The best no-code app builders, ranked by how they bill you

Choosing between the best no-code app builders is usually framed as a capability contest, and that framing is why so many teams end up on the wrong platform holding an invoice they did not expect. All four tools below will let you assemble something real — a request tracker, a client portal, a field app, an inventory screen. Where they differ, sharply and permanently, is in what they count.

Bubble counts server work. Glide counts changed rows. Softr counts people. Adalo counts published apps. Those are not four versions of one pricing model; they are four different bets about what makes your app expensive, and the one that fits your app is the one you should be on. A tool that meters the thing your app does rarely will feel almost free. The same tool, metering the thing your app does constantly, becomes a monthly argument with your finance lead.

This page is organised around that, and it is deliberately short of the number everyone wants. Nobody — including the vendors — publishes what a given application consumes per month, so nobody honest can tell you a total. What can be told to you precisely is the shape of each bill and the point at which it turns.

What counts as a no-code app builder here

An app, for the purposes of this page, is software with state and logic: records that change, rules about who may change them, and screens that behave differently depending on what the records say. A staff rota is an app. A brochure with a contact form is not.

That line matters because the phrase gets stretched to cover anything with a visual editor. The four platforms below are all judged on the same question: can a non-programmer build something with a database behind it, permissions in front of it, and workflows in the middle — and what does the platform charge for the privilege.

Everything is quoted from the vendor's own pricing page or help documentation, re-read on 19 September 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, this page says so rather than estimating. You can see the working in how we judge.

Bubble — the highest ceiling, the least predictable bill

Bubble is the most capable tool in this group by a distance. It has a real database, a visual workflow engine, an API layer and a plugin ecosystem, and the applications people ship on it are frequently indistinguishable from written software. If your idea has genuine complexity — multi-sided marketplaces, conditional pricing, nested permissions — Bubble is the only one of the four that will not stop you halfway.

The cost of that ceiling is a meter nobody can forecast. Bubble bills in workload units, which its own manual defines as a measure of "the server resources needed to host, run, and scale apps built on Bubble." Page loads, workflows, searches and bulk operations all draw from the same pool. Bubble publishes no per-action price list, so there is no arithmetic you can do in advance — you find out what your app consumes by running it.

As listed on Bubble's pricing page, the free tier includes 50K workload units a month, Starter is $59 a month with 175K, Growth is $209 with 250K and two app editors, and Team is $549 with 500K and five editors. Bubble lets you buy an additional workload tier or pay for overages as they happen, and — importantly — lets you disable overages so an app cannot spend past its plan. Turn that off and the app stops rather than the bill starting; which of those two failures you prefer is a genuine decision, not a formality.

Read what a Bubble workload unit actually is before you commit, and then read the full Bubble review.

Glide — quick to ship, priced by what the app writes

Speed is what Glide sells. Point it at a spreadsheet or a database, and a usable interface exists in an afternoon. For internal apps whose job is to show a team what is in a table and let them tick things off, it is the fastest route in this comparison.

Its meter is an update, which Glide documents as roughly one changed row. The detail that decides your bill is where the data lives: user-triggered actions on Glide's own tables do not consume updates, while the same action against an external source does. Reading, filtering and building consume nothing at all. So a heavy read, light write app runs almost free, and a data-entry app on an external database burns through an allowance at a rate you will want to measure in week one.

There is a wrinkle worth knowing before you compare anyone's price list: Glide now sells two things. GlideOS is the newer product, priced in credits — $25 a month for 100 credits at the Basic tier, rising to $125 for 500 at Pro — and what a single credit buys is not published. The classic plans are the documented, update-metered ones: Explorer at $19 a month billed annually with 250 updates, Maker at $49 with 500, Business at $199 with 5,000. Over the quota, Glide documents an automatic charge of $0.02 per update. Make sure the price you are quoted belongs to the product you intend to use.

The mechanics are unpicked in what Glide counts as an update and the Glide review.

Softr — a front end over data you already keep

Softr is the odd one out and, for a specific job, the best choice on this page. It does not store your data. It connects to Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, monday.com, SmartSuite, ClickUp, Xano, Supabase, BigQuery, SQL databases and REST APIs, and puts a permissioned interface on top of whatever is already there.

