Licensed for Distribution

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application

Platforms
Published 8 August 2019 - ID G00361584 - 57 min read

By Analysts Paul Vincent, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark Driver, Jason Wong, Yefim Natis

Enterprise low-code application platforms offer compelling productivity gains for professional
and citizen development, as well as speed-of-delivery benefits. We evaluate 18 vendors to
help you identify those with a balance of technology and business capabilities suited to your
enterprise’s needs.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2024, three-quarters of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools
for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives.

By 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application
development activity.

Market Definition/Description
Application platforms provide runtime environments for application logic. They manage the life
cycle of an application or application component, and ensure the availability, reliability, scalability,
security and monitoring of application logic.

A low-code application platform (LCAP) is an application platform that supports rapid application
development, one-step deployment, execution and management using declarative, high-level
programming abstractions, such as model-driven and metadata-based programming languages.
They support the development of user interfaces, business logic and data services, and improve
productivity at the expense of portability across vendors, as compared with conventional
application platforms.

An enterprise LCAP supports enterprise-class applications. These require high performance,

scalability, high availability, disaster recovery, security, SLAs, resource use tracking, technical
support from the provider, and API access to and from local and cloud services.

Gartner views “no-code” application platforms as part of the LCAP market. “No-code” is a
marketing and positioning statement, implying that the platform requires text entry only for
formulas or simple expressions, all other aspects of application development being enabled by
visual modeling or configuration. The LCAP market includes such no-code platforms.
Citizen development is often associated with no-code application development. We consider it a
niche within the LCAP market.

Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms

Source: Gartner (August 2019)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

AgilePoint
AgilePoint is a Niche Player. It has a background in business process management (BPM)
technology, but undertook an early transition into low-code development tools for automating
business operations. It provides multitenancy using either on-premises deployment or the cloud.
Gartner reviewed AgilePoint NX, version 7.
Strengths
■ Product: AgilePoint’s BPM background is reflected in its model-driven, Business Process Model
and Notation (BPMN)-compliant AgilePoint NX environment for building extensible process-
centric or data-centric applications, aimed at nontechnical developers. More complex
extensions can be built in C# or Visual Basic using AgilePoint’s software development kit.

■ Ecosystem: To assist developers, AgilePoint’s ecosystem store includes popular process

patterns, 70 predefined integrations, 50 domain-specific data entity types and 700 process
activities. AgilePoint also participates in other vendors’ ecosystems; it appears, for example, on
the Salesforce AppExchange and Microsoft AppSource stores.

■ Product vision: AgilePoint’s vision extends to low-code edge computing and the Internet of
Things (IoT), as well as artificial intelligence (AI)-driven development and chatbots, to assist
with digital business initiatives in larger enterprises.

■ Sales execution: AgilePoint focuses on providing value for money and offers concurrent-user
and transaction pricing options. Scores from reference customers for AgilePoint’s pricing and
value for money were higher than those received by most other vendors. It expects its
freemium Community Edition to be an enabler of new business.

Cautions

■ Overall viability: Although AgilePoint is growing well and has an appropriate partnering
strategy, including white-label resellers, it remains one of the smaller vendors, with a relatively
low average revenue per customer. It has been self-funded to date, but might find it challenging
to keep investing at the level needed to compete with other LCAP vendors.

■ Market record: Responses from AgilePoint’s reference customers, supplemented by Gartner

Peer Insights reviews, indicate that its customers have tended to focus on reduced skills
requirements for operations automation, rather than on enterprise rapid application delivery,
although some reported achieving the latter.

■ Product strategy: AgilePoint’s participation in Microsoft and Salesforce ecosystems means it

is potentially competing against these ecosystems’ hosts. Although AgilePoint competes
successfully through its process-centric and value characteristics, these advantages could
easily be negated, forcing the vendor into a more niche position.

■ Customer satisfaction: AgilePoint’s reference customers expressed desire for enhancements

to how mobile apps are deployed, together with improved developer assistance in the form of
better examples and documentation. AgilePoint states it has made improvements recently with
regard to the former desire.

Appian
Appian is a Leader. It originated in the BPM market and focuses on complex business processes
and other applications requiring sophisticated automation, rules and analytics capabilities. Its
technological differentiators include prebuilt no-code integration with various AI services and
support for DevOps with automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) for
enterprise IT shops. Gartner reviewed Appian version 19.1.

Strengths
■ Product: Appian’s LCAP strengths derive from its background in the model-driven intelligent
business process management suite (iBPMS) market. Gartner sees Appian’s support for
business process automation and modernization of applications as the main reasons for
customers to choose it. Appian’s ability to handle complex business rules, decisioning and
workflow is also a key differentiator.

■ Innovation: Appian continues to offer innovative low-code technology, with support for
chatbots and progressive web apps (PWAs) among its multiexperience capabilities.

■ Market responsiveness: Appian demonstrates enterprise-worthiness through the scale of its

deployments, which typically span whole organizations and multiple projects. Appian also
invests heavily in security certifications and audits, and has one of the most comprehensive
sets of certifications for high-security government requirements.

■ Overall viability: In a crowded market with many small, privately owned vendors, Appian stands
out as a stable, publicly traded company with a focus on low-code technology. Although not as
big as the largest enterprise software vendors, Appian has many enterprise customers and
government agencies running its platform, which should ensure its long-term viability in this
market.

Cautions
■ Sales execution: One of the main challenges facing Appian and its customers is the company’s
sales execution. Appian’s reference customers reported below-average satisfaction with its
contract evaluation and negotiation, as well as its contract flexibility. Appian has recently
changed its licensing model to help address this issue, but the effect of the change is not yet
known. Overall, reference customers expressed a lower-than-average level of satisfaction with
its sales process.

■ Sales strategy: Appian focuses on larger deals and its pricing strategy means its rate of
customer expansion is less than that of other Leaders. Appian’s reference customers reported
below-average satisfaction with its pricing.

■ Product strategy: Compared with some vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Appian’s low-code
development product is more suitable for professional developers in terms of the ease of use
of its proprietary expression and scripting language. Furthermore, reference customers’ overall
score for Appian’s citizen developer support was lower than the average for vendors in this
Magic Quadrant.

■ Customer experience: Appian’s reference customers all recommended it to others, but not
unreservedly. They gave lower-than-average scores for time to deployment, which could be the
 result of Appian customers choosing it for larger-than-average applications, and for the quality
of Appian’s peer community.

Betty Blocks
Betty Blocks is a Visionary. Its product, also called Betty Blocks, focuses on the no-code assembly
of applications from components — hence the “Blocks” part of the company’s name. It does this
while providing application oversight and governance and support for enterprise-scale usage.
Technical differentiators include its cloud-native architecture and React-based UI. The Betty
Blocks version reviewed was current as of the start of 2019.

Strengths
■ Market understanding: Betty Blocks differentiates itself as a provider of a citizen development
platform for enterprise applications. This reflects a strong vision for a key aspect of the low-
code market. Simple drag-and-drop development and an emphasis on a component reuse
model with associated component repository encourage use of a compositional model for
application development.

■ Innovation: Betty Blocks’ technical innovation remains advanced, as it uses the Elixir language
to underpin a cloud-native Kubernetes and container-based deployment model with serverless
extensions. This enables customers to extend applications with customizable microapp blocks
for scalable and flexible app delivery.

■ Product: Betty Blocks has a record of delivering standard business applications rapidly. Some
Gartner clients report that Betty Blocks delivered straightforward business process automation
in a matter of days.

