Top 20 Application Development Software in 2020
The following lists the top 20 application development software that is the leading app builder software that has demonstrated their advancements in developing modern, functional, and visually pleasing mobile applications. Depend on your need for a mobile app version of your website or a native app that is published at Apple App Store or Google Play Store, you can choose one of the app creation platforms below.
But why application development software is important?
With the popularity of mobile devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and wearables like smartwatches, mobile applications (apps) become essential for businesses to promote their products or services. This mobile trend is not solely for big-name brands. Nowadays, more and more SMEs realize the importance of integrating a mobile strategy into their marketing strategy.
A mobile app is a brilliant marketing tool because it not only makes the business stand out in the industry, increases company reputation, and recognition but also helps to improve customer engagement and cultivate customer loyalty. For instance, with a mobile app, customers will know about your special sales and promotion, collect rewards, or communicate with your customer service team within a few clicks. There are countless sales and marketing opportunities you can create with a mobile app in your hand.
The increasing need for a business mobile app has created a market for application development software. It exists to make creating apps easier for developers because they don’t have to code everything from scratch. It also helps to reduce significantly the cost of the app design, development, and deployment for business owners.
ShoutEm
If you are looking for a non-coding type of app creation, you should definitely check out ShoutEm. ShoutEm is a good place to start for anyone who wants to make their first app. You will have no problems publishing an industry-standard app within a couple of days with its intuitive UI and detailed documentation.
ShoutEm’s model is similar to WordPress, which allows users to customize their apps through extensions. It offers more than ready-made 40 extensions that enable you to improve customer engagement and experience. Shoutem is also praised for its modern, well-designed app templates and robust features. If you want to create a stunning design app, you can easily find one that you like from its 200 available layouts. They are all highly customizable with hundreds of color schemes, font style, and layouts. Other outstanding, ready-to-go features are content management system, advertising support, and analytics tools. ShoutEm has three tiers of pricing (Android only, Standard & Professional), ranging from $49/month to $149/month. It can be a little bit pricey compared to other software but it is really an ideal app maker to develop interactive and modern apps for everyone.
GoodBarber
GoodBarber is a popular app maker in terms of creating progressive web apps (PWAs). PWAs feature allows users to create a fully-functional and mobile-friendly website and publish these web apps versions directly through the web, without going through App Store or Play Store.
Unlike many other feature-focused app makers, GoodBarber puts a strong focus on app design and customizes all its templates based on industry. So basically, no matter what industry your business is in, you can find the suitable one from a wide selection of over 50 great looking and trendy pre-designed themes and templates. These designs are not only modern and eye-catching but also extensively flexible. You can easily change between hundreds of fonts, colors, and layouts to create your unique app or web apps. Another highlight feature of GoodBarber is its built-in content management system (CMS). With Good Barber CMS, you can easily create any kind of digital publication from articles to videos, photos, audio, and publish them directly to your apps. GoodBarber offers plenty of subscription options. Depend on your needs, you can choose among its 12 pricing plans, ranging from $25 to $300 per month.
Appy Pie
Appy Pie is one of the most popular application development software right now with over 2,000,000 created apps. The software makes its name by offering a very highly user-friendly interface. Imagine you can build an enterprise-grade app with no coding skills within minutes. Appy Pie makes it possible thanks to its simple drag & drop and point & click steps. With more than 60 features, Appy Pie ensures that customers have everything in their hands to build apps. Appy Pie’s pricing strategy is hard to beat as well. Appy Pie offers a free version yet still supports a lot of advanced features. You can choose to develop an Android-only app for only $18 per month or a plan for both Android and PWA, which will cost you $36 per month.
Like other template-based app builders, Appy Pie cannot provide unique features for your app unless you ask its dev team to build a custom app for you. All the templates also look a bit alike but as long as your requirements are just a basic and simple app version of your business website, Appy Pie can satisfy all you need. Even so, AppyPie, with its intuitive and integration capabilities, is one of the best app builders available right now.
Mobile Roadie
Mobile Roadie is one of a kind in the app-maker market because it offers niche features of musician fan apps. Some of the best parts of Mobile Roadie that are not often seen in other builders are fan points reward system, location-based features, social camera tools. In regards to business features, Mobile Roadie also has an abundance of options to build and customize apps such as promotional tools, API integration, analytics.
However, The downside of this application development software is that it is pricey because its business model aims to attract rich and famous customers (namely Taylor Swift, Madonna, Disney, etc). You can choose from starter pricing plans (CORE), which costs $149 per month, and a hefty price of $799 per month for PRO plans.
