Licensed for Distribution

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application

Platforms
Published 31 December 2022 - ID G00759450 - 50 min read

By Paul Vincent, Kimihiko Iijima, and 3 more

LCAPs provide rapid application delivery to enterprises for all but the most complex use
cases. They support varying personas ranging from citizen developers to central IT
professionals. Applications and software engineering leaders should use this research to
compare and contrast leading vendors in the global market.

Market Definition
An Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform is an application platform that is used to rapidly
develop and deploy custom applications by abstracting and minimizing or replacing the coding
needed in development. At a minimum, an LCAP must include:

Low-code capabilities (such as a model-driven or graphical programming approach with

scripting) to develop a complete application

Support for developing applications consisting of user interfaces, business logic, workflow and
data services

Simplified application test, deployment and management

Optional capabilities include:

Catalog support for components, connectors and templates

Custom API generation for the creation of business services

Front-end user experiences beyond web user interface (UI)

Business process automation and management

Event-driven architecture support

AI-augmented development assistance

Management of large-scale distributed development teams

 Citizen developer support

On-premises and multicloud support

Enterprise platform characteristics include support for high performance, availability and
scalability of developed applications, disaster recovery, security, API access to and from
enterprise and third-party cloud services, usage monitoring, service-level agreements (SLAs), and
the provision of technical support and training from the vendor.

Enterprise developers cover professional developers in both central IT and business IT roles, as
well as fusion teams of specialists supporting citizen developers.

Advanced capabilities offered by some enterprise LCAPs include:

Complex business process automation and management

Event-driven architecture

AI-augmented development techniques

Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application
Platforms
Source: Gartner (August 2022)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Alibaba

Alibaba Cloud is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is the YiDA platform. Its
market differentiation is based on a no-code approach to create forms, processes, integrations,
reports, and portal display pages.

Alibaba Cloud’s operations are mostly focused in China and APAC, with a small presence in Japan
and the Middle East and North American regions. Its relatively large client base is mainly small-to-
medium enterprises with most of its clients in the manufacturing, education, retail and technology
sectors.

Strengths
Overall viability: The paying customer base using YiDA is large compared to other LCAP
vendors, while the nonpaying customer base is exponentially larger with the potential to be
 converted into paying customers. Alibaba Cloud also has offices and partners in every major
region.

Customer experience: YiDA users mention features such as the drag-and-drop functionality,
data recording and process auditing are straightforward. The customer experience rating for
YIDA in Gartner Peer Insights is relatively high compared to other vendors.

Platform extensibility: YiDA has an application center, a template center with hundreds of
application templates, and a solution repository. It also offers a component center and
connector factory enterprises where customers can save the component section as a private
module in the custom page designer on YiDA platform.

Cautions
Geographic strategy and marketing: A majority of Alibaba Cloud’s customers are based within
mainland China, with only a small percentage in other regions. While Alibaba Cloud states that
it has offices in multiple regions, it has no sales and marketing strategy specifically targeting
regions outside of China.

Innovation: YiDA does provide some AI-augmented development — such as the intelligent
layout of page components during application design — but capabilities such as native mobile
support and a developer forum remain roadmap entries.

DevOps practices: YiDA offers a self-built testing tool that supports visualized orchestration
that is lacking compared to other LCAP vendors. YiDA lacks data model design tooling found in
other LCAP vendor platforms.

Appian

Appian is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is the Appian Platform. Appian’s
market differentiation is based on its full-stack, low-code automation capabilities, which are
focused on complex case management and business processes. It offers design studios for both
professional and citizen developers, which encourages greater collaboration between business
and IT by including workflows, approvals and change management for different developer
personas.

Appian’s operations are based in North America and Europe, and it has an increasing presence in
the APAC region. It targets large enterprises, mostly in the finance and government sectors.

Strengths
Business logic and workflow: Appian provides strong automation capabilities — including
business process automation, robotic process automation, intelligent document processing,
and process mining — backed up with data fabric, and B2C portal capabilities. It provides a
single-vendor solution for multiple digital business technology needs as a result.

Security and operations: Appian supports multiregion high availability, Fedramp compliance,
data encryption and a variety of certifications. It also supports container-based deployments
 on Kubernetes and horizontal scalability for larger use cases.

Ecosystem: Appian’s sales are increasingly partner-driven, assisted by its specific vertical
market offerings such as SaaS for Workforce Safety. It now has 15,000 certified developers. Its
component store is the Appian AppMarket, which includes more than 700 listings covering
solutions, connectors, functions, task automations and other utilities.

Cautions
Product: Appian’s focus on delivering automation of complex scenarios means that some
customers report a steep learning curve and a need for specialized developer skills. Appian has
recently revised its integrated development environment to address these concerns.
Innovations around process mining and RPA are outside the remit of many application
development use cases and come at an extra cost to customers.

Sales execution and pricing: While Appian Community Edition has likely improved adoption,
clients are still reporting high pricing for platform usage. The new pricing model hierarchy of
application, platform and unlimited pricing is simpler, but still comes at a higher cost than most
other LCAP offerings.

Marketing strategy: Appian’s business process and low-code automation focus counts against
it in terms of market awareness for enterprise application development. This explains the
increasing partner-driven focus for sales and delivery, although it continues to grow organically
too.

Creatio

Creatio is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is Studio Creatio. Its market
differentiation is based on its workflow automation and no-code capabilities, which augment its
CRM SaaS offering, with a focus on customer-centric processes. Enterprises can use Studio
Creatio to rapidly build, manage, optimize and automate workflows, with the free Process
Designer for collaboration across teams.

Creatio’s operations are geographically distributed, with a presence among small and midsize
enterprises in the EMEA and North America regions. Its major customers tend to be from the
banking, finance, insurance, manufacturing and professional services sectors.

Strengths
Product strategy: Creatio has improved its single-environment approach for application
developers and an Application Hub for managing the development life cycle of low-code
applications. Its support for design systems like Figma and Adobe XD indicates enterprise
support beyond its developer persona target of business unit developers.

Marketing strategy: Creatio has hosted some innovative marketing events (175 in 2021) such
as its outdoor musical launch for the Creation Atlas release — as well as low-code marathons,
 white papers and webinars. It has also published a 250-page playbook on harnessing no-code
approaches.

