Glide VS Adalo: Choosing the right No Code platform for your application

Reading time:
7 MIN
September 22, 2023

Since its creation, over 85,000 companies have already used Glide to create applications. Adalo, meanwhile, records an average of 1 million custom mobile and web applications created. These two no-code tools are ideal for integrating large external data sources to create powerful solutions without having to write a single line of code...

But how do you decide which of the two no-code tools to choose? In this Glide VS Adalo review, we'll look at their key features, their fundamental differences, and how they can serve to meet their users' expectations.

If you're looking for no code tools to develop professional, feature-rich applications, then you need to read this in-depth analysis of these two tools. Which of Glide and Adalo is right for you? The verdict is in.

 

Glide : An in-depth overview of Glide

 

What is Glide

 

Glide is an Popular No-Code App Builder that manages and exploits multiple data sources. You can easily create different types of applications thanks to its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. This editor features a drag-and-drop interface, allowing you to appreciate every action you take in real time. Glide helps companies offering services to other entities as well as to customers, to design powerful mobile applications compatible with Android and iOS systems.

 

How Glide works

 

The creation of a Glide app takes place either from a spreadsheet like Google Sheet or with a predefined template. It also supports other data sources such as Airtable and Excel, transforming them into a functional application. Glide lets you manage a large data source to better structure your business activities. 

Glide's strenghts and weaknesses

 

Here, in a nutshell, are the main strenghts and weaknesses of Glide.

 

 

Glide pricing

 

Glide offers four subscription packages. The first is free, allowing you to add 3 private users, design 3 applications, perform up to 1,000 updates and obtain up to 500 lines of data.

 

Secondly, there's the Starter package at $25, which integrates several data sources. The package allows integration of 10 users, creation of five applications, storage capacity of 5,000 lines and other features.

 

The Pro package is in third place, and costs $99 a month. With it, you can create unlimited applications, invite 50 private users, benefit from 25,000 lines of storage, powerful integrations with Glide API.

 

Finally, we have the exclusive Business package for enterprises at $249. You get all the above benefits, except that this time you get up to 100 users, 100,000 lines, 25,000 updates, custom integrations and more.

 

Glide's uses-cases

 

Here are some App ideas you can design with Glide :

 

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for businesses: Glide lets you manage your customer relationships. It goes one step further by enabling you to manage contacts and company information, all within a private portal for your team. This allows you to effectively track and manage customer interactions, which can improve customer satisfaction and team productivity.

 

  • Comprehensive business reporting: ideal for analyzing your company's performance. By creating a customized dashboard, you can visualize your overall figures and key indicators with clear graphics and information. When it comes to your finances, you'll be able to track your revenues and costs.

 

  • Task management for field technicians: Through a dashboard, you can easily assign and track tasks, while monitoring progress in real time. Glide helps you optimize task allocation and improve productivity, while keeping track of every member of your team.

 

Adalo : An in-depth overview of Adalo

 

What is Adalo

 

Speaking of Adalo, it has similarities with Glide, but with a few differences. Adalo is primarily aimed at business owners, offering them the opportunity to design fully customized mobile applications by using Drag-And-Drop Component and basic features. These applications can then be easily deployed on the App Store, enabling users to download and use them on their mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.



How Adalo works

 

Adalo integrates and manages databases and offers greater flexibility in building, designing and launching your app development process. Although its visual editor is intuitive drag-and-drop builder, the learning curve on Adalo is more complex than on Glide.

 

Indeed, Adalo's data support is a little more complicated when it comes to API integration. What's more, it presents a large number of options on its  visual interface that require more time to grasp and explore its full potential.



Adalo's strenghts and weaknesses of Adalo

 

Now you'll discover the  Adalo's strenght and weaknesses.


Adalo Pricing

 

Adalo offers up to five monthly packages to meet a variety of needs, with advanced functionalities. Like Glide, Adalo offers a free package that lets you create unlimited test applications while adding database and responsive collections on all screens.