BiznessApps
BiznessApps deserves a place in this list because it offers a huge list of advanced features specially designed for small businesses. You can find anything from food ordering, appointment scheduling to a built-in scoring system or in-app checkout. It also has impressive marketing tools, modern themes and easy to navigate content management systems. Digital agencies, entrepreneurs or creative individuals are frequent customers.
Apart from niche features, it also has you covered in e-commerce options, location-based services, push notification, social media integration, or loyalty features. BiznessApps is really tops of its game in so many areas and indeed, one of the best app development platforms right now. BiznessApps has two plans: $99 per month for native Android and iOS apps with iPad support and $250 per month for unlimited features access.
Felgo
Felgo is a powerful application development software for game developers. It offers a unique feature set for creating professional mobile games. With Felgo, game developers can use QML, JavaScript, C++ to build mobile apps or games. One of the highlights of Fergo’s offerings is the cross-platform framework that allows users to use the same code for multiple platforms, which help developers save a lot of coding time. Felgo is definitely not for beginners yet a very exciting app maker for app developers. Developers can choose from a free version to $49 — $239/month pricing plans.
Swiftic
Along with AppyPie, Swiftic is considered one of the most comprehensive apps development platforms out there with over 1,000,000 created apps since 2010. What really makes Swiftic stand out from the crowd is its outstanding eCommerce and customer-facing features. Online entrepreneurs can create a fully functional online store with many third-party shopping carts to provide their customers with an impeccable shopping experience on smartphones. Though Swiftic’s pricing structure ($57/month) is a little bit on the expensive side, it offers a 6-month money-back guarantee. That means if you are not happy with the business results your app generates, the vendor will return your money back.
BuildFire
BuildFire is a cloud-based app builder that offers the best of both worlds: a click-and-edit platform and an option to customize new functionality via its open development portal. BuildFire also supports many handy features such as live video & audio streaming, SmartPush technology which allows you to group your customers and design a suitable marketing campaign for each group. BuildFire provides plenty of pricing option; from free to limited, cheap ready-made templates plan to expensive, fully customizable templates.
AppSheet
AppSheet places a strong emphasis on a fully-interactive emulator and advanced editor to make it easier for non-technical customers to build bespoke apps. Indeed, AppSheet’s user interface is effortless to use yet advanced enough to fulfill any customers’ needs. Another big reason to develop with AppSheet is that it allows you to integrate data from many data sources, spreadsheet software, or cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive. This feature comes in very handy in situations where your business has cross-platform company data and needs to integrate them all in the app. AppSheet’s 3-tier price plan, ranging from free to $5 — $10/active user/month. With paid plans, end users can add more premium features and have more enhanced security and centralized management.
Verivo
The main focus of Verivo application development software is enterprise mobile applications. That’s why Verivo really shines when it comes to a flexible back end structure that allows programmers to add advanced corporate features and integrate deeply with corporate systems. It also includes some amazing features like reporting options, UI configuration tools, security tools. Recently, Verivo is acquired by Appery.io (which will be introduced next).
Appery.io
Appery.io is a cloud-based solution that excels in cross-platform development and intuitive, visual interface. Being a completely cloud-based app maker grants Appery’s users a benefit of lower hardware requirements for faster app launching. Furthermore, recently, Appery acquired Verivo in an attempt to become the one of a kind application development platform that provides both excellent front-end and back-end services. Pricing begins at $60 per month for Pro plans and up to $135 per month for Team plan. It does not offer a free version but does allow you to test for free 14 days. Appery also offers custom pricing for custom enterprise solutions.
iBuildApp
Since launching in 2011, iBuildApp has helped create more than 1,300,000 apps built and 150,000 apps published. iBuildApp’s most attractive feature is the ability to integrate marketing and analytic tools to acquire more users and analyze how well your app performs. For example, the software provides email marketing and geo-targeted notification to specifically target and send advertisements to your customers. The platform also offers tools to track users’ activities when they are using your app. iBuildApp also impresses customers with over 1000 stylish design templates. They are all beautiful, industry-focused, and highly customizable so you can easily find what works for your business.
iBuildApp pricing starts at $59 per month for unlimited access. However, iBuildApp charges a hefty price of $395 per month or up to $7500 per year for corporate-specialized features.
AppMachine
A quite unique feature that separates this application development software from others is its lego-style editor. AppMachine’s editor uses a pre-programmed system called building blocks to illustrate how users build and customize the features for their apps. The editor is not just visually pleasing but also is easily navigable. The platform also provides numerous advanced tools like location-based services, e-commerce, social media integration, or custom analytics.