Customer experience: Creatio has a customer care program to maximize customer success
with its platform, including resources like the assignment of a “customer success manager.”
The company supports university training programs as well as third-party trainers like Udemy.

Cautions
Product: Creatio is primarily a three-tier architecture business process automation tool. The
platform primarily focuses on workflow and case management types of applications. Its cloud
version has limitations (such as no support for development on external databases through its
Studio) although external data sources can be accessed via APIs.

Innovation: Creatio provides limited AI-assisted development. Its roadmap does, however,
include more customer development features for UX components using Angular, React or Vue,
as well as more BPMN2 support.

Business model: Most of Creatio’s customers are small and midsize enterprises, and its
existing CRM SaaS customers comprise a significant portion of its LCAP customer base.
Further, Creatio is not unique in its focus on CRM SaaS and needs to differentiate itself from
other large SaaS+LCAP competitors.

Huawei

Huawei is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is Astro (formerly AppCube).
Its market differentiation is based on a no-code approach for information-based applications
developed by citizen developers, alongside a low-code, model-driven system for workflow and
more complex applications.

Huawei’s operations are mostly focused in China, APAC, and Latin America but it has no presence
in North America. Its large client base is split evenly across all sizes of enterprises with a client
focus on the government and manufacturing sectors.

Strengths
Platform ecosystem: Huawei is a major vendor with many other services (13 major cloud
services and 30,000 APIs are supported), of which Astro forms part. Astro developers have
access to Huawei’s IoT, database and serverless and AI technology stacks as well as more
esoteric technologies such as digital twin models and blockchain.

Product strategy: Huawei’s target is to become a one-stop shop for low-code development.
This includes following the popular and successful “SaaS as a platform” model supporting
extensions to its various SaaS offerings in the service, marketing and e-commerce sectors.

Sales execution: Huawei is not only a major cloud provider but has close to 2,000 paying
customers for its Astro LCAP and a growth rate of over 40% in revenue, despite its limited
geographic coverage.
Cautions
Application life cycle: Astro does not support interactions with external design systems, agile
frameworks, or other DevOps tooling. Instead, developers are expected to use their own
Codehub tooling for DevSecOps and stay within the Huawei ecosystem.

Vertical markets: Huawei focuses Astro on e-government and manufacturing use cases, which
may limit interest from other areas. However, this could be an advantage for specific supported
use cases such as IoT, education and smart city applications.

Geographic strategy: Huawei primarily supports customers in China and APAC, with limited
Astro usage outside of there and Latin America. Global clients will need to consider carefully
any local support arrangements, including systems integrator support, and that standard
pricing is only provided for the domestic China market.

Kintone

Kintone is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is the Kintone platform.
Kintone’s market differentiation is based on two factors: a no-code approach and collaboration
features (which enable citizen developers to jointly build workflows) and its large partner
ecosystem (which offers a wide range of extensions and plug-ins). Kintone continues to enhance
its integration and security capabilities for its marketplace.

Kintone’s operations are mostly focused in Japan, with a small direct presence in several other
APAC countries and in the U.S. Its clients tend to be small and midsize enterprises, with many
clients in the manufacturing and retail sectors.

Strengths
Sales execution and pricing: Kintone increased its customer base and license revenue
significantly during the past year, driven by business demand for no-code development and a
very aggressive pricing model. Its channel partners also played a significant role in this growth,
mainly in Japan, China and several other countries in the APAC region.

Customer experience: Kintone has received positive customer experience ratings on Gartner
Peer Insights relative to other LCAP vendors. Its ratings for evaluation and contracting and for
integration and deployment have increased year over year.

Overall viability: Both Kintone and its parent company, Cybozu, are profitable and capable of
funding future expansion. Kintone has established a healthy partner ecosystem, and its large
customer base provides a robust user support community.

Cautions
Innovation: Kintone does not plan to offer native AI-assisted development capabilities on its
platform. Compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, it lags in supporting advanced
professional development features, intelligent automation, integration and UX capabilities.
 Industry strategy: Kintone does not provide targeted solutions for industry-specific use cases.
It does offer industry-specific templates. The vast majority of the applications developed on the
platform are for employee-facing use cases only.

Operations and geographic strategy: Kintone’s geographic reach and ambition is limited. It has
yet to gain significant market traction outside of APAC and especially Japan. It has an offering
based on AWS infrastructure in the U.S. but remains mostly unknown.

Mendix

Mendix is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is the Mendix Platform. Mendix is a
subsidiary of Siemens. Its market differentiation is based on its combined support for both citizen
and professional developers, its library of composable assets for different business verticals
available from the Mendix Marketplace as App Services and Solutions, and specific targeting of
independent software vendors (ISVs). Mendix supports multicloud, on-premises deployments and
multiexperience development.

Mendix’s operations are largely based in Europe, but its headquarters is in the U.S. and has an
increasing presence in APAC regions. Its customers are distributed across all sizes of enterprise,
mostly in the finance, professional services and manufacturing sectors.

Strengths
Innovation: Mendix continues to provide advanced enterprise low-code capabilities that benefit
new use cases, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins. These include Mendix
Data Hub for data and event services, and MxAssist Performance Bot, which proactively
detects modeling and architectural anti-patterns that can impact app performance.

Product: Mendix scored highly across most key capabilities, especially on UX design,
integration support and governance. Its Gartner Peer Insights rating for product capabilities
also affirms this. The vendor’s support for fusion teams via different editors simplifies citizen
development for more sophisticated enterprise applications.

Operations: Flexible deployment options, multicloud support and a release strategy with
backward compatibility help to ensure reliability and resilience for Mendix customers. Mendix
invests in support for additional region and self-service features, and it remains focused on
security and application development governance.