■ Sales execution: Betty Blocks’ reference customers scored it higher than the average for
pricing and contract flexibility. This is an important consideration, as one of the most common
concerns about LCAPs is their pricing.

Cautions
■ Overall viability: Although it has grown, Betty Blocks is still one of the smallest vendors in this
Magic Quadrant. Prospective customers should also note the relative smallness of its
community and be aware of the potential for it to be acquired. Additionally, the company’s sales
coverage is limited primarily to Europe and the U.S.

■ Customer experience: The nascent market for true citizen development tools is evolving.
Reference customers gave Betty Blocks lower-than-average scores for its no-code development
capabilities. Improvements to the end-user experience and further enhancements to the
platform’s usability for citizen developers remain goals on Betty Blocks’ roadmap.

■ Operations: The on-premises version of Betty Blocks’ platform is not the company’s standard
offering. It comes with cloud-native overheads, such as a container infrastructure requirement,
that may be incompatible with departmental or small-customer scenarios.
■ Business model: Extending beyond the platform’s no-code capabilities will often require
professional development, such as for complex extensions to blocks. This may prompt some
users to revert to co-development with their professional services providers or Betty Blocks’
partners.

bpm’online
Bpm’online is a Niche Player. It is primarily a BPM and CRM SaaS vendor, its LCAP being provided
as part of its BPM capability in the bpm’online platform. Its ethos that “everyone is a developer”
prompts its focus on extensions to its prebuilt applications and ecosystem-supplied components.
Gartner reviewed bpm’online version 7.13.3.

Strengths

■ Product: Bpm’online’s LCAP has a strong focus on BPM functionality. This enables the
orchestration of processes across teams and applications, especially in customer-oriented
domains related to its CRM offerings.

■ Market understanding: Bpm’online aims to help business developers without deep technical
skills rapidly build and modify model-driven applications. Its ideal user is a business analyst
with a general understanding of web applications and knowledge of BPMN 2.0.

■ Market responsiveness: In addition to supporting the application extension model of a SaaS-

plus-PaaS (platform as a service) player, bpm’online allows developers to create their own
custom machine learning (ML) models without coding or scripting. These models can predict
values in different types of field, as well as calculate predictive scores (such as for the
probability of specific events). The business logic for ML is defined using bpm’online’s citizen
development environment.

■ Marketing strategy: Bpm’online marketplace is an ecosystem of ready-to-use apps, industry

solutions, templates and development accelerators designed to extend the functionality of
bpm’online’s LCAP. Its community of developers and partners delivers custom applications,
extensions, connectors and templates for the bpm’online platform and publishes them on
bpm’online marketplace.

Cautions

■ Overall viability: Bpm’online is a small vendor, compared with most of those in this Magic
Quadrant, and its focus is CRM SaaS. Gartner rarely sees bpm’online on customers’ shortlists
or vendors’ competitive lists outside Europe. As a result, standing out and scaling its sales and
support strategies to compete head-to-head with larger LCAP providers focused on enterprise-
class deployments is likely to prove challenging in the next couple of years.

■ Product strategy: Although bpm’online supports AI-enabled application deployments, in

comparison with some key competitors it has been slow to deliver AI-augmented development
assistance, such as process autocomplete suggestions.
■ Innovation: Bpm’online lags behind in terms of mobile and integration support, compared with
the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. Most of its 60 integration connectors are for relatively
simple small and midsize business (SMB)-type services, which means that some enterprise
projects require additional work.

■ Customer experience: The productivity achievable with bpm’online’s LCAP may not be
comparable to that of other vendors’ LCAPs for general application development, unless the
customer customizes bpm’online’s predefined solutions. Increased developer productivity
should be a key benefit of an LCAP, but bpm’online’s reference customers gave it productivity
scores lower than those received by other vendors.

K2
K2 is a Niche Player. It is better known as a long-term BPM provider for process-centric
automation projects of moderate complexity and scale. It provides full application life cycle
support for process-driven applications involving multiple developer personas and draws on an
integration framework. It offers separate cloud and on-premises versions, with K2 Cloud Update 7
and K2 Five version 5.2, respectively, being reviewed for this Magic Quadrant.

Strengths
■ Product: K2 is a well-recognized, model-driven business process automation vendor with a
background in BPM. Its product supports process orchestration, business rules and integration,
and has software development life cycle features, such as its own test automation framework.

■ Market understanding: Some citizen developer use cases suit K2, due to its App Wizards.
These offer four simple steps to application definition, resulting in either deployed applications
or templates that can be further customized during the conventional development process.

■ Sales execution: K2 received above-average scores from reference customers for its pricing
and costs. They also scored K2 above the average for contract and pricing negotiation.

■ Market responsiveness: K2 has targeted its audience well for application development.
Reference customers expressed above-average levels of satisfaction with K2’s functionality
and integration features, as well as its developer experience.

Cautions

■ Marketing strategy: K2 needs to invest more in its LCAP marketing and sales execution. At
present, it risks losing out to LCAP competitors, due to a low level of awareness of its offering.

■ Sales strategy: K2 declined to give Gartner insights into its LCAP sales figures, but evidence
from Gartner’s client inquiry service indicates that it still sells primarily to customers interested
in process-centric applications, rather than (for example) data-centric or user-experience-
centric applications.
■ Product strategy: K2’s SmartForms UI remains primarily form-based, although it is rendered in
HTML5. Additionally, reference customers’ overall score for K2’s ability to deliver advanced
architectures in applications was below those received by other vendors. Its UI limitation will
impact certain application use cases.

■ Customer experience: Reference customers’ overall score for K2’s cloud functionality was
below those received by other vendors. Its reference customers also expressed a desire for
more improvements to the end-user experience in terms of quality, reliability, availability and
ease of deployment. A higher-than-average number of K2’s reference customers would give it
only a qualified recommendation to prospective customers.

Kintone
Kintone is a Niche Player. This vendor, whose LCAP bears the same name, focuses on providing a
low-code ecosystem for workgroups and lines of business, primarily in Japan and Asia. It
differentiates itself in terms of how simple it is to use its LCAP to develop applications involving
data, workflow and collaboration. Gartner reviewed Kintone’s January 2019 release.

Strengths

■ Overall viability: Kintone is growing rapidly as part of Cybozu, a Japanese IT business that
provides SaaS applications. In addition to Japan, its LCAP is available in other parts of Asia and
North America.

■ Business model: Kintone’s thousands of partners and developers, as well as its very large
installed base, amount to a primarily Japanese ecosystem success. Partners include some
(such as SoftBank) that operate their own Kintone app stores, and several integration partners
(such as Microsoft and Zapier).

■ Market responsiveness: Citizen development for SMBs is a core capability of Kintone’s LCAP.
This is shown, for example, by its support for self-service application building through the
import of Microsoft Excel data. This citizen development style suits Kintone’s mainstream SMB
and line-of-business audiences.

■ Sales experience: Kintone’s reference customers scored it above the average for sales
evaluation and contact negotiation. They also gave it a higher-than-average score for overall
cost.

Cautions

■ Product strategy: Kintone’s cloud strategy is evolving only slowly to encompass global
infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) — a process that
has been ongoing for two years. As of mid-2019, Kintone has limited cloud presence outside
Japan and no on-premises capability.

■ Product: Kintone’s architecture is not cloud-native, being a monolithic application running on

virtual machines. This limits its horizontal scalability and therefore its overall scalability.
 However, this has not hindered its success in Japan.

■ Innovation: Kintone’s application development features are sparse when it comes to things like
sophisticated business logic, AI and chatbots. The end-user experience is relatively limited,
compared with other LCAPs. There is limited in-platform developer support for JavaScript
extensions.

