4 Best NoCode Backend Dev Tools 2021 (Databases, Servers, APIs + More)

in today's tutorial we're going to talk about the best backend tools for no coders now this is an important topic because back ends is where no coders have traditionally struggled the result is that many no coders create oversimplified apps not because they want to but because they don't know how to do otherwise now my hope is that after this video all of that's going to change i'm going to share with you some of the backend tools that we've used to grow our portfolio of 12 sites to a value of over 1 million dollars so if you'd like to learn how to build digital sas products without having to know how to code simply head over to qb1 to learn about our no code incubator program i'm going to include a link to our site in the description below as well as a coupon code for 100 off enrollment okay with that said let's jump in so first i want to talk about zano now zano is one of my favorite no-code back-ends the thing that i like most about zano is that they've abstracted the back end away from you to a large extent but that abstraction doesn't come at the cost of performance or power so essentially with zeno you have the power of a traditional database without the complexity now i'll create some dedicated tutorials about zeno soon but let me just show you a couple of examples first notice here that i have a database table and it's laid out as an easy to understand spreadsheet now i can simply add a new column here i can select this columns data type and my table is now updated now i can of course manually populate this information right now however it's more likely that i'll have my users manipulate this data through some sort of front-end interface that essentially just links back to this specific database table or i might decide to populate this database with information pulled in from some third-party api all of these scenarios are straightforward and easy with zano so now that i have this table ready zano will automatically have created all of my api endpoints for this specific table so if i navigate over to my api section here you'll notice my end points so for example if i grab this endpoint url and then paste it into my browser you'll see the database information that i previously posted here now if you don't know what apis are and you feel a bit lost by all of this just think of them like a communication channel that allows disparate systems to communicate with each other essentially apis allow you to take otherwise disconnected systems and then mash them up together into one cohesive system so in this case we take data from zano and then we can use this api endpoint to expose data in our database for any other application that wants to interact with it so for example we could link to a front-end to display this data to front-end users and the api would simply be the glue that binds these otherwise disconnected systems together so for example imagine that nasa is publishing the velocity of the international space station and it's updating that velocity in near real time so if they expose that data to the public which they do i can then use zeno to go and fetch that data and then store their data in my database and now that data is in my database so i can reorganize it filter it or slice and dice the data in any way that i want and then visualize my data in any way that i want in my front end or i could give my data to other users to visualize however they want in their front ends so that's a really oversimplified version of what apis are but hopefully that clears things up a bit but zano isn't just a database to store data and it's not just an api to expose that data if we drill down and look at the anatomy of a xano api we'll see that we have this section here called function stack now this is a really powerful feature because now essentially what we can do is we can manipulate the data that we're storing in our database now traditionally writing functions would require that you get your hands dirty in code and today not many no code tools have excelled in this area but zeno changes all of that by making this function stack feature no code as well so for example imagine you were building a social media app and you wanted to show the number of followers each of your users had you would need to have a function that would be able to iterate through a list and count the number of user connections with xano you can do that without writing a line of code you could simply add a new function to your function stack and then it's pretty much just a matter of clicking buttons and understanding your application's logic now the same is true when adding filters to variables you could easily do things like make a conversion you could do things like round numbers concatenate text and much much more all of this without writing a line of code now i personally feel like it helps if you have a basic understanding of javascript when using xana but by no means do you need to have any javascript syntax memorized just understanding the top level logic will go a long way again if you're a non-technical person and you're looking to upskill in the tech department go check out kb1 we specialize in helping non-technical founders build technical things so that's zano and how zeno handles data apis and functions but so far all of this data is still stuck in our back end so this doesn't mean much for no coders essentially unless we can find a way to inject this data into our front end somehow so how do we do that well all we need to do is simply plug any of our api endpoints which remember contain dynamic data that we could manipulate through our function stack and then we could inject that data into uh most no code front ends for our front-end users to consume so for example bubble appgyver bravo studio and wappler to name only a handful of examples could all easily connect to your xano database and display the data in their frontends so rather than speaking in abstractions let me just show you how all of this works so for example imagine we wanted to create an automated task to track the velocity of the international space station every one minute in zano this would be easy to do using their tasks feature so here you'll see that i have a task already set up in my function stack i'm simply fetching data from this api i'm extracting the data that i want and then storing that data within my database and now i can use the automatically generated xano api endpoints to view or expose that data so now i have this data essentially updating every one minute within my database or if i wanted to constantly add new entries instead rather than updating a single entry every minute i could do that and my api endpoint would instead look something like this so now we have the data in our xano back end but again how do we inject this into our front end so let me show you how this works with wappler now this is a great no code front-end editing tool but keep in mind that the logic is pretty much the same for most no code front ends again i just want you to realize as i go through these steps that i'm not writing a line of code either in the front end or the back end to accomplish any of this so here in wappler under api data source i could simply enter my xano api endpoint so here i'll grab the zeno endpoint with many different table entries then i'll go and paste it here then i'll click on define api schema and then to the right i'll see the different columns of my zano database now for example let's imagine i want to display all of this data so i'll just click on data here and then everything within that data object will be accessible to my front end so now our front end has made a successful connection to our back end but we're currently not showing that data anywhere yet so let's do that now now in this row i'll add a responsive table again notice i don't have to code anything to do this and where it says populate i'll select a dynamic data source using this lightning bolt icon you see here now we can see our api data here so i'll just select the root data object again and then click select now here you'll see my headers and values and everything looks like it's