If you are an IT Leader, you’ve most likely found yourself feeling the pinch. Budgets are decreasing or stagnate. Even with disruptions, you’re still being held accountable to deliver more, faster. Tackling this seemingly impossible task requires a shift from “project” focus to more “product” focus, so that you can solve development challenges more strategically and at scale. This struggle of demand outstripping your supply is why you and many others are turning to low-code development.

The low-code market is booming. According to Gartner’s latest Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform Magic Quadrant, “By 2024 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives.” With this fact, it’s no surprise that Gartner is now tracking more than 300 low-code vendors who are coming from all areas of the business and are claiming to solve ALL your problems (yeah right!). With so many vendors with so many messages, how do you sift through the noise and evaluate a low-code platform that’s right for you?

Lucky for you, the Gartner 2021 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms can help you narrow down which low-code platform is right for you and who is excelling at the capabilities that matter to your organization.

The 5 Critical Use Cases of a Successful Low-code Platform

Many of those 300 low-code vendors can’t even pass the sniff test when it comes to what a true low-code platform should deliver for the enterprise. Some of those vendors even go as far as to claim to be “the leader” in the space, even fewer (if any) can back it up.

To help evaluate the best low-code solution for your enterprise, I recommend taking a step back and thinking about the use cases in which you would leverage low-code. Think about both now, and over the next one to five years. If you do this exercise, it will boil down to 5 specific product/solution use cases to uncover where differentiation occurs.

The following may not be the exact category names on your list, but the function is undoubtedly the same as the five critical use cases as recently scoped by the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, 2020 report. They are:

  • Business Unit IT Application Use Case – This category measures the strength of capabilities provided to users looking to build new enterprise applications for web, mobile, data, business logic, and external services. And it specifically targets B2B and B2E scenarios with an intended goal of delivery in and around eight weeks. Mendix received the highest score with a 3.9 out of 5.
  • Mobile and web application for SaaS and ISV Use Case – This use case sets out to determine the capability of a vendors low-code offering and their effectiveness in building mobile and web SaaS and ISV applications as well as providing rich user experiences for both B2B and B2C scenarios. Mendix received the highest score with a 4.03 out of 5.
  • Fusion Team Composable Application Use Case – The use case name may vary among businesses, but the underlying principle of this use case focuses on the functionality vendors provide to enable the assembly of application experiences from a portfolio of ‘building blocks’, which serve as custom application experiences for specific end-user roles/individuals. Mendix received the highest score with a 4.0 out of 5.
  • Citizen Development – Low-code is an ideal way to increase capacity by enabling citizen developers to engage in the app-building process. This use case specifically measures the enablement of citizen developers to build line-of-business, web-based, data-oriented applications within a two-week period using no-code tools for B2E scenarios. Mendix received second-highest score with a 3.8 out of 5
  • Enterprise IT Business Process Application – This use case examines the low-code platform’s ability to automate complex business processes, workflows, case management with sophisticated business logic, external services, and multiple end-user roles for B2E scenarios. Mendix received the third-highest score with a 3.98 out of 5.

Outside of Gartner’s Critical Capability report, Mendix continues to receive third-party validation when it comes to leading the low-code market.

Sifting through the noise

Up and down the list of critical capabilities, you can see how Mendix excels at each. We are the first and only all-in-one low-code application platform for the enterprise. With that, we’ve extended our low code principles of accelerated development through abstraction and automation, and have increased organizational agility to new domains such as native mobile development, process automation, data integration, cloud portability, and more.

Sound like more marketing buzzwords and noise to you? It’s not.

The Mendix Platform is a robust and mature low-code solution built for the enterprise, and you can see for yourself by clicking the banner below and taking a tour of the leading low-code platform.