Google AppMaker was a low-code development environment. App Maker is included with G Suite Business and Enterprise editions, as well as with G Suite for Education. It was discontinued in early 2021.
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Mendix
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Mendix is a low code platform-as-a-service offering with mobile and social extensions. Mendix was acquired by Siemens August 2018.
App Maker is exceptionally strong when you need things to just get done, but your internal development team has a full queue. Or maybe you don't even have an internal development team! If you need a check-in system, an applicant tracking system, an office cleaning checklist with notifications and reports, etc. you can use App Maker to throw something together and make sure your team can use it. You can also collaborate on it, so teams can make this part of their process improvement goals.
I would recommend Mendix for large organization issues and applications. It is very robust and scalable. It is made to deploy quickly so changes and expansions can be made every step of the way. I would not recommend Mendix for very small projects because the costs of usage would just be too high.
Minimal coding experience required. Javascript is a must-have, but the documentation is excellent, and once you're past the learning curve, it's great!
Great WYSIWYG editor. It's easy to see the layout and still have deep control over what you're putting together.
Excellent integrations with G Suite. There are methods built-in that allow you to easily authenticate and work with the G Suite APIs.
Definitely not for beginners. App Maker certainly isn't usable by "everybody," but it's excellent for those who are willing to learn and get their hands dirty!
Experienced developers will have issues. The target user is someone who doesn't want to (or know how to) use something like App Engine or Kubernetes. People with more experience will certainly see limitations and find it difficult to use to the fullest extent.
Data sources can be iffy to manage. It used to be that App Maker would use a sheet or "Drive table" as a data source, but it now requires a GCP data source like CloudSQL.
A 10 would say I have nothing to wish for. A 9 means I haven't seen anything better.This tool really helps you in the whole creation and maintenace cycle, so from requirements to building/modeling to testing to deploying to capturing feedback.
App Maker is a very "do it yourself" platform. There is a huge amount of documentation and plenty of examples to begin learning, plus a vast community support through StackOverflow that can assist anywhere that you're stuck, but the great thing is that it's all up to you. If there are specific features that don't work, Google is always there to help troubleshoot.
Response times are quick and you will get updates regularly about the status of your request. Even with very technical questions they have specialists that can help you with your problems it will give you an answer or help you with a work around.
App Maker is really kind of new in its own space. We haven't seen the level of functionality, nor the deep integrations, with anything else. It can replace a lot of products, and we've seen it in place in many applications across our organization, so it's been able to reduce our spend on products that offer specific functionality and still need to be customized.
We evaluated 3 to 4 other products before making the choice to go with Mendix. From a maturity perspective it was further ahead than the other options. From the rapid development perspective the tool was light years ahead of others. The ability for developers to learn the tool quickly and still have the flexibility within the platform to develop simple to complex widgets is great. This tool has endless possibilities once you become comfortable with the platform itself
We have seen a reduction in time spent on manual processes by being able to automate functions in Google Sheets, take input with special functionality, and have App Maker do the work for us.
We have seen the internal development queue decrease, which allows us to focus on larger projects that couldn't be handled by App Maker.
We have seen ownership and process improvements increase in certain departments, as they are able to get to work themselves.