Cautions
Marketing strategy: Mendix’s go-to-market strategy is relying more on its parent Siemens
(Siemens acquired Mendix in 2018). While this connection is driving much of Mendix’s growth,
it may not be enough. Gartner speaks with clients who see Mendix as primarily driven by
Siemens, such as for industrial use cases. To improve its broader marketing strategy, Mendix is
making an effort to build new marketing partnerships with cloud providers, ISVs and provide
more coverage for use cases with SAP.
 Geographic strategy: Mendix has had less success expanding its market presence outside of
North America and Europe compared with some of its competitors. However, the vendor has
been increasing headcount in its APAC offices to build a stronger presence in that region.

Vertical industries: While Mendix is a fully featured, general-purpose application development

platform that would suit most vertical industries, significant preference is still given to a limited
number of business verticals such as finance and manufacturing.

Microsoft

Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is Microsoft Power Apps —
including Dataverse data service, Power Pages (was Power Apps portals), and Power Automate —
which are included in Power Apps licenses. Power Apps typically targets citizen developers, but
also offers a broad range of code-first tools for professional developers, such as publishing a
custom API in a single click from Azure APIM, registering a custom control built in React or
TypeScript with the Power Apps Component Framework, or publishing a custom AI model to the
platform.

Microsoft’s operations are geographically diversified, and it has clients across all industries and
enterprise sizes. We estimate that Microsoft Power Apps maintains the largest user base of any
LCAP due to the number of enterprise users of Microsoft 365 and Dynamics, and their partial
entitlements to the Power Platform.

Strengths
Business model: Some Power Apps capabilities are included in most Microsoft 365 and
Dynamics 365 enterprise plans. Office 365 users can access standard prebuilt connectors,
utilize custom connectors in Teams, and build on Dataverse for Teams. Dynamics 365 users
can utilize all connector types, build on Dataverse, and create stand-alone Power Apps in their
licensed Dynamics 365 environments. Open-sourcing Power Fx has made the low-code Power
Apps and Excel language available for open contribution and usage by the broader GitHub
community.

Product strategy: Power Apps targets API-driven development with more than 800 connectors
for many common enterprise applications and has a curated marketplace of approved
integrations. External connectors can be developed and consumed, but only over REST APIs.
The full version of Microsoft Power Platform gets access to premium connectors and support
for custom API services and OpenAPI Specification. The Power Apps Developer Plan is a free
development environment that enables users to connect to any data source using custom or
out-of-the-box connectors.

Platform extensibility: AppSource is the publicly available app and component store for
Microsoft. It includes over 3,600 solutions, which can contain platform components, flows,
process, table/schema, logic, bots, connectors and reports. Microsoft also supports
community-driven development where developers can publish extensions and tools to
 AppSource as well as purely community-driven initiatives such as PCF Gallery, which has an
active professional developer and ISV community.

Cautions
Pricing: Power Apps is included at no additional cost with every Office 365 license for personal
productivity, but Gartner clients continue to report concerns about pricing and licensing
complexity, especially around the licensed version of Power Apps required to access enterprise
data sources and applications. Professional developers wanting to extend to Azure features
like Azure DevOps will need to license those separately.

Mobile deployment: Power Apps provides a responsive application UI for canvas, model-driven
and portal development, but requires a “wrap” application in order to distribute mobile apps via
public app stores. This uses AD authentication, which means a poor match for B2C use cases.

Integration and APIs: Power Apps applications do not generate APIs for other applications to
integrate with. However the underlying Microsoft Dataverse data service, if used, does provide
APIs, and Microsoft Power Automate can be used to integrate between applications and
connectors. Power Apps can provide webhooks to external services via Dataverse. Note that
Dataverse access requires either a premium connector, or for Power Apps to be hosted in
Teams, under current licensing terms.

Newgen

Newgen is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is the NewgenONE Digital
Transformation Platform. Newgen’s market differentiation is based on its breadth of capabilities
for automating complex processes and content services at scale. It uses modern microservices-
based architecture and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to deliver business
applications with process automation and content management capabilities.

Newgen’s operations are mainly based in India, but it has a growing presence in the wider APAC
region, EMEA and North America. Its clients tend to be large and midsize organizations in the
financial services, insurance and government sectors.

Strengths
Business logic and workflow: Newgen provides a robust platform to automate complex
business processes. It follows Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and decision
model and notation (DMN) standards for process modeling and decision modeling,
respectively. It also offers AI-enabled document processing capabilities such as intelligent data
capture, document classification and automated document generation.

Sales execution and pricing: Newgen continues to offer flexible licensing options, including
perpetual, subscription and value-based pricing (that is, pricing associated with business value
metrics or outcomes). The platform is also sold by its global systems integrator partners.
 Customer satisfaction: On Gartner Peer Insights, Newgen customers expressed a high degree
of satisfaction with the quality and availability of the vendor’s end-user training. Evaluation and
contracting are also rated highly for this market.

Cautions
Platform ecosystem: The ecosystem around Newgen’s platform continues to lag behind its
competitors. The vendor’s marketplace is essentially a portal that consists of a few prebuilt
applications alongside some training materials and implementation guidelines.

Product: Newgen has limited native support for testing of applications built on the platform. Its
low-code capabilities are focused more on automation than application development, without
much separation of tooling for different developer persona.

Geographic strategy: Newgen’s primary customer base is in India, the Middle East and Africa.
However, it now has a growing physical presence and a number of customers in the North
America and Europe regions. Prospective clients in the U.S. and Western Europe need to
evaluate Newgen’s local support and partner abilities to meet their requirements.

Oracle

Oracle is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is Oracle APEX, previously known
as Application Express, and part of the Oracle Database business. It is available as a database
feature or as the APEX service on Oracle Cloud. Its market differentiation is based on its use of
Oracle Autonomous Database for scalability and high availability (in the cloud or on-premises), its
use of SQL as its expression language, and its low entry costs, including a free tier.

Oracle’s operations are based in the U.S., but it is represented across all regions. Its customer
base is primarily large and very large enterprises across all vertical sectors. Midsize and small
enterprise markets are generally managed through channel partners and inside sales.

Strengths
Overall viability: Oracle continues to be the third-largest vendor in application infrastructure and
middleware services, and its database remains the leading database solution for enterprises.
Oracle has a proven track record in revenue retention, growth and profitability. Its acquisition
and planned rewrite of Cerner’s systems, using APEX, highlights Oracle’s financial strength and
its commitment to the platform.

