Low-Code vs High-Code - Choosing the Best For App Development in 2023

Due to the pandemic, organizations around the world have been forced to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives to support a rapidly growing hybrid workforce. As a result, organizations are now looking for ways to build their solutions in-house with robust business app development solutions that are collaborative, scalable, quick, and highly effective.

Choosing between the low-code and high-code approach is a dilemma that most companies will face when planning a way to build business applications themselves. The right solution will depend on requirements, expected development time, employee expectations, and of course, budget.

Let's take a look at the differences between low code vs high code to better understand the two.

What is low-code?

Low-code development platforms allow you to build applications even when you don’t have any in-depth expertise in coding.

Instead of using complex programming languages, you can use drag and drop editors to build applications and processes. You can also take advantage of pre-built functionalities and reusable components to build applications quickly.

That means, anyone in the organization can create applications with a low-code platform, even if they have limited technical expertise or abilities.

The benefits of using low-code solutions also include collaboration, speed, and customization.

For IT teams, low-code platforms help develop applications at a much faster speed, and with fewer bugs as well.

This in turn helps accelerate digital transformation initiatives in organizations and saves on costs. In fact, 70 percent ^[1] of IT leaders agree that low-code platforms are more cost-effective than other traditional development solutions, including high-code.

What is high-code?

High-code refers to traditional programming where experienced developers are responsible for writing code and developing solutions from scratch. This approach is more code-driven as it is tightly tied with development cycles and controlled by developers.

The primary benefit of high-code is that you can create completely custom business applications that are unique to your business.

However, high-code also means heavy reliance on your IT team which can end up excluding citizen developers and other business users. And with no way to include business users who will actually be using the application, it can be challenging to develop applications that completely fit the requirements of different teams and departments.

Moreover, when everything requires the support of your IT department, including building and managing applications, it can take your talented developers away from more valuable work in the organization.

Low-code vs High-code – Quick comparison

	Low-Code	High-Code
Personnel responsible for development	IT developers and citizen developers The pre-built components of low-code platforms along with their drag and drop editor make it easy for both IT developers as well as citizen developers to create business applications.	Experienced IT developers High-code requires developers who have experience in different coding programming languages (depending on the type of application that needs to be built). Citizen developers cannot take part in the development process.
Level of customization	Medium Even though low-code platforms have pre-built components and modules, they still offer some level of customization since you can integrate custom written code in the application.	High High-code has considerably high customization, as compared to low-code since applications are developed by writing custom code from scratch.
Development speed	Fast. Drag and drop editors combined with ready-to-use code components, reusable blocks, and templates make the entire low-code development process very quick as compared to high code. Moreover, since both IT and citizen developers can take part in the development process, it helps divide responsibilities and get the entire work done faster.	Slow. High-code involves developers building applications from scratch through multiple iterations and extensive coding – all of which can take quite a long time.
Technical expertise required	Little to no technical expertise needed	High level of technical expertise required
Development costs	Affordable Most low-code platforms work on a subscription basis allowing you to pay as your company grows in size. It also makes scaling back easier.	Expensive You need upfront investment for an experienced development team, infrastructure setup, and ongoing management.
Reusability	Yes You can reuse different features and code blocks from one low-code application to another for quick development.	Difficult While it's not impossible to reuse code from one high-code application to another, it would require a lot of tweaking and maneuvering – all of which can be a time-consuming process
Scalability	Highly scalable	Difficult to scale
Support	Dedicated support provided by the low-code platform.	Your internal IT team will be responsible for providing support and managing the application

What to choose - Low Code vs High Code?

High-code applications may seem like a great approach for building legacy applications, but in a world where technological trends change every few years, it can be an incredibly expensive decision to build hard-coded monolithic applications from scratch and then find a way to scale and upgrade them every few years.

The answer to the low-code vs high-code conundrum is simple – If you need a flexible business application development solution that can offer customization, quick turnaround, reusability and affordability while also including both technical and business users in the development process, low-code is the way to go.

Kissflow - An Unified Work Platform

Kissflow low-code platform can help build custom business applications, automate processes, and digitize operations. Take a look to see how Kissflow can improve your organization’s productivity and efficiency while decreasing reliance on IT teams or consultants