■ Customer experience: Kintone’s reference customers consider its integration capabilities weak.
They scored Kintone below the average for integration capabilities, and they want it to improve
in this respect.

Kony
Kony is a Challenger. The Kony Quantum platform has evolved from a mobile app development
platform offering (now a multiexperience development platform), which means it can address rich
web and mobile app use cases and is configurable through a low-code environment. It supports
PWAs and API management capabilities. Gartner reviewed release V8SP3 of Kony’s product.

Strengths

■ Product: Kony Quantum is most suitable for professional developers who want a low-code
approach to visually construct web, mobile and even conversational apps. The platform is
highly extensible using JavaScript and can integrate with a wide range of popular enterprise
systems via Kony’s connectors.

■ Market responsiveness: Kony demonstrates a high degree of responsiveness to market trends

and customer needs. It continues to innovate with the Kony IQ chatbot in order to provide AI-
augmented development. It is one of the few LCAP vendors to support both PWAs and
chatbots.

■ Market understanding: The Kony Fabric back-end provides comprehensive services for
enterprise application needs, including identity management, workflow, Object Services for
back-end data model transformation, offline synchronization and app analytics. It also offers
API management functionality and an API developer portal for extending the platform.

■ Product strategy: Kony works well for advanced developer needs relating to the user
experience and integration. Reference customers scored Kony above the average for developer
productivity. While they tended to select it for its multiexperience capabilities, they also scored
it higher than the average for its end-user experience and integration features.

Cautions

■ Marketing strategy: Kony has only recently started to shift its marketing and positioning toward
a low-code value proposition. However, we have not seen significant awareness of Kony as an
LCAP provider among users of Gartner’s client inquiry service.
■ Visual model development: Kony does not yet offer any visual process modeling for laying out
complex back-end processes to support low-code development. Organizations requiring
process-oriented development should look elsewhere.

■ Sales execution: Although all of Kony’s reference customers would recommend it to others,
some would do so only with qualifications. Some of Kony’s scores for value for money and the
overall purchase experience were lower than those received by other vendors.

■ Customer experience: Reference customers’ scores for Kony were lower than those given to
other vendors for overall product capabilities. Reference customers’ main concerns were about
Kony’s no-code capabilities for citizen developers and the amount of training required for
developers. They also reported longer times to deploy their first app. Although Kony is strong
when it comes to meeting requirements for sophisticated app user experiences, customers
looking for a relatively simple no-code LCAP, particularly for citizen developers, should consider
other vendors.

Mendix
Mendix is a Leader. Mendix, which was acquired by Siemens in 2018, focuses on improving
business-IT collaboration and application life cycle management. Its LCAP, of the same name, is
deployed on cloud-native technology. It is also being extended to integrate with Siemens’
MindSphere IoT and product life cycle management products. Gartner reviewed the Mendix 7.20
release.

Strengths

■ Overall viability: Ownership by Siemens gives Mendix an inflow of resources, which is essential
for competing successfully in a market that is increasingly targeted by megavendors. In
addition to accelerating research and development, ownership by Siemens implies a new level
of viability for Mendix business; it opens new distribution channels and positions Mendix for
future differentiation in the low-code IoT market.

■ Product strategy: Mendix offers significant enterprise characteristics, which are especially
attractive to large businesses. Its platform is well equipped for multicloud and hybrid
computing, due to its support for on-premises, virtual private multicloud and multitenant public
cloud deployment options. The platform’s autoscaling, high availability and very low latency for
failover across multiple availability zones increase the quality of its service. Mendix’s
partnerships with IBM, SAP and now Siemens will reassure large customers.

■ Innovation: Mendix is one of the first vendors in this market to offer a multipersona developer
experience in one integrated platform. The ability to support both business developers in
Mendix Studio and professional IT developers in Mendix Studio Pro supports advanced forms
of business-IT collaboration. Mendix’s AI-assisted development further promotes productivity
and consistency of outcomes.
■ Product: Mendix’s offering is suitable for sophisticated applications. Reference customers
gave Mendix high scores for enterprise-worthiness, integration and advanced architecture
support, as well as for productivity and ease of use by professional developers.

Cautions
■ Industry strategy: Mendix’s acquisition by Siemens offers some promising opportunities, but
also represents a risk. Given the scale of Siemens’ business (its revenue totaled €83 billion in
2018), its commitment to Mendix could shift. Siemen’s prioritizing of industrial IoT offerings
and its other vertical commitments may become a stronger influence on Mendix, which could
shift its focus away from the mainstream LCAP business.

■ Market strategy: Mendix needs to increase its capabilities in integration, API management,
event brokering and process orchestration if it is to lead future LCAP requirements for a
composition platform, rather than just a development platform. Some of these increased
capabilities are roadmap items for 2019.

■ Market responsiveness: Growth in the LCAP market is much easier to achieve when a vendor
offers its platform as an extension tool for prebuilt applications and services. Mendix may have
to expand its business model to begin offering business applications that utilize its platform, as
well as increase its efforts to attract partners to create applications on it.

■ Customer experience: Mendix’s reference customers scored it below the average for
satisfaction with its platform’s support for citizen developers. They also gave it some poor
reviews for pricing and contract flexibility.

Microsoft
Microsoft is a Leader. Its LCAP, consisting of PowerApps, Flow and Common Data Service, is
applicable to many use cases but strongest for those that extend Microsoft Office 365 and
Dynamics 365. This LCAP is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, along with PowerBI analytics,
and is differentiated by the additional depth provided by additional and advanced Azure services.
The Power Platform includes more than 240 third-party web service connectors and data source
connectors. Gartner reviewed PowerApps version 3.19014, Flow version 20190121, and Common
Data Service version 9.1 19013.

Strengths
■ Market understanding: In 2018, Microsoft brought its Dynamics 365 platform together with
PowerApps, Flow and the Common Data Service to create a unified LCAP. In the process,
Microsoft enhanced the Common Data Service with additional enterprise-grade capabilities,
such as server-side logic, business processes, advanced security and professional developer
support.

■ Product (business-to-employee [B2E]): Of the vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant,

Microsoft offers one of the simpler design-time tools in PowerApps, one that is used for
 designing canvas apps and that employs a drag-and-drop approach and Microsoft Excel-like
expression language. This makes it well suited to citizen developers and business unit
developers. Reference customers for Microsoft reported some of the fastest production
deployment times for apps — nearly all said such deployment took less than two months, and
many said less than one month.

■ Product strategy: Microsoft has shown increased commitment to the LCAP market by
introducing a low-code AI Builder, as well as deeper integration with Microsoft Azure services.
Given Microsoft’s incumbent position in many enterprises with Office 365, Gartner expects
Microsoft to appear on many enterprises’ LCAP vendor shortlists, and that it will have good
long-term platform viability. Microsoft’s was the platform most considered by all the featured
vendors’ reference customers, with nearly one-third of them assessing it.

■ Customer experience: Reference customers for Microsoft reported above-average satisfaction

with the overall experience, service and support, and overall product capabilities. Microsoft also
had the highest proportion of reference customers exploiting an LCAP for prototyping.

Cautions
■ Market responsiveness: Whereas PowerApps’ canvas apps provide citizen development
capabilities, PowerApps’ model-driven app capability targets more complex applications and is
often used by independent software vendors (ISVs) to extend the Dynamics platform. Gartner
clients indicate that their needs often lie in between, being, for example, for enterprise
application developers working on systems of differentiation and vision.