Sales execution and pricing: Oracle provides APEX as a value-added service to its database
customers, along with APEX Cloud Service (which is priced per resource) through a network of
80,000 sales reps trained to sell APEX. As a result, APEX is the standard choice for the large
community of Oracle Database users.

Geographic strategy: Oracle is a multinational vendor that provides global support for its
solutions through 37 cloud regions (and seven more planned). It fosters an active, international
 APEX user community with 500,000 developers and 200 hosting and implementation partners
worldwide.

Cautions
Product: While APEX’s relationship to the Oracle Database can be beneficial, it can also
constrain the user’s ability to perform common tasks such as third-party database access
(outside of Oracle’s MySQL) and is missing basic business process orchestration (until 2022).
Customers’ success with APEX will vary with their use cases, as APEX’s architecture is
constrained to that of the parent database and its emphasis on SQL and stored procedures.

Native mobile support: While APEX supports responsive and progressive web apps, APEX does
not support native mobile app development for Android or iOS.

Innovation: Oracle has been slow to implement features on APEX that are commonly included
in other LCAPs. For example, a graphical application logic editor is not available, and
implementations for workflow and server-side JavaScript as an extension language arrived
much later than other LCAPs. The use of AI/ML to guide application development is limited to
the APEX Advisor tool for application verification testing.

OutSystems

OutSystems is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP is the OutSystems platform. Its market
differentiation is based on an evolutionary approach to software engineering where low-code
development can be used to produce applications and application components of any complexity.
This concept is supported by enterprise-level platform features and extensibility that boost
professional developer experience and productivity. OutSystems provides robust security,
multiexperience development and AI-augmented development capabilities to enhance the
application delivery process.

OutSystems’ operations are primarily in Europe and North America, but it has an increasing
presence in APAC. It has a high percentage of both small and large enterprise customers, which
tend to be in the banking, finance, insurance and professional services industries.

Strengths
Product: OutSystems offers advanced low-code capabilities such as AI-augmented
development, native plus third-party continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD),
application testing, enterprise agile planning, and governance. These capabilities support rapid
development of enterprise-grade applications.

Marketing execution: OutSystems runs both top-down and bottom-up engagement initiatives
including events for senior leaders (like thought leadership webinars, CIO roundtables and
clinics) as well as developer channels (like PODcasts, DeCoded, tech talks and demos). They
broaden the platform’s use cases and technical scope, optimize pricing and target global
systems integrators (GSIs) to position OutSystems as a solution for every business problem.
 Customer experience: OutSystems include a customer success program in every
subscriptions. This includes intensive training on a variety of topics with developer certification,
expert architecture guidance and strategic partnerships with major GSIs to deliver great
customer experience that is measured with publicly available CSAT ratings.

Cautions
Business model: OutSystems identifies and accepts the challenges of solving the most
complex business problems and becoming a comprehensive hyperautomation platform for
most, if not all, business domains. Fast-changing trends in the IT industry and fierce
competition in the LCAP market are pushing OutSystems to rely more on partners for all
aspects of its business operations. Its challenge in this environment is to maintain the
reliability, quality and security of its platform in the face of fast-growing third-party
contributions, dynamic use cases and variety of channels for customer engagement.

Vertical industries: OutSystems has no distinctive focus on industries or business verticals,

with specific industries targeted through partners and independent software vendors.
Customers seeking industry-specific domain expertise, native integrations or solution
accelerators may find that other LCAP vendors offer more direct solutions.

Marketing strategy: Public cloud and cloud-native concepts are notable parts of the
OutSystems marketing message, yet public cloud and associated technologies are identified by
most customers as mature requirements. Cloud-native concepts are accepted by Gartner
clients to be inherent to LCAP. One of the purposes of “low-code” is to abstract from the
underlying implementation, including public cloud services.

Pegasystems

Pega is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP is a part of the Pega Infinity platform, which
primarily competes in business process automation, but also offers multiexperience
development, CRM and robotic process automation (RPA) for enterprise workflows. Its market
differentiation is based on a full set of automation technologies, including process optimization,
digital experience APIs for B2C user interfaces, and separate citizen and professional developer
experiences.

Pega’s operations are geographically distributed and its customers tend to be large enterprises in
the banking, finance and insurance, telecom and healthcare sectors.

Strengths
Business logic and workflow: Pega’s strength lies in low-code development for process and
workflow automation using the Pega Infinity platform. Rules-driven, straight-through processing
or human-in-the-loop automations enable complex digital business applications, and can
involve process mining, RPA, AI-driven process optimization, and case management, albeit with
some of these at additional cost for most pricing plans.
 User experience: The Pega Cosmos design system, and multiexperience support using React
together with the updated digital experience API (DX-API) provide comprehensive user interface
capabilities. The DX-API in particular allows users to implement external design systems like
Sketch, Material and Fluent while using Pega’s model-driven authoring.

Product: Pega’s latest Infinity platform provides a cloud-native, multitenant, microservices-

based runtime architecture that can scale up and down, helping clients address use cases
more cost effectively. Pega is extending product coverage to B2B SaaS in 2022.

Cautions
Sales execution and pricing: Pega licensing costs continue to be a barrier to some customers
that want to extend usage in their organizations, and can be especially challenging for small
and midsize organizations, despite Pega’s tiered pricing model. Some Gartner clients also
complain of difficulties in negotiating with Pega.

Customer experience: Pega’s platform primarily targets complex enterprise applications.

Platform complexity causes some customers to report an increase in reliance on systems
integrators and scarce skills as well as occasional support challenges.

Marketing and sales strategies: Market awareness of Pega’s LCAP and low-code capabilities
(outside of hyperautomation and digital business technology areas) continues to trail that of its
main competitors in this Magic Quadrant. Pega’s recent innovations have mostly focused on
automation use cases, and it is still considered an expensive proprietary BPM solution by many
software engineering leaders.

Quickbase

Quickbase is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is the Quickbase platform.
Its market differentiation is based on its no-code application development for business-led
development initiatives including project management and system integration. Quickbase
positions itself as a no-code platform and prioritizes features for citizen developers and business
technologists. It participates in this Magic Quadrant because it supports low-code scenarios for
integration, application logic and user interface customization.

