What makes a piece of RAD software (Rapid Application Development software) stand out? What propels great RAD software? Is it all about the speed of app development, deployment, and modification, or is it about quality? Or is it the pricing?
We’ve taken a look at the top-rated RAD tools from trusted review sites like G2Crowd, TrustRadius, SoftwareSuggest, and more. Poring through volumes of bias-free reviews, we’ve narrowed down the top features that earn these tools the best ratings, leaving out branding and marketing that don’t impact the product.
Bonus: At the bottom of this list, you’ll find a table comparing the best tools rated according to these features!
Rapid Application Development (RAD) is an agile method to quickly create and deploy software applications with a limited focus on planning. Here's a list of features that RAD offers:
Pre-Designed Application Templates
Visual Development Support
Lifecycle Management
WYSIWYG Form Designers
Rapid application development is all about nimble, quick development and modification. That’s why it’s handy to have a tool that provides app templates.
App templates are customizable apps that represent the most popular use cases. For example, a commonly applied business process is the leave request process. A great rapid application development software can provide a basic ‘leave request’ app that you can customize instead of creating your own from scratch.
Now that is a surefire high rating-earning feature!
Often using a low-code or no-code / zero-code approach, the best RAD software development tools let you bypass writing lines of code.
How is this done? Through a visual approach, which lays out the data operators through shapes on the screen linked by arrows that represent the flow of data. Yes, it is rather like creating a flowchart to represent what the app will do, before actually building it.
Except for one thing: the visual representation you create–that’s the app itself! This lends itself perfectly to the quick rendering and deployment that rapid application development software demands.
With RAD software development, the first version of the app is never what the final version will be. The first version is primarily for observation and figuring out how the solution stack will be built.
If your RAD software lets you customize processes and organizational models throughout the lifetime of the app, then that’s what you need.
Rapid application development tools with the capability to drive this object-oriented way of programming through repeated prototyping, are winners on review sites.
It’s not just about the developer; the end user of RAD software-created tools matters too.
Business users today work on a number of platforms–offices provide desktops, laptops, and even handheld devices, or let employees bring their own devices[1]. This means that any given employee may be using the app you create using: computer browsers, dedicated desktop programs, cloud services, or mobile devices.
Cross-platform functionality is a highly-rated rapid application development feature, for this very reason. If the rapid application development software you use lets you create apps that can be used across a variety of mediums, you have a winner on your hands.
As we’ve mentioned here, form designers in 2018 have no excuse for being anything short of spectacular.
If a rapid software development tool is going to be used to create apps that involve data collection through forms, the drag-and-drop features of a WYSIWYG designer tool are more necessity than a luxury.
The top rapid application development software on most review platforms all include this feature, helping them stand out from others that don’t.
From a thorough study of the top review aggregation sites, it’s easy to see which features rapid application development users are looking for. Now that we’ve gone through these, time to get to our bonus: the 5 rapid application development tools that dominate ‘top rapid application development tool’ lists.
| Software | Pros | Cons | Pricing |
| Zoho Creator |
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$15/user/mo |
| Kissflow |
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Starts at $390 |
| Outsystems |
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$5,400/mo for 100 users |
| Bizagi |
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$26/user/mo |
| Appian |
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$90/user/mo |
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