■ Sales execution: PowerApps and Flow come in restricted-license versions when supplied with
certain Office 365 and Dynamics 365 plans, so customers must purchase more licenses or
upgrade their plans if they need to build more apps or satisfy more complex use cases.
Reference customers for Microsoft reported below-average satisfaction with its pricing and
contract flexibility, so prospective customers should check how licensing prices and other
arrangements may change as platform usage grows.

■ Product (B2C): Microsoft’s platform has not targeted the building and deploying of customer-
facing apps, although PowerApps Portals has been announced to address this. PowerApps’
licensing does not yet support unnamed external users or less predictable usage patterns.
Capabilities expected by customers aiming to offer a consumer-grade experience, such as
higher-end UI customization, have only recently been released.

■ Industry strategy: Microsoft is in the early stages of providing specific industry solutions or
industry accelerators for its LCAP — it currently offers four Industry Solution Accelerators and
has others in preview, most aimed at ISVs. Customers will likely need to look in addition to
Microsoft’s community of partners, accessible via its AppSource marketplace.

Oracle
Oracle is a Challenger. It offers two distinct LCAP solutions. One is its long-standing Application
Express (APEX), which is provided free to users of Oracle Database on-premises or of all Oracle
Database Cloud services. The other is the service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based Visual
Builder Cloud Service (VBCS). Oracle APEX is strongly tied to the Oracle Database platform and
has tens of thousands of organizations using it. VBCS supports new applications, as well as
customizations of Oracle SaaS; it offers HTML5 and an extensible low-code experience.

Strengths
■ Market responsiveness: Oracle is the only vendor in this Magic Quadrant to offer two distinct
LCAP solutions. As a result, it can address use cases ranging from simple spreadsheet
replacement and form processing (create, read, update, delete [CRUD]) applications in VBCS, to
advanced professional developer environments in APEX (as preferred by many database
teams).

■ Product strategy: Oracle continues to extend its LCAP offerings with advanced application
features. APEX now offers dynamic UI selection, including UI features such as a simplified
reporting interface, a dashboard and a timeline report. VBCS includes access to all generated
JavaScript and HTML5/Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) source code for services, while both
VBCS and APEX exploit the Oracle JET UI technology stack.

■ Innovation: Oracle offers advanced AI/ML-assisted conversational chatbot capabilities,

including specialized mobile bots and interaction with popular consumer voice services such
as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri. In addition, VBCS supports access to the separately priced
Oracle event hub, messaging, process and IoT cloud services, which enables the creation of
advanced event-driven applications.

■ Customer experience: VBCS enables low-code access to Oracle’s broad collection of cloud
services. It does so by drawing on a network of IaaS data centers, a suite of PaaS capabilities
and a portfolio of SaaS offerings. In addition, it supports hybrid cloud and on-premises
deployments with Cloud at Customer. VBCS extends customers’ Oracle SaaS investments via
APIs, while Oracle’s innovative consumption-based portfolio pricing should encourage wider
usage. Reference customers for Oracle gave it higher-than-average scores for product
capabilities, developer productivity and contract negotiations.

Cautions

■ Market understanding: Having two LCAP offerings is a strength in one regard, but also poses a
challenge, as there is no portability of applications between them. Oracle customers report
some confusion about determining the most suitable low-code path to take for application
modernization.

■ Sales strategy: Most of the advanced capabilities in Oracle’s cloud service portfolio, such as
advanced process and decision modeling, come at additional cost and are accessed via REST
APIs. For some customers, the initially low-cost VBCS or no-cost APEX can lead to
 multiproduct complexity and expense, as further services are added for desired functionalities.
Costs may, however, be mitigated by Oracle’s Universal Credit Pricing approach.

■ Sales execution: Adoption of VBCS by Oracle’s SaaS ISV partners is still low and is not creating
any significant Oracle ecosystem at this point in time. Other LCAP vendors maintain a more
SaaS-independent position and forge stronger third-party partnerships.

■ Marketing execution: VBCS appears far less often than most other vendors on the competitive
lists drawn up by users of Gartner’s client inquiry service. The benefits of its LCAPs are mostly
limited to Oracle’s own ecosystem. As a result, Oracle’s LCAPs mostly attract experienced
Oracle customers.

OutSystems
OutSystems is a Leader. It originated as vendor of a rapid application development environment
based on .NET, but now offers an enterprise LCAP of the same name that supports cloud, on-
premises and hybrid solutions. It focuses on enterprise application development for agile and
continuous customer delivery by offering a combination of omnichannel support and scalability.
Gartner reviewed OutSystems 11.

Strengths
■ Overall viability: OutSystems continues to grow strongly by providing an alternative to many
older third-generation language (3GL) platforms, while enabling low-code productivity
improvements with access to capabilities such as an advanced web and mobile user
experience, B2C support and even batch processing. Reference customers stated that they
selected OutSystems for its strong vision and innovation.

■ Product strategy: OutSystems supports both AWS and Azure deployments, but is particularly
interesting to Microsoft shops due to its underlying use of .NET. Both AWS and Azure versions
support access to the underlying cloud services for the IoT, AI and analytics.

■ Innovation: OutSystems’ multipersona developer experience encourages professional and line-

of-business developers to participate in governed and AI-assisted application development
using web-based and fat-client integrated development environments; deployment can be
container-based. Over 2,500 components are available on OutSystems’ Forge app store, and
reference customers’ usage of shared components in this ecosystem was among the highest.

■ Customer experience: Reference customers scored OutSystems higher than the average for
developer productivity and most critical LCAP capabilities. They also scored it above the
average for modernizing the user experience of existing applications.

Cautions

■ Product: OutSystems’ LCAP is often used for automation of business processes, but is not yet
competitive in all aspects of process-centric application development, especially with regard to
aspects such as complex business logic modeling.
■ Market understanding: OutSystems tends to be favored by professional developers, rather than
citizen developers. Reference customers were less satisfied with its LCAP’s ease of use for
citizen development (though citizen development was not a goal of any of them).

■ Sales strategy: OutSystems’ customers need to ensure its pricing remains acceptable as their
usage increases. The vendor’s pricing model uses a blended metric (“application objects,”
which measures user experience pages, data tables, and API or service operations) to gauge
consumption and therefore price, which clients can find it difficult to predict. In addition,
increasing B2C usage is forcing increasing adoption of an unlimited user-count pricing model.

■ Cloud strategy: OutSystems’ reference customers scored it lower than the survey average for
cloud functionality. Its application PaaS (aPaaS) credentials for larger deployments have also
received some criticism from Gartner clients. Additionally, surveyed reference customers
requested continued improvement in the area of quality, reliability and availability.

Pega
Pega is a Visionary. Pega Infinity has evolved from a BPM suite into an application platform and
provides an LCAP capability through its App Studio, formerly Pega Express. Pega Infinity adds an
LCAP layer to the vendor’s CRM and other SaaS offerings. Pega provides capabilities for
governing developers, as well as advanced integration services, such as robotic process
automation (RPA) and event processing. In addition, it supports multipersona developer
experiences for professional developers and data scientists. Gartner reviewed Pega Infinity 8.1.

Strengths
■ Product: Pega has a reputation for selling a mature, multifunctional offering capable of
producing advanced application designs. It offers visionary support for accessible
development of event processing, decision management, data science and integration. Pega’s
Cosmos user experience design system is evidence of this strength.

■ Market understanding: Pega is one of only a few vendors in the LCAP market to recognize the
need for unified multipersona developer experiences, with Pega App Studio and Dev Studio.
Pega supports continuous business-IT design cooperation, which can help with IT-enabled
business innovation.