 

The Startup package appeals more to entrepreneurs who are just starting out, at a cost of $45. You can publish an application, take 10,000 monthly actions on the application with a single editor. Startup helps you publish your application directly on the web.

 

The Professional package, which is the most popular, is priced at $65. It includes all the benefits of the previous offer, plus customized integrations, a better design version, the geolocation option and the ability to deploy your solution on the App Store.

 

The Team service pack, suitable for agencies and freelancers, costs $200 per month. It lets you design up to five applications, chain 100,000 actions and benefit from the range of features of the Pro package. What's more, you become a privileged member of the Adalo team and can integrate Xano and other advanced features.

 

Finally, Adalo's last offer is Enterprise for $250. The advantage with this offer is that it includes all the above additions with a publishing capacity of 10 applications. In addition, it includes an unlimited number of editors, 500 gigs of storage capacity, and other special add-ons for users.



Adalo use-cases

 

With Adalo, you can create a variety of customized applications to meet different needs.

 

  • Clean database showcase: You can create an elegant application that serves as a showcase for a database. This solution is suitable for real estate, product presentations, recipes, or any other data collection. The application will benefit from a user interface that displays information in an attractive, user-friendly way.
  • Facebook-like functionality: If you want to create an application with Facebook-like functionality, Adalo gives you the flexibility you need. You can integrate features such as content publishing, comments, likes and user profiles. In other words, Adalo lets you clone existing applications.
  • E-commerce platform: Adalo also lets you develop an online sales application. You can set up a shopping cart, a secure payment process, and give users the option of having a seller's account.


Comparison of key features and differences

 

Through this comparison, you'll be able to easily use both tools and understand how you can use them for your needs. Glide Vs Adalo: a clash of features, integrations, templates, collaboration options and more.

Customization capabilities and limits

 

In contrast, Glide and Adalo are more affordable tools for creating applications than if you have to deal with endless lines of code. Glide is very easy to get to grips with, because of its simplicity in connecting to databases. When designing, you don't have to worry about the interface design of your application, as Glide takes care of designing the frontend automatically.

 

What's more, Glide lets you create your application and get it up and running as soon as possible. However, the tool does have some limitations when it comes to bringing more customization to your creation. This can be a constraint for those looking for a unique application with more advanced functionalities.

 

As for Adalo, although it has a drag-and-drop editor, it has a powerful customization options enough to help designer to customize your application as you wish. With its integrated database, this doesn't prevent you from connecting it to external data sources. In fact, over 20 million pieces of data are processed daily on Adalo applications.

 

In terms of customization, Adalo offers you a palette of elements including colors, different fonts, icons, the addition of images, and much more. As for the backend, you can create your database from scratch or connect it to other external tools such as Xano or Zapier. We'll come back to this in detail in the integration section.



Learning curve

 

Glide is a no-code tool accessible to anyone wishing to create their first digital solution. With Glide, you don't need to build up any programming experience before starting to design an application. Its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface eliminates all constraints.

 

Applications designed with Glide meet the highest standards of professionalism, allowing you to start your creation from pre-existing templates. But you can also make a few modifications to add your own personal touch. It has a very short learning curve, making it simpler and faster to design applications without coding experience.

 

With Adalo, on the other hand, the learning curve is a little steeper than with some no-code application creation tools. This is because it presents a slightly more complex process for integrating databases. Glide, on the other hand, takes just a few clicks.

 

It goes without saying that Adalo has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. On the other hand, the difficulties become more acute when you need to exploit external data, which necessarily requires an  API knowledge.

 

All in all, the learning curve may seem more demanding at first. But very quickly, it can be rewarded with greater flexibility and the ability to create customized applications to suit your specific needs.



Collaboration and project sharing

 

Glide promotes collaboration on its platform to speed up the work process and make data more accessible to users. Collaboration focuses on creating user-specific experiences within an application.

