Low Code Capability comparison SalesForce vs DronaHQ
Before we compare the two platforms it would be great to understand a brief history on the paths leading to entering the space of low code.
Salesforce announced apex in 2006 at dreamforce - was the the 1st time a packaged software company got into the game of "build your own application in a configurable way". Sure it worked for them & in 2008 they were out with VisualForce. Why would salesforce, a CRM SaaS provider, 7 years after its launch, would really care for giving a low code tool for building any app on top of its CRM and possibly opening up its platform for wider use cases. Back in the day - LowCode/ NoCode wasn't even a category that existed.
Selling a point solution across industry and across the world for sure can not happen with out customising your point solution. While I am not a salesforce insider, but having experienced similar situation when we launched DronaHQ content management system for mobile & the amount of customisations asked each day by our customers truly makes me believe that the only sensible way to not loose the customer & not let your product team go insane - would be to open up the platform to do insane things by making it configurable.
At DronaHQ - we opened up our frontend app ecosystem for any use case when we got a CPG major to use our platform for doing a sales contest in 2014. All the capabilities burnt into our app were now made available in an SDK for any 3rd party developer to leverage without needing to rewrite any of the functionality. While our reason to open up our platform vs SalesForce may not be the same - but the end result was similar. Enabling customers to do much more by themselves on top of our already stable platform.
By 2015 end, a year & a half later after we opened up our platform, we started conceptualising a drag & drop tool on top of the platform to build apps to empower business users to do way more things then they could imagine. Through the next few years we saw crazy number of apps being built by developers using the SDK. This gave us plenty of insights on what kind of apps were being built. We saw 3 categories emerging:
a. An island frontend app (say an offline calculator)
b. Frontend app with Existing API integration
c. Frontend app with custom backend
Our low code/ no code offering had to cover all of the above categories of apps which were demanded by our global customers. Fast forward to 2019 - 4 months into our Beta launch of low code tool - today at a high level this is how we compare to salesforce.
At a high level - SFDC comes with sane default systems like CRM, MarketCloud and much more - while DronaHQ scores on its Mobility background. It comes loaded with capability to leverage on SFDC or any other tools capability with its API & IaaS offering. Infact some of the SFDC customers who have been seeking offline capability & better output on mobile have used DronaHQ & its IaaS & API integrations capability to extend those capability.
At the ground level - SFDC is highly complex & cant be managed without SFDC consultants/developers while DronaHQ has been built with a fresh mind keeping simplicity as its main goal.
I would love to hear your comments & feedback on this comparison. Incase if you have any questions feel free to post it across.