■ Industry strategy: Pega’s evolution toward offering stand-alone business applications,

including ones for CRM, financial, healthcare, government and other vertical markets, which
also represent components for LCAP users to build on, reflects a strong vision. Its combined
SaaS-and-PaaS strategy provides the platform with multichannel business opportunities and
helps drive its technological innovation and maturity.

■ Developer experience: Reference customers for Pega scored it above the average for developer
productivity and integration capability. They also praised its support for improved business
process agility.
Cautions
■ Business model: Pega’s business model supports a large consulting business to help
customers fully implement its major capabilities. In addition, Pega’s pricing involves add-on
fees for some enterprise-significant capabilities, including RPA and other integration features,
AI assistance for developers and disconnected-mobile support. That this can result in relatively
high per-user pricing is confirmed by users of Gartner’s client inquiry service and one of the
lowest scores from reference customers for satisfaction in terms of value for money.

■ Marketing execution: Pega does not separate out its LCAP-only revenue, and Gartner’s
assessment is that Pega’s LCAP capabilities account for only a small part of its overall
business. Reference customers confirmed that Pega’s platform is still seen as being primarily
BPM-centric. Pega’s marketing efforts have yet to succeed in redefining the Pega brand for the
LCAP market.

■ Sales execution: Pega’s reference customers gave a below-average score to its contract
negotiation process, but generally had not evaluated many other LCAP vendors.

■ Platform experience: Pega’s reference customer scores for end-user experience, deployment
and integration, enterprise-worthiness and cloud functionality were lower than those received
by other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Pega, however, reports that it has recently made
significant investments to improve its capabilities in these areas.

ProntoForms
ProntoForms is a Niche Player. Its LCAP of the same name is used primarily for field service use
cases and apps for mobile frontline workers. It supports rapid form development with a simple
drag-and-drop approach to building mobile apps, web apps and Microsoft Windows fat clients.

Strengths
■ Product (B2E): ProntoForms provides an intuitive no-code, web-based tool using a drag-and-
drop, visual app-building approach ideally suited to citizen developers. Its platform is most
suitable for replacing paper forms, prototyping new apps, and modernizing or mobilizing
existing desktop-bound applications.

■ Market responsiveness: ProntoForms recognizes the advantages that a comparatively small

vendor can seize by exploiting the ecosystems of larger ones. Its platform is available via the
Salesforce AppExchange and Box app store, for example.

■ Product strategy: ProntoForms focuses on mobile app development and provides some of the
more robust capabilities in this area, such as offline data synchronization, bar code scanning,
push notifications and SMS. However, some reference customers for ProntoForms said they
would like its UI capabilities to be more sophisticated.

■ Operations: Reference customers for ProntoForms gave above-average satisfaction scores for
overall experience and service and support. They specifically praised the company’s culture and
 integrity in addressing their needs and helping them succeed.

Cautions

■ Marketing execution: ProntoForms is not widely known in the LCAP market. It has primarily
marketed and sold to mobile field service organizations. As it competes more in the enterprise
sector and sells to IT departments, it will need to raise greater awareness of its platform,
particularly as other LCAP vendors enhance their mobile app capabilities.

■ Business model: ProntoForms has a large base of customers, but these are mainly business
departments or business units, rather than enterprise IT departments. Its core platform
updates in 2018 enable it to serve the needs of IT departments and enterprises better, but
prospective large-enterprise clients still need to evaluate it carefully.

■ Product (B2C): Gartner does not recommend ProntoForms for B2C or consumer-facing
applications. Very few of ProntoForms’ customers use its LCAP for such applications.

■ Sales execution: Reference customers for ProntoForms reported below-average satisfaction

with its product in terms of value for money, as well as with the company’s pricing and contract
flexibility. A few said that ProntoForms’ licensing management tools and processes were
cumbersome to deal with.

Quick Base
Quick Base is a Niche Player. Its LCAP of the same name is focused on enabling citizen
developers to create applications as a means of empowering knowledge workers. It provides
governance and rapid application development capabilities, based on a custom in-memory
database. Its LCAP is entirely cloud-based.

Strengths
■ Product: Quick Base focuses on ease of use for citizen developers, and has developed a large
customer base. This base extends across industries and includes professional developers
aiming for rapid delivery of data-oriented applications.

■ Market responsiveness: Quick Base primarily delivers data-oriented applications, which some
customers deploy at an enterprise level, encouraged by certifications for the U.S. Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Service Organization Control (SOC) 2,
for example. The Quick Base Exchange provides hundreds of applications to accelerate
application development, while for professional developers there is a site dedicated to API
usage.

■ Market understanding: Quick Base has a large feature set for citizen developers, including
Kanban models for project use cases and multiple data reporting styles. Business logic is
simplified through triggers or actions, but can be scripted for more complex use cases. Quick
Base scored above the average in the reference customer survey for enabling no-code and
citizen development.
■ Customer experience: Reference customers gave Quick Base higher-than-average scores for
value for money and business automation.

Cautions
■ Corporate ownership: Quick Base has undergone two changes of corporate ownership in the
past four years, and is now owned by Vista Equity Partners (which also owns TIBCO Software,
another LCAP vendor). This may result in another change of ownership, judging by typical
private-equity patterns.

■ Marketing execution: Although it has built up a large base of SMB users over many years,
Quick Base’s customer numbers have not grown as much as those of other LCAP vendors. It
faces increasing competition from other providers of low-cost data-oriented cloud services.

■ Product strategy: Quick Base targets internal B2E applications involving data recording and
reporting, and the lack of visual process modeling makes more complex applications harder to
build and maintain. Offline mobile support and visual process modeling are roadmap items.
Quick Base is specializing in meeting the needs of the citizen developer subset of the LCAP
market.

■ Geographic strategy: Quick Base has customers beyond North America, but has yet to expand
its data centers outside the U.S. or to offer technical support outside U.S. hours. This is likely to
deter non-U.S. customers with data location concerns, although, for the EU, Quick Base does
support General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data encryption controls and plans 24/7
customer support in future.

Salesforce
Salesforce is a Leader. It is better known for its CRM application services, but in the LCAP market
its Lightning Platform focuses on customer-related applications and extensions to SaaS,
supported by over 5,000 third-party applications on the Salesforce AppExchange and the
Trailhead education service. It also interfaces with high-control services through its Heroku
offering. Salesforce operates largely on its own cloud data centers, but recently began to expand
onto AWS infrastructure. Gartner reviewed the Winter ‘19 version of its LCAP.

Strengths

■ Overall viability: Salesforce can claim persistent LCAP revenue growth, widespread name
recognition, aggressive innovation and acquisition activity, intimate compatibility of its LCAP
with its market-leading CRM SaaS, and ecosystem partnerships with thousands of third parties
whose offerings are hosted in AppExchange. It generates more LCAP revenue than any other
provider.

■ Innovation: Salesforce continues to innovate in the following areas: AI libraries for discovery,
prediction and voice services (Einstein); integration with DevOps (Salesforce DX); and event-
driven design (including IoT Explorer and platform events). The recent announcement of a
 future Salesforce Blockchain suggests that Salesforce will be the first major vendor with a low-
code platform for blockchain-enabled application design.

■ Marketing execution: Salesforce continuously invests in deepening its relationships with

customers and partners. It supports ISVs through monetized AppExchange programs for
partners, startups and incubators. Salesforce’s strategic investment in training and education
(Trailhead) facilitates a growing community of developers and encourages further adoption.