That architecture produces the most legible bill in the group, because Softr meters people, not activity. Its documentation splits them into builders, team users and client users. Basic is $19 a month billed annually with one builder, five team users and five client users. Pro is $99 with two builders, ten team users expandable to fifty, and fifty client users expandable to 250. Business is $329 with three builders, thirty team users and a hundred client users. Extra users are bought individually — $1 each for client users on Pro, $2 on Business — and Softr notes they are billed monthly even when the base plan is annual.

You can therefore forecast a Softr bill exactly, because you know how many people you are inviting. What you cannot do is avoid the step: the jump from Basic to Pro is a fivefold price increase, and it is triggered by your sixth client. The arithmetic is worked through in what an app user costs on Softr.

Adalo — no usage meter at all

Adalo is the only platform here that has removed usage from the equation. Its pricing page states plainly that there are no usage-based charges and lists unlimited app actions on every tier. What it charges for instead is publishing: the free plan publishes nothing, Starter is $36 a month billed annually for one published app, Professional is $52 for two, and Team is $160 for five.

Adalo is also the only one of the four that is fundamentally about native mobile. From Starter upward, it publishes to the Apple App Store and Google Play. If the thing you are building genuinely needs to be an icon on a phone rather than a link in a browser, that shortens the list to one immediately.

The trade is capability. Adalo's logic model is the simplest here, and complicated conditional behaviour gets awkward long before it gets impossible. But for a small, well-defined app used by an unpredictable number of people, a fixed price is worth a great deal. See the Adalo review.

Match the meter to the shape of your app

Once you stop ranking features and start matching meters, the choice usually makes itself.

• Lots of readers, few writers. A directory, a knowledge base, a status board. Glide's meter barely moves, because reading is free. This is where its cheap tiers are genuinely cheap.
• Constant writes by a small team. A dispatch board, a stock count, a daily log. Glide is the worst fit and Bubble or Adalo the better ones — although Bubble's writes draw workload, so the question becomes which pool drains faster.
• A known, small group of external people. Client portals, supplier dashboards, member areas. Softr, and it is not close. You can name every user and therefore price the whole thing before you build it.
• A large or unknowable audience. Anything public-facing. Softr's per-user pricing is exactly wrong for this, and Adalo's flat fee is exactly right — if you can live inside its logic.
• Genuine complexity. Marketplaces, multi-step approvals, anything with real business rules. Bubble, and budget for the possibility that success costs money.

The unit is explained in full in how no-code app builders charge, and the shape question in internal tools or client portals.

The free tiers are trials, not homes

All four publish a free plan and none of them is a place to run something real. Bubble's 50K workload units exist to let you build and test. Glide's classic free plan includes zero updates a month, which means no data can be written by anyone. Softr's free tier gives three builders and five users combined, with no split between staff and clients. Adalo's free plan cannot publish an app at all.

That is not a criticism — it is the correct design for a trial. The mistake is treating the free tier as evidence about the paid one. The meter you are about to depend on is invisible until you are on a plan with enough headroom to actually use the thing. What the free tiers actually ship goes through each one.

What none of them gives you back

This is the part that belongs above the fold on every comparison of this kind and never is.

None of these four documents a way to export a working application. You can get your data out — Bubble exports the database as CSV, JSON or NDJSON, and Adalo documents downloading a collection as CSV. Softr is the interesting exception, because your records were never inside it: they are in your Airtable base or your Postgres instance, and they stay there when you leave. But in every case the application — the screens, the logic, the permissions, the workflows — is not a thing you can take with you. Leaving means rebuilding.

Price that in. A business running on one of these platforms is not simply a customer; it is a tenant with no moving van. It is a perfectly rational position to occupy, and thousands of profitable companies occupy it happily. It should just be a decision you made rather than one you discovered. Getting your app out covers what each vendor actually documents.

How to choose without building a spreadsheet

Answer four questions honestly and the shortlist collapses to one.

1. Does it need to be on a phone's home screen? If genuinely yes, Adalo. If a web app is fine, keep going.
2. How many people will hold a login, and do you know the number? If you know it and it is small, Softr is likely cheapest and certainly most predictable.
3. Does your app mostly read or mostly write? Mostly read favours Glide. Mostly write moves you toward Bubble or Adalo.
4. Is there a rule in your process that a simple tool would refuse to express? If yes, you are on Bubble, and the workload question is one you manage rather than avoid.

Then, whatever you picked, do one thing before you build anything anyone depends on: run it for a month on a paid plan with a real user, and watch the meter. That single month of evidence is worth more than every comparison table on the internet, this one included.