.

Not only that but because we’re talking directly to the Google Sheet or Excel document, we can now update and insert rows too! Turn your project into an application with write-back capabilities, no database needed!

Progressive Web Applications (PWA)

PWA’s have been around for a while. Last year saw an increase in their popularity mainly due to app developers growing tired of the high percentages taken when selling apps via app stores. PWA’s allow you to visit a website or web app and install it as application on your device. This felt like a natural fit for Squirrel365 apps so we added this as an option for subscribers to the Builder plan. Customise your app with a name and an icon and you have something that looks and feels like a native app on mobile devices.

Custom code and more

Throughout 2024 we saw an increased demand for complex/highly customised apps. We often solved challenges with custom code to get an app to look a certain way, or do more than is available with standard components. What started as a quick fix for some of our consulting projects made it into the core product to allow the use of use Custom CSS and Javascript.

We also added support for Google Tag Manager so that you can add even more custom code (via tags) to your apps. Need to track conversions, get enhanced analytics, add cookie compliance? Our GTM feature, allows you to do just that!

Where we went…

IBIS

2024 saw the second ever customer influence session conducted at the IBIS Conference. It provided an opportunity to reflect on the features and enhancements that were directly influenced by regular Squirrel users. By the end of 2024 we had managed to deliver 12 out of the 17 top voted enhancements. As always talking to customers proved invaluable and revealed insights that we simply cannot get from data and product analytics alone.

Company catch-ups at The Wave, Bristol

As a 100% remote company it’s nice when we come together.

This year we started meeting at The Wave for company catch ups and workshops. It’s an inland surfing lake that has meeting rooms to hire and a cool café to work from. More recently, we extended this to ‘work together Fridays’. It’s completely optional and gives people a chance to just turn up and work with others. We’ve even had a few customers join us. If you are ever in the Bristol area just let us know as it’s great to work, chat and innovate together over a coffee.

Looking ahead to 2025

A lot of work has happened already, in preparation for our next release. This will include a soft launch of our designer in the browser experience, making it easier for people to get started without having to install anything. For those of us that prefer to use a client tool, the current desktop designer isn’t going anywhere. It’s essentially the same code base so we can ensure feature parity (as much as possible) between the two experiences.

Some of the other cool features to look forward to:

• Image library
• Autosave (cloud saved files and versioning
• Layout containers to support responsive design
• Custom fonts
• And we’ve turned a few of our add-on functions into native functions, making them part of the core product, and improving the experience.

To everyone who has been part of our journey so far — customers, partners, and team members – Congratulations on all the achievements of 2024. We can’t wait to work together to make an even more remarkable 2025.

Nowadays it seems that AI is being added to everything, from content creation platforms to mobile phones. I’ve even seen an AI powered toaster which monitors the “toastie-ness” of the bread to guarantee “the perfect piece of toast every time”.  Seems we’re only one step away from “Talkie Toaster” from Red Dwarf.  Phrases like “Now with AI” are becoming the go to marketing tag to indicate your platform, service, or toaster is cutting edge.

Aside from the practical applications of AI in end products, there is also a growing place for AI in more traditional creative, analytical and development roles.  My background as CTO is obviously technical, so I have more of a leaning towards the application of AI in development. Mel, our Chief Experience Officer, is seeing a similar trend in her creative teams.

Using AI whilst developing

With the proliferation of programming languages, not to mention the constant evolution of frameworks, design patterns, API’s etc, means that it is impossible for one person to know everything.  Software developers will have an area they focus or are more proficient at. However, even then you will hit a bug, or an issue, or a requirement that makes you stop and think.  Historically you would spend a day contemplating the challenge.  Or you could run it past a colleague, in more recent years you can post and search questions on StackOverflow.  In today’s LLM / AI age, ChatGPT has the answers, or does it?

Just like with asking a colleague or searching StackOverflow, ChatGPT can inevitably give you incorrect and sometimes crazy answers.  The oracle you’re asking is only as good as their own knowledge.  In the past, a developer might trawl through this out of date, misleading and conflicting information and derive the nuggets of insight to let you solve your dilemma. The answer very rarely is already written for you, you have to take inspiration and then create your own solution.

With services like ChatGPT you can pose technical questions and receive, on the surface, great responses.  They not only provide the code, but they also provide an explanation as to what the code is doing.  However, we need to view the quality of this code through the same sceptical eye we would if we found a piece of code on StackOverflow.  It’s like asking a colleague who thinks they know the answer but they tell it to you confidently so you blindly believe them.  In the LLM / AI world this behaviour is called a hallucination, where the AI model generates incorrect or misleading information in response to a prompt.

Just recently I was explaining a simple application’s architecture to a colleague.  I’m used to the AWS landscape, but my colleague is more familiar with Azure.  I asked ChatGPT for the Azure terms for things like S3, Cloudfront CDN etc.  It was great and I was able to convey the architecture in Azure terms.  I then asked if ChatGPT could draw a landscape diagram of the AWS vs Azure solutions.  I was expecting a line drawing of a few interconnected nodes, instead I got this:Even though I asked the question and know the subject matter, I am still not 100% sure what this picture is showing.  I don’t know what AWZ is, or “Crotic Barrantion”, never mind “Azuue App Sanvication”.    To me, this is a great example of an AI hallucination.

It goes to show

“AI is only as good as the quality of the source material it was trained on.”

And if ChatGPT was trained on sites like StackOverflow, then there is a lot of noise to fight through to get those nuggets of information or insight.  And sometimes, as with the above image, AI just seems to throw all caution to the wind and get creative.

All is not lost

That said, all is not lost.  As part of my job, I still get my hands dirty with coding.  More recently as part of our ongoing R&D activities.  This means I am trying to solve challenges in creative new ways or prove out new concepts and capabilities.  As a result, I am regularly stumped with development challenges. I find myself leaning more on ChatGPT than on StackOverflow for my investigations.  I am also finding that I am spending more time in curating the questions that I am going to pose to ChatGPT.  Gone are the short keyword specific search terms, trying to hit some magic SEO through Google.  Now I am putting context into my question, explaining what I’m trying to accomplish, how it should fit into an existing workflow, what I’ve already tried etc.

Earlier this year I was talking to a customer at our company conference. And we commented that the complexity and thought that goes into phrasing questions to LLMs like ChatGPT is becoming a science in itself.  So maybe my statement before that AI is only as good as the quality of the material it was trained on, is only half the story.  The other half is that:

“The answers you get are only as good as the questions you ask”

Indeed, we’re now seeing jobs and training courses advertised for AI Prompt Engineers, whose job it is to tailor the best, most efficient and accurate prompt for an LLM.  There are even LLMs that you can use to help you build questions to ask other LLMs.

It’s fascinating to see how AI is evolving, and where it is having an impact.  I just hope companies, like the one producing the AI toaster, consider the long-term implications of AI in products. Otherwise, we could end up with neurotic products like “Talkie Toaster”, or automatic doors and elevators with “Genuine People Personalities” ala the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.