■ Market responsiveness: Salesforce’s reference customers use the platform for enterprise-class
applications and gave high scores for the platform’s high availability and the quality of its peer
community. Additionally, they expressed higher-than-average satisfaction with Salesforce’s
vision and innovation.

Cautions
■ Product strategy: The architecture of Salesforce’s [Link] platform core has sustained
continuous growth for the past 20 years, and is evolving from a monolithic architecture. This
makes integration with the newer and acquired parts of Salesforce’s portfolio more difficult and
complicates some types of innovation. Developers have to use both Lightning no-code and
Salesforce Apex language features to deliver complex functionality.

■ Market understanding: Salesforce Lightning remains resolutely cloud-only, which threatens to

undermine the completeness of Salesforce’s enterprise vision in some strategic areas, such as
hybrid deployments and IoT edge computing.

■ Business model: Salesforce’s recent business model has been to grow by making major
acquisitions, but this can create challenges. Despite acquiring MuleSoft, an integration leader,
in 2018, the integration features of the Lightning Platform remain limited, and Salesforce’s
reference customers expressed dissatisfaction with its support for integration.

■ Sales execution: Reference customers for Salesforce expressed below-average satisfaction

with its costs. Also, their scores for Salesforce’s customer service and support were not as
high as those received by other vendors in this market.

ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a Challenger. It is better known as an IT service management (ITSM) SaaS provider,
and its SaaS is built on its low-code LCAP called the Now Platform. It is used for low-code
workflow automation relating to ITSM and other domains, thanks to its support for portal, web
and mobile user experiences. Gartner reviewed the ServiceNow Madrid release.

Strengths

■ Overall viability: ServiceNow’s core business of providing SaaS for IT users provides a ready IT
audience for centralized application development using the Now Platform. Developers can
exploit all its SaaS-developed capabilities, such as support for portals and chatbots, for new
applications across the business. As a result, the Now Platform’s customer growth is strong.
■ Innovation: ServiceNow’s development environment includes natural language-assisted
development and new mobile capabilities for 2019. Its integration features were already
considered a strength.

■ Product strategy: ServiceNow successfully offers its LCAP to its core IT audience for various
application development tasks. It scored higher than the average for enterprise-worthiness in
the reference customer survey.

■ Market responsiveness: ServiceNow has responded to the demand from its customer base,
and reference customers report they are deploying the Now Platform for large-scale
deployments. ServiceNow was selected by its reference customers principally for its strategic
relationships with clients and its performance.

Cautions
■ Sales strategy: Business unit development usually drives growth in vendors’ LCAP revenue.
ServiceNow, however, remains popular mostly with central IT teams. Although it claims lines of
business or departmental application development teams as users, it had fewer reference
customers reporting line-of-business or departmental usage than did other vendors in this
Magic Quadrant.

■ Product: ServiceNow’s popularity with IT users has led to less specific support for citizen
development personas. This is an area that is partly addressed by features planned in the 2019
New York release; however, reference customers for ServiceNow claimed that development
was 3GL-based, and a higher-than-average number described their developers as “specialist
developers.” They also gave lower-than-average scores for ServiceNow’s application
development capabilities and for their usage of its app store ecosystem, although ServiceNow
reports steady growth in the latter.

■ Market approach: ServiceNow’s interpretation of how best to deliver low-code workflow

applications differs from that underlying traditional workflow tools, such as BPM systems.
Prospective customers should review both approaches to identify which suits their use case.

■ Sales execution: Reference customers for ServiceNow and users of Gartner’s client inquiry
service indicate that ServiceNow’s pricing and contract negotiations are more complex than the
average. However, ServiceNow’s pricing models have recently changed, which should improve
the sales experience in 2019.

TrackVia
TrackVia is a Niche Player. Its LCAP of the same name focuses on non-IT application developers
that require low entry costs for digitizing business processes and procedures. Its proposition
relates to no-code business process automation and easy definition of mobile and web
applications.

Strengths
■ Product: TrackVia provides a low-cost, extensible, process-oriented platform with features like
process modeling. It targets relatively small teams and SMBs that need to build departmental
applications.

■ Innovation: Applications developed with TrackVia’s LCAP can include some sophisticated
features, such as Gantt charts. Its LCAP also provides extensibility using the Apache Groovy
language. The platform offers some of the ease of use of a citizen development platform, but
can also tackle complex process applications.

■ Industry strategy: TrackVia supports multiple industry domains (it is HIPAA-compliant for
healthcare applications, for example). It provides consulting services with experience in many
types of workflows within those domains.

■ Customer experience: Surveyed reference customers for TrackVia indicated above-average

satisfaction with its LCAP’s capabilities and value for money.

Cautions

■ Overall viability: TrackVia is one of the smaller vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Its recent sales
performance lags behind its size and technical capabilities, which may increase the risk of it
being acquired.

■ Product strategy: Some aspects of TrackVia’s functionality are more limited than those of other
LCAP vendors, such as when it comes to the integration of complex services. TrackVia has
recently added an integration platform to address this particular limitation. TrackVia’s standard
form-oriented user experience reduces its appeal to organizations with B2C use cases.

■ Market understanding: Sophisticated enterprise IT users will find that TrackVia lacks any
advanced capabilities for headless applications and types of event processing. This will restrict
its usage for many digital business initiatives.

■ Geographic strategy: Although TrackVia has customers outside North America, its AWS data
centers are all in the U.S., which could be a problem for some organizations with data location
requirements. In addition, there is a lack of support for text string internationalization.

Zoho
Zoho is a Challenger. Primarily a SaaS provider focused on SMBs, it provides an LCAP called Zoho
Creator for building applications via both citizen and professional development. Application
developers can also draw on its CRM and other applications. Zoho has a global presence and
offers built-in integration PaaS (iPaaS) and access to SaaS capabilities such as analytics and
chatbots. Gartner evaluated Zoho Creator 5.

Strengths
■ Overall viability: Zoho offers the enterprise scale of a global SaaS-plus-PaaS provider, is
internally funded and is mostly used by SMBs. It continues to record strong growth, driven by
 initiatives such as its Enterprise Business Solutions team’s provision of professional
management assistance and partner resellers (of which there are many). Two different pricing
models with different metrics are supported for SMBs and large enterprises.

■ Innovation: Zoho Creator has strengths associated with Zoho’s nature as a SaaS provider: a
predefined data schema, PWAs, conversational and headless voice applications, a dedicated
cloud offering and Kanban reports. Zoho expects to offer Zoho Creator on-premises in 2019,
albeit without modern deployment practices, such as the use of containers.

■ Market understanding: Citizen development is supported, with features like code-free

dashboards displaying data from composite data sources. Zoho also offers low-code support
for Zia, its AI-driven natural language application.

■ Customer experience: Zoho’s reference customers gave it above-average scores for its
features and functionality, as well as its ease of deployment.

Cautions
■ Business model: Zoho has only a small professional services arm to assist with application
delivery, and is still in the early stages of attracting large solution provider partners to help
customers with more complex solutions. However, it does have a large ecosystem of smaller,
specialist partners.

■ Product: Reference customers for Zoho expressed a general desire for improvements in the
area of quality, reliability and availability. They gave Zoho a lower-than-average score for the
availability and usage of optional accelerators, such as prebuilt components and processes
from the Zoho ecosystem.

■ Product strategy: Zoho Creator uses Zoho’s Deluge script language for application business
logic, but does not support external DevOps. Additionally, reference customers scored Zoho
lower than the average for no-code development and end-user experience, and expressed a
general desire for better productivity for developers.