Quickbase’s operations are mostly focused in North America, with a small presence in the Europe
and APAC regions. Its relatively large client base tends to comprise smaller enterprises, but over
70% of its revenue is now from more midsize and larger enterprises. Quickbase increasingly
targets clients running projects in construction, real estate and facilities, public sector,
infrastructure and industrial equipment.

Strengths
Customer experience: While targeting business technologists and citizen developers,
Quickbase has achieved a high rating on Gartner Peer Insights. In particular, it is valued by
customers for integration, deployment, services and support. It has also responded to feedback
and developed new capabilities such as its dashboard builder.
 Product: Prebuilt, no-code implementation for specific use cases and data sources is available
for both citizen developers and business technologists, but Quickbase remains open for
advanced customizations and professional developers through Quickbase APIs.

Business model: Quickbase is not aiming to offer a no-code or low-code platform for general
purpose application development, but it delivers on its promise of automation for managing
complex projects. It has extended its product to better support this with asset management,
staff scheduling, and Gantt project displays.

Cautions
Operations: Quickbase leverages public cloud services from GCP and AWS, and has opened up
to integration with client applications running on-premises. But it still falls behind the Leaders
in this Magic Quadrant in terms of regional availability and public-cloud and cloud-native
capabilities.

Geographic strategy: Quickbase’s geographic reach is mostly limited to North America. It

currently has few customers outside of this region, and is building a channel to grow and
support customers outside North America through a mix of partners and in-region resources.

Vertical industries: Quickbase’s focus on a limited selection of vertical industries could be a

disadvantage for some customers compared to more IT-focused, cross-industry LCAPs that are
extending to include citizen development capabilities.

Retool

Retool is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is the Retool platform. Its
market differentiation is a low-code platform for professional developers. It offers drag-and-drop
app building combined with tooling using JavaScript, HTML, CSS and SQL. The data layer has a
library of native database and API integrations to connect to nearly anything with a REST or
GraphQL API.

Retool’s operations are mostly focused in North America, with smaller presences in the Europe
and APAC regions. Its relatively new and large client base tends to comprise small-to-midsize
enterprises. Most of Retool’s clients are in the technology sector, with some customers also from
retail, finance, healthcare and professional services sectors.

Strengths
Overall viability: Retool has established a very large paying customer base with an even larger
nonpaying contingent that provides the potential for conversion. Revenue growth YoY and total
funding raised puts Retool in a solid position currently.

Marketing strategy: Retool is targeting professional developers, a segment traditionally known

for its poor awareness of or interest in LCAP, but a market that has potential for growth.
Increasing interest from software engineering leaders in improving productivity as well as low-
 code approaches addressing more technical app use cases will increase interest in this
segment.

User experience design: Multiple customers state in Gartner Peer Insights that a key driver to
use Retool is its drag-and-drop UI components. Users can make application design choices in
Retool by customizing out-of-the-box components (using built-in customizability options,
JavaScript or CSS) and managing the layout through drag-and-drop design.

Cautions
Product (offering) strategy: Retool targets developer audiences using low-code approaches to
building internal software. The consequence of this is a level of tooling that is too complex for
citizen developers. This makes it an unsuitable choice for enterprises seeking low-code tools
for fusion teams that involve business technologists, or for B2C application use cases.

Development productivity: Developers must use Retool’s query editor rather than their own
preferred IDE. Feedback in Gartner Peer Insights mentions that editing more complex apps can
feel slower. Building highly performant, complex apps may also require knowledge of SQL.

Innovation: Retool does not provide some of the features that other LCAP vendors offer, such
as native AI services and AI-augmented development, and its built-in database is poorly
documented and likely rarely used. Retool does not currently support external templates or
design systems. Instead, it offers custom components where users can create a React
component or import a component from an external library.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is Salesforce Platform. This is a
suite of low-code and conventional development tooling, ranging from no-code visual designers
(such as Lightning App Builder and Flow Builder) to IDEs for scripting and 3GL support (such as
the Salesforce Apex language). Salesforce’s operations are geographically distributed, and its
clients tend to be medium to large enterprises that are already using its CRM products. Salesforce
is focusing its Platform investments on Salesforce Flow, Lightning App Builder and web
components and numerous minor enhancements.

Strengths
Industry strategy: Salesforce offers 12 industry cloud solutions, all of which use its LCAP
capabilities for extensibility. Many partners also use the Salesforce LCAP to create industry-
specific modules and applications for customers.

Market responsiveness: Salesforce consistently unveils new capabilities in three annual

releases (Spring, Summer and Winter) and releases patches throughout the year. It also tends
to release platform capabilities into developer preview and beta stages in advance of general
availability. New capabilities for Salesforce Flow, such as Flow Orchestration, demonstrate its
alignment with market demands.
 Platform ecosystem: The Salesforce marketplace (AppExchange) with over 7,000 resources,
and its community (Trailhead) supporting 74,000 developers, comprise an ecosystem that is
unrivaled in the LCAP market. The Salesforce ecosystem is a major value-added resource for
customers looking to adopt its LCAP.

Cautions
Lagging innovation: Other leading LCAPs provide AI-augmented development, yet Salesforce
does not offer this capability in its platform. Its newer investments in low-code DevOps tooling
also lag some of the Leaders in ease of use (mentioned in Peer Insights). When Salesforce
announces innovations, it can take nearly a year before these features are fully released, as
with Salesforce Functions.

Complex environment: The Salesforce Platform has a fragmented approach to supporting logic
and workflow. There is a loose collection of differing workflow tools, including Einstein bots,
Flow Orchestration, industry workflows from Vlocity OmniScript and add-ons in AppExchange.
On Gartner Peer Insights, Salesforce received its lowest ratings for challenges in deploying the
complex development environment, with low-code DevOps a continued roadmap topic.