There are four pricing categories: $49 (Plus), $69 (Pro), $99 (Reseller Bundle), and $300 (Reseller XL). In order to remove the AppMachine logo, you need to pick the Reseller plan. One drawback of this software is the inability to create web-based apps and lack of some pro features. Even so, AppMachine is still a fun, cost-wise, and feature-wise option in the app maker market.
Mobincube
Mobincube is a DIY mobile app builder that offers an absolute level of customization. You can build and customize your apps any way you want from scratch. What’s more is that Mobincube provides some of the most advanced features such as monetizing capabilities, e-commerce, or great social features.
But what makes Mobincube really stands out from other DIY app builders in the market is its pricing structure. Mobincube’s pricing strategy is really hard to beat. You can build unlimited apps (with ads) for free. Its pricing plans are reasonable as well. Standard plans start at $2.99 per month and allow you to activate monetize service and remove Mobincube branding, though, for $19, $39, or $99 per month, you can remove all the ads and access to its cloud user manager and advanced notification.
AppBuilder
AppBuilder’s focus remains on building an intuitive, drag, and drop app builder editor in order for everyone to use it. The technologies the app support go from loyalty tools, social integration to workflow management to help small and medium-sized businesses. All the plans offered by AppBuilder allow customers to create apps without AppBuilder branding. However, in order to publish the apps to Google or Apple Store, you need to pick more premium plans which cost around $30 — $50 per month.
GameSalad
GameSalad is an affordable web-based game development platform that uses a visual programming interface to help game creators quickly build a mobile game without any coding experience. What sets this game mobile app maker apart from other options on the market is that it lets game creators create and publish their games for many platforms including Os X, iOS, Android, or HTML5. Additionally, this application development software enables developers to test game logic and behavior sets right inside the app. Users can start creating their games for free with the trial period. After that, it will cost $19 per month for the basic version. The Pro plan which comes with in-app purchases, cross-platform publishing features costs $29 per month.
MobAppCreator
The primary focus of MobAppCreator is on native apps. It is also packed with all necessary app functionalities. From the white-label dashboard, custom access control, to real-time previewer, MobappCreator has got it covered for you. However, the downside of the platform is that it offers very limited design templates and customized options though its interface is relatively easy to use. Apart from this, MobAppCreator is a high-quality application development solution. Its pricing is a little bit pricey but it comes with many advanced features like unlimited installs, push notification, or apps analytics. The app cheapest subscription options start at $57.5 a month and the most expensive plan costs users $165.83 a month.
Appsmakerstore
Appsmakerstore’s approach is to put design front and center. There are over 100 professional-looking themes with various industries to choose from, and then extensive customization including custom color schemes & fonts, tailored layouts within that as well. It also has a good selection of advanced features such as POI push, advertisement options via SponsApp or Google Adsense, live streaming, or QR codes. The app-making software program comes with two pricing ties: $29.5 per month for the basic version and $99 for the reseller version.
AppYourself
AppYourself is intended for users looking for an app solution with powerful e-commerce modules. The software is especially aimed at small and middle-sized businesses that already owned an online shop and want to create a complete in-app store. Unfortunately, compared to other app makers, AppYourself doesn’t provide many design options and the flexibility of the builder is limited as well. But they do offer a custom design service to compensate for that.
The cheapest subscription option starts at $43 per month but it only allows you to publish a PWA app. For iOS and Android App, you need to upgrade to their Business or Enterprise plan which costs up to $60 — $300.
AppInstitute
AppInstitute is a relatively user-friendly application development software because it lets its customers the ability to build a powerful app with a really simple set up process on multiple devices. Its interface indeed is well-structured, easy to navigate, and good step-by-step instructions. It also offers a powerful suite of business built-in features such as extremely customizable catalog menus, unique booking features like a multi-level takeaway menu, or check out via Paypal.
The weakness of this platform is the backend structure. Unlike most DIY app builders in the market, the backend is cluttered and complicated, thus, it takes time for beginners to get used to. There are four pricing tiers, with varying limits on the white-label app, priority support, and API access. The entry price is $60 per month. If you want full access to its pro features, you have to pay an extra $95 or up to $400.
A mobile app will soon become a standard component of any business in any industry in the future. Investing in mobile app development, therefore, will guarantee your company’s leading position in the market. If you are contemplating to make a mobile app but don’t know where to start or worried about the cost of building, don’t hesitate to contact us right away. With extensive experience in application design and development process, our developers at Designveloper will help you figure out the most affordable yet functional mobile app strategy for your business.
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