■ Operations: Zoho reference customers gave lower-than-average scores for its service and
support. Technical support during working hours is included, but a premium subscription is
required for 24/7 support.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor’s
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
This “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms” replaces 2018’s “Magic
Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service.” Its definition relaxes
the requirement for each vendor to be a cloud PaaS vendor, though all the vendors included in this
Magic Quadrant have PaaS capabilities anyway.

Added
Compared with 2018’s “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a
Service,” which the present Magic Quadrant supersedes, the following vendors have been added:

■ K2

■ ProntoForms

Dropped
Compared with 2018’s “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a
Service,” which the present Magic Quadrant supersedes, the following vendors have been
dropped:

■ Caspio

■ Fujitsu

■ MatsSoft

■ OrangeScape

Honorable Mentions
The following vendors were considered for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, but did not meet all
the inclusion criteria:

■ Alpha Software

■ WEM

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

The inclusion criteria reflect the specific attributes that Gartner considered necessary for
inclusion in this Magic Quadrant. The cutoff date for compliance was 1 February 2019; releases
after this date were not considered.

To satisfy our technical inclusion criteria, each vendor had to:

1. Demonstrate a go-to-market strategy for its LCAP for cross-industry application

development, rather than for specific vertical markets.

2. Provide a minimal set of application platform capabilities, including:

 ■ Tools to develop, version, test, deploy, execute, administer, monitor and manage the
applications and their relevant artifacts.

■ Support for the design of data schema and application logic.

■ Invocation of external third-party services via APIs and/or event topics.

■ Support for some automation of platform patching and versioning.

3. Provide for rapid application development, including:

■ A low-code or no-code approach to development of UIs, business logic and data definitions.

■ Support for development and deployment of applications by line-of-business developers.

■ Single-step deployment.

4. Provide an enterprise-grade LCAP, aimed at enterprise-class projects, that offers:

■ High availability and disaster recovery.

■ Secure access to application services.

■ Technical support to customers.

■ Third-party application access to application logic and/or data via APIs and/or event topics.

Each vendor also had to satisfy all of the following business criteria:

1. Growth: The vendor must have had at least 20% year-over-year growth in revenue from LCAP
licenses and subscriptions, excluding professional services, in 2018.

2. Size: The vendor must have had either:

■ Revenue of at least $10 million from LCAP licenses and subscriptions during the 12-month
period ending on 31 January 2019 and at least 250 paying customer organizations.

Or:

■ At least 10,000 organizations as customers.

3. International support: The vendor must have added at least 10 new paying enterprise
customers for its LCAP in 2018, in at least two of the following regions:

■ North America

■ South America
 ■ Europe

■ Middle East and Africa

■ Asia/Pacific

We excluded any vendor that:

■ Required a specific third-party component or product that was not already “OEMed” into its
platform(s) (that is, was not branded, sold and supported directly by the LCAP vendor).

■ Only sold its platform(s) along with development or professional services, with the offering
being used exclusively by the vendor’s consultants.

■ Required the purchase and/or installation of other, unrelated products or platforms from the
same vendor (such as a CRM application or content management system).

■ Did not offer a commercial enterprise offering — that is, only offered an LCAP as open-source
software.

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Vendors are evaluated on two axes: Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. These relate
to their performance in 2018, capabilities delivered through 1 February 2019, and vision for the
coming years. Vendors are scored according to Gartner’s methodology for Magic Quadrants, and
these scores define each vendor’s position. In each successive year, the evaluation criteria are
changed as new technologies are defined, new markets addressed and new roadmaps created.
Vendors are invited to provide data for the evaluation criteria via questionnaires and briefings, but
our evaluations also reflect the results of Gartner customer surveys and information gathered
from analysts’ interactions with users of Gartner’s client inquiry service.

For the Customer Experience criterion, Gartner confidentially surveyed vendor-identified reference
customers. At least seven references were required for the survey data to be considered for
discussion in the Magic Quadrant. Although insights from reference customers may not be
statistically significant, they are still useful feedback from vendors’ customers.

For the Product or Service criterion, which assesses the capabilities of a vendor’s enterprise
LCAP(s), we examined:

1. Developer experience: How does the platform support development using a no-code or low-
code approach to create applications?

2. End-user experience: How does the platform support rich mobile and web interfaces and
continuous user experience, as well as other user interfaces?
3. User experience data, business logic and process: How does the platform support the user
experience using local data, business logic for tasks like data validation, and processes like
page navigation?

4. Back-end data, business logic and process: How does the platform support shared data and
associated automated business logic and processes?

5. Integration: How does the platform support back-end integration with local and cloud services
via APIs and data sharing?

6. Enterprise software development life cycle support: How does the product support mixed low-
code and professional application (mesh app and service architecture) applications and work
with their different software development life cycles and tools?

7. Advanced architecture support: How does the platform support scalable development and/or
delivery on local private or public cloud services with associated ecosystems?

8. Cloud and deployment functionality: How does the platform support aspects like governance,
access and data security, regulatory compliance and standards?

9. Enterprise-worthiness: How does the platform support aspects like governance, access and
data security, regulatory compliance and standards?

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (August 2019)

Completeness of Vision
Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on their ability to convincingly articulate logical
statements about current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and
competitive forces, and how well they map to Gartner’s view. Ultimately, technology providers are
rated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunities for the
provider and its customers.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy High

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy Medium

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Source: Gartner (August 2019)

Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders have an insightful understanding of the realities of the market, a reliable record, an ability
to influence the market’s direction, an ability to attract and keep a following, and a capacity to
lead.

In the enterprise LCAP market, leadership implies an understanding of the opportunities and
benefits of a low-code ecosystem for enterprise customers. Leaders provide significant enterprise
coverage for some subset of SaaS service extensions, application modernization or development,
or citizen development. They will support digital businesses. Leaders must have demonstrated a
market-leading vision and the ability to fulfill that vision. They must support cloud services and
enable use by low-code developers.

Five vendors have sustained excellence, in terms of both execution and vision, long enough to
demonstrate effective leadership: two SaaS-plus-PaaS vendors and three independent vendors.
As we expect continued growth from Challengers and Visionaries, and the attribution of more
importance to low-code platforms, we expect other vendors to progress toward Leader status
over the next two to three years.

A Leader is not always the best choice for a specific enterprise application. A focused, smaller
vendor may provide excellent support, value and commitment to individual customers —
especially with regard to specific geographical or industry needs, or requirements for commitment
to a certain capability or functions. Such a focused vendor would not be a Leader in the overall
LCAP market, but could be a leader within a specific vertical domain, such as ERP or supply chain.

Challengers
Challengers excel in their ability to attract a large user following or provide a strong technical
capability, but this ability is limited to a subset of the market. For their target audience,
Challengers may be the best choice, but their specificity represents a barrier to adoption for those
outside that segment.

In the enterprise LCAP market, a Challenger may have a strong presence or following, but lack
traction, commitment or sophistication. A Challenger must demonstrate a sustained excellence in
execution and must have a significant following. There are four Challengers this year. Three are
SaaS-plus-PaaS vendors that face a challenge to break into wider application domains, and one is
evolving from the mobile and multiexperience segment.

A Challenger can become a Leader if it adopts an aggressive, innovative strategy to serve the full
breadth of the target market, demonstrates exceptional insight in understanding the market’s
direction, and retains the capability to fulfill its vision. Alternatively, it may become a Visionary by
sacrificing growth for new features and capabilities that are ahead of the rest of the market.