Pricing: Salesforce has set a goal of making customer procurement transactions easier,
simplifying some of the terms on its order forms, and introducing consumption-based
offerings. However, some Gartner clients express concerns over Salesforce’s relatively high
prices and its myriad options (such as for environments and security options) which can be
complex to navigate as the application use cases grow.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its LCAP offering is App Engine, which is part of
the Creator Workflows offering and part of the Now Platform alongside its integration and
automation components. It is licensed either for extending its SaaS or for new applications, and
has a ServiceNow Store app marketplace. ServiceNow’s market differentiation is based on the
wide set of platform capabilities that power its SaaS offerings, and its support for fusion team
collaboration, business processes, workflows and case management.

ServiceNow’s operations are geographically distributed, and its customers tend to be large
enterprises, primarily with IT organizations that are also ServiceNow ITSM customers.

Strengths
Customer experience: Gartner Peer Insights has reported an increase in satisfaction with
ServiceNow and few complaints, matching Gartner client inquiries. ServiceNow continues to
grow its staff and geographic coverage to support its customers, and has 640,000 members in
its Now Community.

Sales execution: As a rapidly growing SaaS vendor, ServiceNow has continued to exploit its
“SaaS as a platform” roots to sell App Engine to a large number of organizations for new
business applications, resulting in high business growth.
 Market responsiveness: ServiceNow has boosted its ecosystem with over 3,000 apps available,
two-thirds of which are from external sources. It is moving into wider automation use cases
with its Celonis partnership and added RPA capabilities, which will also support its initiative
about assisting SAP modernization.

Cautions
Industry strategy: ServiceNow has customers across multiple industries, but many of its
traditional App Engine developers remain in IT, with few Gartner clients reporting citizen
development or fusion team usage. ServiceNow is addressing industry support with a new
solution program for specific industries and applications with systems integrators, but it is too
early to identify whether this is having a big impact on increasing adoption.

Platform strategy: ServiceNow’s focus on workflow and business processes has led it into
direct competition with mainstream business process automation vendors that have more
sophisticated support for concepts like integration with process analysis tools, and better
focus on business developers as a developer community. ServiceNow’s roadmap continues to
try and address this for more complex process and case management use cases.

Pricing: Gartner Peer Insights reports issues with rigid licensing and high costs, and Gartner
clients have indicated high variations in pricing in the past. ServiceNow has continued to
simplify its pricing structure throughout 2021 and 2022.

Unqork

Unqork is a Niche vendor in this Magic Quadrant. The Unqork Platform provides a no-code, single-
tenant architecture of solutions delivered through declarative assertions in a drag-and-drop
interface. Privately held and founded only in 2017, Unqork has targeted Global 1000 businesses,
and has initially focused on insurance, financial services and governments, but is currently
expanding into high-tech, retail, manufacturing and professional services. Largely through global
partners, including EY and KPMG, Unqork is expanding its footprint into Europe and Asia.
Composability (“bring your own component”) and AI-assisted configuration are two areas of
significant investment focus for Unqork.

Strengths
Productivity: Current customers on Peer Insights cite Unqork as “a next-generation platform,”
with ease of use and speed to deliver/time to market as key positives, once developers
negotiate the “mindset shift” to no-code development.

Momentum: Privately held, VC-backed Unqork completed Series C funding round in October
2020 raising $207 million for a valuation of $2 billion. To date, Unqork has already raised $415
million from investors, while realizing 99% YoY revenue growth in the last fiscal year.

Innovation: Unqork has evolved a model of product engineering rapidly extending the platform
to support new use cases. The current roadmap adds a software development kit (SDK) to
allow professional developers to extend Unqork directly. Unqork also invests in productivity
 features like formula autocomplete and real-time configuration analysis, laying a foundation for
predictive configuration powered by AI/ML. Unqork features bidirectional integration with
enterprise agile planning tools using out-of-the box plug-in components.

Cautions
Ecosystem: Unqork is a small and ambitious startup with aggressive go-to-market, rapid
growth in two verticals, a nascent developer community, and only a small fraction of the
customer base of LCAP Magic Quadrant Leaders. The Unqork Marketplace — which offers
primarily Unqork-developed applications, templates, integrations and snippets — is only one
year old, and considerably smaller than its competitors.

Vertical focus: Unqork was designed specifically for highly regulated industries like insurance
and financial services. Despite this focus, Unqork is currently well-established in only two
verticals: financial services and government. However, Unqork risks spreading itself too thin
pursuing other verticals (such as high-tech, retail and manufacturing) with comparatively lower
levels of partner support.

Pricing: Unqork offers three pricing tiers: standard, enterprise and business critical, which are
all consumption-based on a per-transaction basis. This means that costs grow with usage, with
at least one report of ROI becoming a challenge for more complex use cases.

Zoho

Zoho is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Zoho Creator Platform is Zoho’s low-code application
platform for custom workflows and applications, and is also used by some of its SaaS customers
for solution augmentation. It differentiates in the market with cloud-native capabilities such as
unified analytics and process analysis while targeting users who are less inclined to pay the
higher subscription rates of larger vendors.

Zoho is privately owned and its operations are geographically distributed and it primarily serves
customers in the SME market (less than 1,000 employees) but targets larger organizations. Its
strengths are in manufacturing, professional services, technology and education.

Strengths
Product: Zoho Creator is a mature platform that supports diverse developer personas for
multiexperience application development as well as business processes. It provides graphical
process, data and UI designers as well as a low-code application development language,
Deluge, along with support for Java, JavaScript, XPath and Node.js.

Market understanding: Zoho targeted Creator for custom applications outside of its SaaS
offerings, but is increasing its footprint amongst its SaaS customers. It provides low-cost
access to enterprise-class features such as multiregion and multicloud/on-premises
deployments and backups, vertical and horizontal autoscaling, and rich application
performance monitoring. It also plans to add the necessary governance abilities to establish
developer guardrails to administer fusion teams.
 Innovation: Zoho provides some LCAP innovations around AI support for data, through to
extensibility via serverless functions for pro-code development. Its process blueprint feature is
indicative of the merger of business-process-centric and low-code development features.
Zoho’s roadmap is extensive compared with many other LCAPs, and addresses automation
(including RPA), multiexperience (including augmented and virtual reality), collaboration, testing
and governance.

