Gaps in low-code platforms, 2025 edition

Few of us have the capacity nor opportunity to evaluate multiple low-code application development tools in our daily work. Which is why professionals in the field often must resort to big-name analysts that publish market reports. While the advice given in these may not be entirely independent nor reliable, it’s still better than nothing.

I’ve been storing copies of such analyst reports on the low-code market on my cloud drive for the past few years. Occasionally I’ve also promoted their results in my social media channels - and I have been punished for it. So, I won’t name the company in question here, but let’s just say their name starts with “F” like in “failure”.

This time, I compared what the same analysts were saying in their reports between 2023 and 2025. To help me with this, I of course pointed an LLM at the texts and asked it to figure out what the trends have been. The most interesting part of the results were what I am sharing here today on my newsletter: what areas remain the common challenges for low-core application platform vendors in 2025?

Instead of just filling the article with GenAI content, I’ll be commenting on the discoveries based on my real-life experiences and thoughts generated by my human brain. But first, let’s look at the summary table that the text chewing machines was able to put together:

As mentioned, my own expertise is solely from the Microsoft low-code ecosystem. I have been reading news and reports about the low-code market quite intensely for the past 5 years, though. Including the source documents used by the LLM here. Based on this, I didn’t spot obvious hallucinations in how the results were interpreted.

Let’s proceed to looking at each of these seven challenges. The AI produced summary is in purple, followed by my comments on the state of things (in good ol’ black).

🚧 1. DevOps, Version Control & CI/CD Maturity Still Lags Behind Traditional Dev

Even in 2025:

• Many platforms still lack integrated and intuitive version control, CI/CD pipelines, and test automation tools.

• Several vendors (e.g. Salesforce, Retool, Oracle APEX, Unqork) rely heavily on external tools (like GitHub or custom scripts) for DevOps, which defeats the promise of low-code for full-stack lifecycle management.

• Citizen-developer friendly platforms often sacrifice SDLC robustness, while the more pro-focused platforms (like OutSystems or Mendix) don't yet offer a seamless DevOps experience.

🧠 Implication: Pro developers can’t fully replace their traditional toolchain, and integrating low-code into modern GitOps flows is still complex.

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I’ve been talking about the democratization of Git in this newsletter earlier. As the Power Platform + Git native integration went GA in the beginning of 2025, it’s safe to say that yes - this is an area that has been lagging behind traditional pro-code development.

The reason Microsoft has been able to offer an acceptable solution to this is due to the history of the XRM platform and the needs arising from enterprise scale Dynamics 365 projects. The community working with this technology has actively participated in developing not just the CI/CD practices but also a part of the tooling needed for pro-code development to succeed.

Through Power Platform Pipelines, a feature of Managed Environments, the story is becoming considerably more accessible to the citizen developer audience. We still don’t have in-platform version control, thanks to the Git integration depending on Azure DevOps. It could be more seamless, but it’s getting better.

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