mapping properly so i'll just select ok now and then you'll see the data being pulled in to my front end from my zeno back end so as you saw i didn't have to write any code to make any of this happen using this approach you can create really really complex and interesting platforms best of all using a front-end tool like wappler you'll have granular control over how your data displays in the front end because unlike most front-end editors wappler gives you full control over your source code here you'll see i can use these easy drag and drop no code page elements if i wanted to but if i needed access to my source code at any time for more granular control i could simply click on these buttons or links here to access my platform's source code now i'm using wappler here but as i mentioned the logic is similar if you're using bubble or appgyver or bravo studio or many other no-code front-ends so that's the zeno back-end in a nutshell and that's an example of how you can use zeno's built-in api endpoints to connect your back-end data to a front-end now zano has a very generous free plan so i'll leave a link to their platform in the description below so you can go and check them out now i personally think they're one of the most exciting no-code platforms out there right now so if you're looking for a back-end solution i highly recommend you go and check them out so the zeno back-end with the waffler front-end pairing gave us a huge amount of control over our application but what if our application didn't require that level of access or control what if what we wanted to build was simpler for a simpler application what we could do is we could use tools that haven't actually even been traditionally designed to be web backends so for example google sheets could be used as a back end by linking the data contained within a google sheet to app sheet as your front end here in app sheet you can see that once i've made the connection to my data my google sheet data is automatically being fed into my front end here you'll see i can easily edit my user permissions so for instance here i can set if i want my app users to be able to edit my data or here i can select read only if i want to remove privileged access to this data and in fact it's not only app sheet that can use google sheets as a back-end today many front-ends and data visualization tools integrate with google sheets for example if you had a wordpress installation and you wanted to visualize google sheets data for your users you could simply link a google sheets to a google data studio project and then embed that google data studio document into your website now this what you see on the screen now is one of the applications that we run at qb1 and this application uses google sheets as the no code database google data studio as the no code visualization tool and wordpress as the no code front-end website so i personally think this is a great setup for those who want to use easy to use and familiar tools and for people who don't care too much about having full manual control that's not to say you can't do powerful things using google sheets and applications like app sheet for example because you can you could create a complex shipping app that tracks in real time the position of a package using the built-in barcode scanner feature for example so you can build complex apps that said this app sheet and google sheets pairing abstracts both the front end and back end complexity totally away from you now the priority with this setup is helping you develop your app as quickly and painlessly as possible using familiar tools and while you will have some control over the design of your application so for example here notice if i click on ux and then brand i can change my theme from light to dark and there are more advanced design features here as well but you're not going to get full control over the design of your app and for many that's fine the basic out-of-the-box templates will do just perfectly many users don't care to edit their css code or don't know how to so a tool like app sheet paired with google sheets would be perfect for this demographic of builder however for those who need more control over their applications design you might be interested in the next backend no code tool option now similar to google sheets you can use airtable as a back-end database now like google sheets airtable wasn't designed to be a traditional database it's not something that's trying to directly compete with mysql for example that said for some use cases a no-code tool like airtable could be used as a back-end database as well if linked to the appropriate front-end tool so for example bravo studio is a front-end tool that allows you to link to your figma designs now this will give you total control over the look and feel of your application then once you have the front end looking the way you want you can simply click on data library and then add a new collection now here you'll notice that i already set up a xano connection here for instance you'll see that i just pasted my zeno api endpoint here now if i click on send you'll see under received data the data that this api endpoint is accessing so if i wanted to i could simply link to my zano database from my bravo studio account too but let's say that i wanted to use airtable instead now for this all i would need to do is click on airtable wizard and then simply copy and paste my airtable url into my application which will allow me to populate my app with my airtable data so this is a great option for those who want to place a heavier focus on design and don't mind going through the learning curve to learn how to use figma's design tools next on the list we have bubble now bubble is actually an all-in-one platform in that it handles both your front end and your back end for you for example if you're logged into your bubble account you'll see that you have a section here for design now this will give you control over the look of your application and if you look at this tab you'll see an option for workflows essentially this section handles your application logic and then you'll see your data tab just below that which handles your application's data now this is an interesting option because now essentially you have everything under one roof design app logic and data and again this entire back end is 100 no code for example if i wanted to sign a new user up i could double click on this button and then i could click on start edit workflow and then i could simply click on add action for example if there was a form associated with this button element i could simply hover over users and then click on sign user up then once a user signs up i could head over to my data tab i could click on app data and then click on my users table and then here you'll see my database data is displayed to me in a very easy to understand spreadsheet format so here i'm getting the ease of use of a spreadsheet but the power of a more traditional database and what i like about bubble as well is that they have an api plugin and what this plugin allows you to do is link your bubble account to any third-party backend service that you want so for example you might want to use bubble for your front-end but you might want to use zeno for your back-end using bubbles api connector you could easily do that so i hope you found this list helpful again if you're a non-technical founder and you'd like to learn how to build software platforms using some of the no code tools that i discussed in this list head over to kb1 today to learn more about our no code incubator program i'll leave a coupon code for 100 off below also if you've learned something today don't forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel we're always publishing new content for the no code community thanks for stopping by today

Channel: KibiOne

Views: 12,220

Keywords: nocode database, nocode backend, no-code database, no-code backend, no-code server, nocode server, no-code automated tasks, low code, nocode, database, MySQL, Xano, Bubble, Google Sheets, Airtable, nocode tools, no-code tools, no-code app builders

Id: pO6Mm3DOKto

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021