Cautions
Business model: Despite its enterprise features, Zoho remains successful but entrenched in
the small and midsize enterprise market, and is largely unseen by many Gartner clients despite
its technology assets.

Marketing execution: Zoho’s marketing reflects its business model and lacks visibility with
potential enterprise customers. It has invested in promotional activities including events
(Zoholics) and content (Decode), but as yet has struggled to increase its mind share among
enterprise customers for LCAP.

Process and business logic: While Zoho Creator provides visual process and decision models,
it does not support the relevant enterprise standards such as BPMN that would allow
collaboration with other enterprise tooling. However, it plans to add more BPMN-based
elements and practices to the platform in future, and supports business logic in serverless
functions.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added
We updated our 2022 business inclusion criteria to better represent the balance between financial
performance, customer adoption and developer usage. Based on the changes, the following
additional vendors qualified for this year’s evaluation:

Alibaba

Huawei

Retool

Unqork

Zoho
Dropped
No vendors were dropped this year.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion, each LCAP vendor must:

1. Demonstrate a go-to-market strategy with specific pricing for its low-code application platform
for cross-industry or general-purpose application development:

The LCAP must not be used only (or mainly) for building industry-specific applications, and it
must not be only a product bundled within some other solution or platform.

The LCAP must support development and deployment of applications by professional

developers in both central IT and lines of business — not just for citizen developers.

2. Provide an LCAP offering with both no-code and low-code capabilities to:

Develop, version, test, deploy, execute, administer, monitor and manage the applications and
their relevant artifacts.

Embed data storage features without relying on additional procured services (in other words, it
must include a database).

Support the design of data schema and application logic.

Create rich application UIs (not only a forms builder or building an administration UI, for
example).

Enable the invocation of external third-party services via APIs or event topics.

Support some automation of platform patching and versioning.

Provide single-step deployment across environments (including development, test, staging and
production).

Access a platform repository or marketplace for sharing components, modules, connectors

and templates.

3. Offer an enterprise LCAP aimed at enterprise-class projects that provides:

High availability and disaster recovery.

Secure access to applications.

Technical support to customers.

Third-party application access to application logic or data, via APIs or event topics.
In addition to the above market and technical criteria, each vendor must meet the
following business criteria:

1. Size: The vendor must, by end of 31 March 2022, fulfill one of the following size requirement
combinations:

LCAP license and/or subscription revenue of at least $50 million for LCAP over the previous
year, and at least 100 paying enterprise customer organizations (of at least 1,000
employees) for its LCAP offering, excluding other related product offerings.

LCAP license and/or subscription revenue of at least $20 million for LCAP over the previous
year, and at least 5,000 paying enterprise customer organizations for its LCAP offering,
excluding other related product offerings.

LCAP developer community of more than 100,000 developers using the LCAP across all
customers.

2. Growth: The vendor must have at least 20% year-over-year growth in revenue for the previous
year for LCAP licenses and subscriptions, excluding professional services or other related
product offerings, in the past year ending 31 March 2022.

3. International presence: The vendor must have direct customers (that is, not through resellers)
in three of the following geographies:

North America

South America

Europe

Middle East and Africa

China

Japan/Asia/Pacific

We exclude vendors for any one of the following reasons:

Require a specific, licensed, third-party component or product that is not already resold into
their platform — that is, branded, sold and supported directly by the vendor.

Only sell their platform with, and for the use of, their professional services and consultants.

Require the purchase and/or installation of other unrelated products or platforms offered by
the same vendor (such as a CRM application or content management system).
 Did not market a generally available product prior to 2021 that was described as a distinct
LCAP offering (for example, a SaaS vendor that provided a low-code tool as part of its SaaS
license only and separated it out in 2021).

Do not offer a commercially supported enterprise offering — that is, they only offer the platform
as open-source software.

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Gartner’s weightings for Ability to Execute emphasize product and sales execution/pricing
criteria.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Low

Customer Experience Medium

Operations Low

Source: Gartner (August 2022)

Completeness of Vision
Gartner’s weightings for Completeness of Vision emphasize offering/product strategy and
innovation criteria.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Low

Source: Gartner (August 2022)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
Enterprise LCAP Leaders demonstrate both strong execution (particularly in terms of business
performance) and a strong vision (in terms of product and go-to-market strategies). These
vendors stand out in a highly competitive, global market and serve a wide range of organizations
and application use cases with their robust LCAP offerings. This year’s Leaders are again Mendix
and OutSystems, and the SaaS platform vendors (whose LCAP complements their SaaS
offerings) Microsoft, Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Challengers
Enterprise LCAP Challengers demonstrate strength in execution but lack the vision of Leaders
(especially in offering and go-to-market strategies for broader use cases and markets). Such
vendors have shown strong execution in their respective focus areas and are expanding their
customer base. However, they have not demonstrated the vision required to expand their offering
beyond their core customers to serve different types of buyers and needs. This year’s only
Challenger is Oracle, whose database-oriented platform is still playing catchup with the Leaders in
areas such as workflow capabilities.

Visionaries
Enterprise LCAP Visionaries demonstrate a strong vision, but less so in execution as an
application platform. This year’s Visionaries are Appian, Pega and Zoho, who also all compete in
business process automation. Appian and Pega especially provide low-code automation
platforms covering many digital business technologies, while Zoho is more known for its SaaS
capabilities. There are also many smaller specialist vendors not in this Magic Quadrant that have
compelling vision and specific use case support, and ought to be considered if execution track
record is not a priority for evaluation.

Niche Players
Enterprise LCAP Niche Players are vendors that focus on a specific area of the market or have a
regional geographic footprint. While they have not demonstrated the strongest Vision or Ability to
Execute in application platforms relative to other vendors we evaluated, qualifying for this Magic
Quadrant is an accomplishment in itself (versus the hundreds of others that market their products
as LCAPs). Niche Players in LCAP may also be high performers in other areas such as business
process automation (like Creatio, Newgen and Unqork), content services (Newgen), professional
development (Retool), and citizen development (Kintone and Quickbase), and can be more
suitable for specific application use cases. Of particular note is the qualification of China-focused
LCAPs from Alibaba and Huawei. Therefore this year’s Niche Players are Alibaba, Creatio, Huawei,
Kintone, Newgen, Pega, Quickbase, Retool, and Unqork.

