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Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.

Mendix vs OutSystems

OutSystems and Mendix are two of the oldest names in the low-code space. Together, they occupy a huge corner of the market, with tens of thousands of businesses relying on them to ship custom applications. But, despite being direct competitors, there are huge differences between the two - in terms of key functionality, target personas, pricing, and use cases. Today, we’re giving an in-depth account of everything you need to know.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 26, 2024

6 ServiceNow Alternatives & Competitors

ServiceNow is totally synonymous with IT service management. In fact, it’s hugely embedded in how countless IT teams deliver services to colleagues. However, despite its dominant market share, it’s not the only option out there. See, ITSM is a hugely varied field. Even the most basic processes can look completely different from one company to the next. This raises a couple of problems for COTS ITSM platforms. Vendors inevitably need to position their solutions towards one type of team or another - even at the level of individual features.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 25, 2024

Top 7 Quickbase Alternatives & Competitors in 2025

Quickbase is one of many tools on the market today that seeks to give teams a single platform for unifying data, managing internal processes, and automating menial tasks. This reflects a huge problem that’s faced by almost every business today. Companies have never relied on data more. At the same time, data assets are dispersed, siloed, and uncoordinated. Therefore, centralization offers huge potential for efficiency savings, improving accuracy, facilitating collaboration, providing oversight, and more.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 12, 2024

Top 7 Airtable Alternatives & Competitors in 2025

When Airtable launched in 2012, it was a real innovation. Spreadsheets hadn’t changed much in several decades. So, the power to add interfaces, automations, advanced in-line components, and external data syncing on top of this was huge. Today, Airtable has upwards of 300,000 users - including some of the world’s biggest companies. But, despite Airtable’s popularity, it’s not necessarily the ideal solution for every use case. Today, we’re exploring some of the other tools that teams can use to collaborate on data and manage internal processes, with our roundup of Airtable alternatives.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 6, 2024

How to Build an Employee Portal

Employee portals are some of the most ubiquitous internal tools around. Teams of all sizes in every industry need a secure, efficient way to share information, handle requests, and deliver internal services to employees. Portals offer a unified, centralized platform for interacting with data within internal processes. Today, we’re checking out how Budibase empowers teams to build sleek, professional portals on top of just about any data source. With our open-source, low-code platform, you can output fully functional solutions in a fraction of the time.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 5, 2024

How to Build a Franchise Portal

Franchise businesses face some unique challenges. A huge part of this is gathering and managing information from independent locations. Without an effective, centralized way to manage data, it’s almost impossible to achieve optimal performance or even full visibility across the business. Today, we’re exploring one solution to this issue. We’re building a secure franchise portal for individual stores to share information with head office - and vice versa. Specifically, we’re showing off how we can use Budibase to build fully functioning custom portals on top of just about any data source - with minimal custom code.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 3, 2024

Top 10 Retool Alternatives & Competitors

Retool is one of the biggest players in the low-code space. However, that doesn’t mean it’s viable for every business; it’s far from it. Today, we’re checking out some of the top Retool alternatives from across the market. And it’s a crowded market nowadays. However, there’s huge variation between different options - across their pricing, features, target personas, use cases, and more. Today, we’re covering the following: What is Retool? Why would you look for an alternative to Retool?

Ronan McQuillan

Mar 30, 2024

How to Build a B2B Customer Portal in 6 Steps

Managing B2B sales is quite a bit different from selling to the public. This can present challenges, including managing communications, securely hosting product information, and effectively handling inventories and fulfillment. Today, we’re looking at one solution - building a custom B2B portal. Most often, business customers don’t have the same priorities as typical consumers. Above all, they want a fast, secure way to order from trusted suppliers. That’s where portals come in.

Ronan McQuillan

Mar 28, 2024

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