Visionaries
Visionaries are innovators that drive the market forward by responding to emerging leading-edge
customer demands and offering their customers’ new opportunities to excel. Typically, they
appeal to leading-edge customers, and may have minimal mainstream presence or name
recognition. Their ability to deliver sustained and dependable execution in the mainstream
enterprise market has not been sufficiently tested. Note that a vendor’s vision is expressed not
only in its technological innovation; insightful understanding of market trends is also required for
visionary marketing, sales, and product and business management strategies.

In the enterprise LCAP market, there are two Visionaries, one a SaaS-plus-PaaS provider that is
undertaking a transition to support the next generation of application developers. Visionaries
generally invest in leading-edge enterprise LCAP services that are not yet readily adopted by
mainstream enterprise customers. They offer capabilities such as multipersona developer
support, advanced AI and chatbot capabilities, process, case and decision management, cloud-
native architecture and associated ecosystems. They also excel in understanding the demands of
enterprises on the path to cloud adoption: ready customizations of SaaS, strong integration
capabilities for composite application services, and hybrid deployment support.
Visionaries may eventually grow to become Leaders. Alternatively, they may limit their target
markets to focus on their core competencies (or core technologies or existing customers) and
become Niche Players. Then again, they may mature their specialties and improve their execution
to become Challengers.

Niche Players
Niche Players typically specialize in a vertical, geographical or functional area, and therefore
address only a segment of the market. Neither their execution nor their vision is market-leading
from an enterprise perspective. Often these vendors are in transition from or to other markets.
They may also have excessively risk-averse leadership; they may be startups just starting to
succeed, or vendors focused on a specific subset of use cases.

In the enterprise LCAP market, most Niche Players are simply focusing on SMBs, or citizen
developer models of application development, or undertaking a transition from the BPM market.
In the first two cases, they are extending the capabilities of citizen development to handle more
use cases. In the last case, they are adjusting their marketing and functionality to match that of
the Leaders, and in particular addressing developer skill set requirements and adding UI
capabilities.

Because of their specializations, Niche Players often represent the best choice for a specific
category of buyer or a particular use case. They typically offer specialized expertise, focused
support practices, flexible terms and conditions, lower costs, and greater dedication to a
particular market segment.

Some Niche Players are poised to improve their Ability to Execute and enterprise features, and
thus become Challengers. Others may discover innovative solutions that attract interest beyond
their niche segments, and may emerge as Visionaries. Some will look to strengthen and broaden
their businesses in order to challenge the Leaders. In this fast-evolving and consolidating market,
opportunities exist for all.

Context
Enterprise LCAPs enable organizations to develop applications faster using more capabilities and
fewer conventional developers. Analysis of the responses to Gartner’s survey of around 200
reference customers in February and March 2019 produced the following insights, which can be
used to build a business case for using an enterprise LCAP:

■ They sought an LCAP mainly for its application productivity benefits, reduced time to market
and ability to improve business process automation.

■ Most used an LCAP for both enterprise and departmental applications, which more than half
deployed organizationwide.

■ Less than half of their LCAPs were used to support process automation or multiexperience
development.
■ LCAPs improve productivity, citizen development and the end-user experience.

■ LCAPs are primarily cloud or aPaaS offerings, but significant deployments are self-managed
on-premises or on customers’ own cloud contracts. Some are a hybrid of cloud and on-
premises deployments.

■ The skills required and application delivery times for LCAPs are low, compared with historical
norms for application development.

The LCAP market and its tools are still evolving. Consequently, business justifications and cost
negotiations need to be handled carefully to offset the lock-in effect of these tools, which support
no portability across vendors. Survey respondents identified the top-five aspects that vendors
could improve as the following, which should be evaluated carefully before purchasing any LCAP:

■ Costs

■ Integration features

■ Functional depth and completeness

■ Ease of deployment

■ End-user experience

Market Overview
The enterprise LCAP market is growing strongly, due to continued demand for applications and a
shortage of skilled developers. Low-code development is a natural evolution of rising abstraction
levels in application development, which will eventually lead to viable cross-enterprise, highly
scalable citizen development and composition of applications.

LCAP vendors represent the vanguard of the movement to democratize application development
by increasingly replacing standard business application development in Java or .NET, and
providing differentiating alternatives to commercial off-the-shelf or SaaS applications.

Many enterprise software vendors recognize the advantages of low-code application

development and provide associated platforms, but not all do. For example, among the major IT
vendors, AWS has no LCAP offering at the time of writing, Google App Maker is rarely promoted,
and SAP and IBM partner with other vendors. Gartner currently tracks over 220 vendors of low-
code development tools, many of which do not fulfill our definition of an enterprise LCAP (see
“Low-Code Development Technologies Evaluation Guide”).

Vendors in the enterprise LCAP market also support other markets:

■ SaaS market: Several of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant are also vendors of CRM or other
SaaS. SaaS requires underlying platform services, and its customers often desire application
customizations and extensions, which leads to their vendors moving into the LCAP market.
■ Application PaaS market: All the LCAPs evaluated in this Magic Quadrant are available as
vendor-managed cloud services and therefore may qualify as aPaaS offerings when delivered
on a self-service basis with bidirectional scaling and instrumentation for resource tracking.
However, many of the featured vendors also offer software versions for on-premises, noncloud
use cases; some also support multicloud deployments.

■ Multiexperience development platform market: A few LCAPs can create multiexperience apps.
All can support web and mobile capabilities to various levels of sophistication. A few also
support chatbots.

■ Business process and workflow automation platform market: Although many LCAPs have
process modeling features, they lack full iBPMS capabilities, such as for process discovery,
case management and human workforce management. However, some LCAP customers
successfully configure their own case management, decision parameter management and
workflow management using their platform’s metadata capabilities.

■ Integration platform market: Although not stand-alone integration products, LCAPs can invoke
REST APIs for external access to third-party or custom-developed services, and many include
integration services to provide semantic reconciliation of inbound data. Some LCAP users,
however, rely on the specialist capabilities of separate integration platforms such as iPaaS
offerings, or deploy separate API management tools to manage APIs constructed by an LCAP.

■ Database and content management platform market: All LCAPs provide some data services,
and all have REST interfaces to enable external access to their content. Some LCAP users
access or exploit separate databases that are either legacy systems of record or shared cloud
database platforms as a service. Often, other data types are either used or provided by LCAPs,
such as those provided by document content management platforms.

■ Industry- or domain-specific LCAP market: Some domain-specific software vendors are also
introducing low-code development tools, according to the SaaS-plus-PaaS model. Industry-
specialized LCAPs are available for the education, financial services, legal, manufacturing and
pharmaceuticals sectors. Horizontal specializations are also tackled by some vendors, such as
for ERP and supply chain requirements. While providing specializations, most of these vendors
can also address general-purpose application needs and therefore also compete in the general
LCAP market. Likewise, the general LCAP vendors can also address vertical and horizontal
markets.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This
includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether
offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and
detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the
financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business
unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and
the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and
market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver
the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and
other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen
to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer
programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth
of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current
and future requirements.
 Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or

capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

© 2020 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc.
and its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior
written permission. It consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization, which should not be
construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from
sources believed to be reliable, Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy
of such information. Although Gartner research may address legal and financial issues, Gartner does not
provide legal or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and
use of this publication are governed by Gartner’s Usage Policy. Gartner prides itself on its reputation for
independence and objectivity. Its research is produced independently by its research organization without input
or influence from any third party. For further information, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and
Objectivity."

About Careers Newsroom Policies Site Index IT Glossary Gartner Blog Network Contact Send
Feedback

© 2018 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.