I've created a dashboard listing open-source low-code tools available as public repositories in GitHub.

The selection method is based on the following inclusion criteria:

• Repositories that declare themselves as low-code projects
• Repositories with more than 50 stars
• Active repositories (last commit is no more than 1 year ago
• Tool aims to generate any component of a software application, including AI components, dashboards, or full applications

and exclusion criteria:

• Repositories with no information in English
• Repositories that were just created to host the source code of a published article
• Repositories that are awesome lists or collection of resources

The final list is the intersection of the above criteria. The final list has also been manually curated to remove projects that use low-code in a different sense of what we mean by low-code in software development.

An initial search with the above inclusion resulted in a surprising total of 301 candidates. But a couple of years ago (February 2022) I had written a post complaining about the lack of open source low-code tools. Was I wrong? Has the situation changed drastically over the last two years? What's going on?

Real number of real low-code tools

While it's true that there were 301 tools satisfying the inclusion criteria, the dashboard only lists 151, once we remove those not complying with the exclusion criteria.

But 151 is still quite a lot compared with what I covered in the previous post. So I decided to see how many of these low-code tools were model-based. Or just mentioned the word models (or derivatives). It turns out, only 9 of the 151 low-code tools claim to use any type of model. Not even 9 if we remove a couple that only target AI components and merge the three repos of the same platform. Of course, BESSER is one of the few exceptions 😇.

And to me, this minimal number is the one that matters. As you know, my vision of low-code is linked to that of model-based approaches so tools called low-code where there is zero control on how such code is generated are not what I'd really call low-code.  So in this sense, I still believe there is a lack of open source low-code tools, as I understand them.

A fragmented community

Keep in mind that I'm not saying there are no other model-driven tools or code-generators in GitHub beyond the tools in the dashboard.

In fact, there are a few. For instance, Telosys (that we also covered here). But Telosys defines itself as a "lightweight and pragmatic code generator", not as a low-code tool. Once again, the diverse terminology in our area makes a small domain even smaller and hides useful tools from potential users that are using the "wrong" keywords. To read mode about the relationship between the low-code and model-driven communities, take a look at our work on a Metascience Study of the Adoption of Low-Code terminology in Modeling Publications, which we are now updating and extending as I still believe it's an important discussion to have in our community.

Other interesting aspects

• A significant number of low-code tools are Chinese and targeting only Chinese users (as there is zero effort in having any type of English documentation, not even in the readme). As I don't speak Chinese I can't really dig deeper in the characteristics of these tools but it does seem low-code has a strong presence in China. Given the exclusion criteria, these tools are not part of the dashboard but it was indeed one of the most used exclusion criteria when going down from 301 to 151.
• There are very few low-code tools in Python (see the end of the dashboard for some global stats like this one). Most of the existing ones are low-code tools targeting specific AI components, not low-code platforms for a full application development. Once again BESSER is one of the few exceptions, but in a world becoming more and more AI-driven, I'd like to see more low-code tools embracing Python, and thus, facilitating the interaction with machine learning and AI libraries.
• If you look at the distribution of tools per year of creation, you'll see that some tools were created before the low-code term was coined. This means that such tools saw the marketing wave of low-code and decided to rebrand themselves to gain visibility.
• The dashboard itself was built with the help of Cursor. As usual, I was faster than if I had done it alone but I still suffer some hallucinations (Cursos suggested to use a Cell Renderer that made a lot of sense but that, unfortunatley, didn't exist and for a couple of bugs I had to go the "old way" and find myself the solution in StackOverflow and the Streamlit forums)

Check out the dashboard

Check out the dashboard, play with it and let me know what you think. Here or in the dashboard GitHub repository.