Your legacy applications are both assets and liabilities. They contain years of refined business logic and institutional knowledge. They support critical operations that can't simply stop. But they're also increasingly expensive to maintain, difficult to integrate with modern systems, and constraining your ability to innovate. The traditional approach to modernization through complete rewrites is risky and expensive. There's a better way.
The application modernization services market, valued at $19.82 billion in 2024, is expected to reach $39.62 billion by 2029. This doubling in five years reflects the urgency enterprises feel about addressing technical debt while the pressure to innovate intensifies. No-code platforms are emerging as a pragmatic path forward.
Legacy modernization traditionally meant choosing between several painful options. You could rehost your applications on new infrastructure without changing code, replatform by making minimal changes to run on modern platforms, refactor to optimize code while maintaining core functionality, or rebuild from scratch.
Each approach carried significant risk and cost. U.S. federal agencies spend 70-80 percent of IT budgets on legacy maintenance, with some agencies reaching 90 percent. These massive allocations prevent investment in innovation and modernization initiatives. Private sector enterprises face similar constraints, with legacy maintenance consuming resources that could drive competitive advantage.
No-code platforms introduce a different modernization strategy. Instead of rewriting legacy systems in traditional code, you rebuild functionality using visual development tools. This approach delivers faster time-to-value, lower risk through incremental migration, involvement of business experts who understand the requirements, reduced dependency on specialized legacy skills, and easier ongoing maintenance and evolution.
Successful legacy modernization with no-code follows a structured approach. Start by identifying high-value capabilities in your legacy system. Don't try to migrate everything at once. Focus on functions that users most frequently access, processes causing the most pain, features requested for enhancement, or areas where the legacy system integrates poorly with other applications.
Build these capabilities on a no-code platform while maintaining the legacy system in parallel. This parallel-run approach lets you validate the new implementation against the proven old system before cutting over.
37 percent of respondents to a Zoho 2024 survey held among European companies already consider low-code an essential element of their software development strategy. This percentage is climbing rapidly as more enterprises experience the benefits.
The abstract promise of modernization becomes concrete when you see what organizations are actually achieving. Here are patterns emerging across industries.
Banks and insurance companies operate under intense regulatory pressure. Their legacy systems often can't adapt quickly enough to new compliance requirements. One global bank faced exactly this challenge with a core system built in the 1990s. Every regulatory change required extensive custom coding, testing, and deployment cycles measured in months.
By rebuilding regulatory reporting workflows on a no-code platform, they reduced deployment time from months to weeks. Business analysts who understood the regulations could directly configure reporting logic. The platform's built-in audit trails satisfied compliance requirements. Most importantly, when regulations changed, updates took days instead of months.
In the 2024 Konveyor.io survey of comzpanies invested in app modernization, 58 percent noted it helped enhance software security, 53 pezrcent reported improved software scalability, and 52 percent stated that modernization helped increase software reliability.
Healthcare organizations run some of the most critical legacy systems in any industry. A mid-sized hospital network operated a patient management system built in the early 2000s. The system worked but couldn't integrate with modern electronic health record platforms or support mobile access for clinicians.
Rather than a risky big-bang replacement, they used a no-code platform to build new patient-facing and clinician-facing applications that integrated with the legacy system's database. This incremental approach delivered immediate value through better user experiences while preserving the tested business logic in the core system.
Over time, they migrated additional functionality to the no-code platform, eventually decommissioning portions of the legacy system as new capabilities proved themselves in production.
A manufacturing enterprise relied on a complex supply chain management system built over two decades. The system worked but couldn't provide the real-time visibility and predictive capabilities needed for modern operations.
Using a no-code platform, they built new analytics and orchestration layers on top of the legacy system. These new applications pulled data from the old system while adding AI-powered forecasting and automated decision-making. The legacy system continued handling transactions while modern applications added intelligence.
The legacy application modernization market is valued at approximately $24.8 billion in 2024 and is anticipated to reach around $64.4 billion by 20332, reflecting a CAGR of 11.2 percent.
Success with no-code modernization requires attention to several critical factors.
Legacy systems often have decades of accumulated data with inconsistent structures, business rules embedded in data, dependencies across tables that aren't well documented, and performance characteristics that depend on specific data access patterns.
Before migrating functionality, invest time in understanding your data. Create a clear data model for the new system. Plan how data will flow between legacy and modern systems during parallel operations. Test data migration thoroughly in non-production environments.
One of the biggest risks in any modernization is losing the business knowledge embedded in legacy systems. Code comments from 15 years ago might be your only documentation of why certain logic exists. Long-tenured employees might know critical workarounds and exceptions.
No-code platforms actually help preserve this knowledge better than traditional rewrites. Business experts can directly review and validate the new implementation because they can see the logic in visual workflows rather than buried in code. This transparency helps ensure nothing critical gets lost in translation.
Your legacy system doesn't exist in isolation. It exchanges data with other enterprise systems through integration points that have evolved over years. By 2024, 75 percent of businesses will have deployed multiple data hubs to drive the sharing and governance of business-critical data and analytics.
Modern no-code platforms provide robust integration capabilities, but you need to plan the transition. Identify all integration points, document expected data formats and volumes, test integration with the new system before cutting over, and maintain backward compatibility during transition periods.
The beauty of no-code modernization is you don't have to wait months or years to see benefits. Deliver value incrementally through phased migration. Each successfully modernized component reduces risk and builds confidence for the next phase.
78 percent of companies that participated in Lufthansa's 2025 survey state they are happy with the results of cloud migration, and 72 percent say they are increasing budgets for cloud technologies and cloud migration projects.
The most successful modernization efforts don't simply recreate legacy functionality in a new technology. They use modernization as an opportunity for fundamental improvement.
Legacy systems process transactions. Modern applications should learn from them. When rebuilding on a no-code platform with AI capabilities, you can add predictive analytics that forecast issues before they occur, natural language interfaces for easier user interaction, automated decision-making based on learned patterns, and anomaly detection that identifies unusual transactions or behaviors.
The majority (78 percent) of organizations surveyed by Red Hat in 2024 were already using AI to support their application modernization initiatives or were planning to use the technology in the future.
Legacy systems were built for desktop browsers or even terminal emulators. Modern users expect mobile access. No-code platforms typically provide responsive design that works across devices without additional development.
This mobile-first modernization can dramatically improve user adoption and enable new workflows that weren't possible with desktop-only access.
Legacy systems often became integration bottlenecks. Modern applications should be integration-ready from day one. No-code platforms provide API-first architectures that make integration with other systems straightforward rather than an afterthought.
Kissflow provides a powerful platform for modernizing legacy applications without the risks and costs of traditional rewrites. The low-code environment lets you rapidly build new functionality that replicates or improves upon legacy capabilities. Pre-built integrations ensure your modernized applications connect seamlessly with existing enterprise systems during transition.
The platform's visual development approach means business experts can directly participate in modernization efforts, ensuring critical business logic isn't lost in translation. Workflow automation capabilities let you not just replace legacy functions but actually improve processes that have accumulated inefficiencies over the years.
With Kissflow, modernization becomes an incremental journey rather than a risky big-bang project. You can deliver value quickly, validate each phase before proceeding, and build confidence across the organization that modernization is achievable.