Context
As demand for applications continues to rise, software engineering leaders cannot afford to rely
solely on traditional, code-based application development approaches. They must accept the
march of progress to higher abstraction levels for application development and embrace low-
code to accelerate professional application development. They must also enable business-based
development teams to create and maintain their own applications, up to and including citizen
development.

As a result, LCAPs for a variety of developer audiences are becoming mainstream. Even
conservative IT organizations that have previously resisted modernization and automation are
exploiting LCAPs to move to the cloud, enable mobile user experiences, address skills and
resource shortages, and achieve faster time to deployment. Progressive IT organizations are
exploiting low-code for commodity application services such as basic data-oriented applications,
as well as composability to layer low-code on expansive API products such as SaaS and hand-
coded custom proprietary services.

Application and software engineering leaders need to consider three main areas:

1. Technology fit:

Analyze your use cases and business needs carefully to deliver the best results from an
LCAP (see Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms).

Compare these needs against the technology offerings in LCAP versus alternative
overlapping low-code markets such as multiexperience development platforms
(MXDP),business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), integration
platform as a service (iPaaS) and citizen automation and development platforms (CADPs).

Ensure LCAP implementations interact with the business processes, which should be
identified and optimized first. Consider either LCAP with strong built-in business process
capabilities, or use complementary business process services that can be called from your
LCAP as needed.

Exploit composability and modularity as all enterprise LCAP can call external services
including self-built APIs as well as bought API services such as SaaS. This enables LCAP to
handle almost unlimited complexity in applications as sophisticated functionality can be
delegated to external services in a composite manner.

Strategize on how to fit the enterprise LCAP solution will fit into existing application
architectures and strategic tooling investments, especially in terms of integration effort,
compatibility with existing design systems and agile frameworks, and existing services.

2. Commercial considerations:

Define all immediate requirements and anticipate application needs for the next two to three
years to avoid having to replace platforms for new use cases. Take special care on pricing
considerations and ensure that contracts cover future usage to avoid renegotiating.

Evaluate LCAP options prior to major investments by utilizing free or evaluation versions
with at least one proof of concept to become familiar with the developer experience and
platform functionalities.

Evaluate the long-term effect of subscription costs versus functionality and developer costs.
Compare products with similar capabilities and prices.

Understand and communicate the potential pitfalls of using LCAPs — including lock-in and
long-term costs — to business stakeholders.

3. Developer talent and skills:

 Select a LCAP that is appropriate to your developer persona, such as tools like Quickbase
and Kintone for citizen developers and tools like Mendix and OutSystems for full time IT and
business-led developer teams.

Exploit fusion team collaboration approaches to maximize developer performance. This

may mean educating other software engineering leaders in your organization that low-code
platforms are not just for citizen developers! It may also imply using tools that support
multiple developer personas like Mendix and Pega.

Evaluate the maturity of the LCAP’s developer and partner community support as well as its
ecosystem of connectors, templates and prebuilt business and technology services.

Train professional and citizen developers prior to app development and provide ongoing
self-learning programs, instead of only relying on the LCAP vendor or its partners.

Market Overview
The enterprise LCAP market is part of an overall low-code development technologies space,
which is expected to reach $29 billion in revenue by 2025 (with a compound annual growth rate
[CAGR] of more than 20%). Specifically, the LCAP segment is projected to expand to $14.38 billion
in 2025, with a CAGR of 26.4%.

The rapid increase in enterprise adoption and usage of enterprise LCAPs is driven by three key
trends:

Democratization: On average, 41% of employees in an organization are business technologists

— that is, employees who report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics
capabilities for internal or external business use. In a Gartner 2021 survey 1 on business
technologists, these non-IT employees primarily use either a low-code or no-code approach to
create analytics or technology capabilities, versus manual coding.

Hyperautomation: Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies,

tools or platforms. LCAPs have emerged as a key component of successful hyperautomation,
with low-code development tools being among the three tools used the most (based on
frequency and volume) to support automation initiatives.

Composable business: Organizations are adopting application composition technologies that

enable fusion teams to implement composable applications. LCAPs are one of the key
technologies that drive greater exploitation of application services, functionalities and
capabilities.

The vendors in this Magic Quadrant are all providing enterprises with various capabilities and
services and successfully delivering applications to their customers. However, the market
continues to expand with more vendors appearing throughout 2021 and 2022.
Acronym Key and Glossary Terms
Fusion A fusion team is a multidisciplinary team that blends technology or analytics and
Team business-domain expertise, and shares accountability for business and
technology outcomes. Instead of organizing work by functions or technologies,
fusion teams are typically organized by the cross-cutting business capabilities,
business outcomes or customer outcomes they support. Fusion teams do not
have a prescribed reporting structure. Team leaders or members may report to
either dedicated IT departments or business areas outside of IT. Fusion teams
often start as Agile project or Scrum teams, and gradually adopt a product-
management discipline to oversee a capability end to end, from strategy to
delivery and continuous enhancements.

Evidence
1
The 2022 Gartner Low-Code Vendor Survey was conducted online during February and March
2022

among 136 vendors. This evidenced continued interest in and evolution of LCAP.

Gartner’s Peer Insights was used to provide customer feedback on vendors from January 2021 to
May 2022. A period of January 2020 to May 2022 was used for vendors with less than five
reviews from the 2021-2022 period. Two vendors had no reviews to consider.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This
includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether
offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and
detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the
financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business
unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and
the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and
market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver
the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and
other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen
to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer
programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth
of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current
and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or

capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.
 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc.
and its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior
written permission. It consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization, which should not be
construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from
sources believed to be reliable, Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy
of such information. Although Gartner research may address legal and financial issues, Gartner does not
provide legal or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and
use of this publication are governed by Gartner’s Usage Policy. Gartner prides itself on its reputation for
independence and objectivity. Its research is produced independently by its research organization without input
or influence from any third party. For further information, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and
Objectivity."

About Careers Newsroom Policies Site Index IT Glossary Gartner Blog Network Contact Send
Feedback

© 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.