 

For reasons of security and confidentiality, you can assign roles with restrictions based on the user table: private or public. For example, if you have a project in progress, only private users will have access to certain data, and will modify it if possible.

 

On Adalo, you can also add members of your team to the application under construction. However, the only major constraint you encounter when collaborating on Adalo is that you don't have the option of working in real time. As a result, each member will have to be careful about every action he or she takes to avoid creating bugs or other conflicts.

 

Unlike Glide, which assigns roles, here everyone you add has full access to your application. So, beforehand, you only need to give access to people you trust, as Adalo doesn't offer a restore option. However, as the owner, you have full rights to manage members and delete them if necessary.



Templates selections

 

Glide and Adalo offer a plethora of templates on which you can base your application development. Each offers templates in a variety of categories for easy customization. On Glide, for example, you'll find application templates suitable for managing inspections and task automation. You'll also find solutions for managing deliveries and sales, inventories, etc.

 

With Adalo, you can find templates to use for a real estate application. This solution can be adapted for products and services, or for other databases. You can find adalo pre-built templates for e-commerce applications, directories to manage information, and other applications for other purposes. Adalo also provides applications that you can clone.

 

These include mobile applications such as Facebook and coaching applications. What's more, you can even clone the entire Product Hunt model, a community platform that enables tech enthusiasts and experts to share and discover new products.



Integrations and automations

 

Many individuals and companies use Glide not only because of its simplicity. It's also due to its ability to connect easily to applications and other data sources. With Glide's integration functionality, you can integrate multiple external data sources without time-consuming processes.

 

You can connect platforms such as Google Sheets, Airtable, Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint and BigQuery. Another feature of Glide is the ability to create a table to import data into Excel or CSV files.

 

Tables are at the heart of Glide's operation, helping you to customize names, columns and data. You can even duplicate tables and link them to other applications. Glide integrations help you synchronize and automate data management

 

Once you've retrieved the key, you'll launch API requests that look like this: "Authorization: Bearer [Your API key]" and "Content-Type: application/json." Data integration on Adalo is not as straightforward as on Glide. You must first understand how the Adalo API works, and the only way to access it is to subscribe to a subscription service.

 

Next, you'll need to generate an API key, which you can access in your application's parameters or by clicking on the three dots in the names of your collections: API document. It may seem complex at first, but with the help of the available documentation and the Adalo community, you'll get the hang of it.

 

Once you've got to grips with the API, you can now connect your application to a wide range of external data sources to make it more powerful with advanced functionalities. Among others, Adalo makes it easy to connect to Google Sheet, Xano, Make, Airtable, Hubspot, Stripe, Gmail, Zoom, Mixpanel and many other applications and data sources.



Conclusion: The final verdict on Glide vs Adalo

 

The choice between Glide and Adalo will mainly depend on your specific No Code application development needs. Both tools have distinct advantages and disadvantages that you need to consider.

 

For example, if your aim is to quickly create a simple application, without having to embark on a long and complex learning process, then Glide might be the better choice. It offers ease of use, easy integration of data sources, and well-managed collaboration.

 

On the other hand, if you're looking for advanced UI customization, specific functionality and are prepared to invest time in learning, Adalo proves to be a more appropriate option. It offers considerable flexibility in terms of integrations and customization, although it does require a longer learning curve.

 

When it comes to pricing, both platforms offer a variety of plans to suit different budgets and requirements. As described in the "Comparison of pricing plans" section, all you have to do is choose according to your solution-seeking needs.



Embrace the future with us. Contact our Agency for all your No code projects.

 

At Noxcod, our expertise in no-code app development with Glide and Adalo ensures the perfect balance of simplicity, customization and flexibility for your no-code mobile app management project. We understand both tools to meet your specific needs for powerful digital solutions to better manage all your business activities.

 

This will give you more control with the integration of customized data sources. So what app creation project are you secretly nurturing? We're ready to help you make it a reality right now.

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Fiacre HOUNDJAHOUE
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