The Quiet Land Grab in No-Code
Glide has spent the last few years doing something most startup observers underestimate: building a no-code app platform so tightly integrated with Google Sheets and Airtable that small business owners stopped asking their IT departments for help. The pitch is simple – if you can manage a spreadsheet, you can ship an app. That framing has proven sticky in ways that matter, particularly among the SMB segment that Adalo spent years cultivating with its own drag-and-drop builder.
Adalo built its reputation on giving non-technical founders a path to publishable mobile apps. It was the platform you turned to when Bubble felt too heavy and hiring a developer felt too expensive. But Glide has quietly moved into that exact use case, and it has done so not by competing on features alone, but by making the on-ramp so frictionless that users barely notice they are building software.
The gap between the two platforms is widening.
Where Glide Has the Structural Advantage
Glide’s core architectural decision – treating your data source as the foundation of the app rather than a separate layer to configure – gives it a speed advantage that Adalo has struggled to match. When a retail shop owner or a field service company can pull in their existing Google Sheets data and have a functional internal tool in under an hour, that is not a feature comparison win. That is a category redefinition. The question stops being “which no-code tool should I use” and becomes “why would I use anything else.”
Glide Apps for Business, the company’s commercial tier targeting teams and organizations, has expanded its template library and workflow automation capabilities in ways that directly overlap with what Adalo’s paying customers use the platform for. Customer-facing apps, employee directories, inventory trackers, booking tools – all of these are now either native Glide templates or achievable within a short configuration session. The learning curve has dropped so sharply that business owners who would have previously hired a freelancer to set up an Adalo project are handling it themselves inside Glide.
Adalo’s mobile-first positioning was a strength in the early app builder wave, but mobile publishing has become a liability. App store submission requirements, review timelines, and platform-specific development constraints have made web apps a more practical default for the SMB market. Glide ships progressive web apps by default, which sidesteps the App Store entirely. That single architectural difference has real operational consequences for small teams who cannot afford to wait two weeks for an Apple review cycle every time they push an update.
What Adalo Is Up Against
Adalo is not standing still. The platform has continued iterating on its component library and has invested in a marketplace where developers sell pre-built components to extend native functionality. That ecosystem approach is a reasonable hedge – it acknowledges that Adalo alone cannot build every feature, so it creates incentives for third parties to fill gaps. The problem is that Glide’s integration with external data sources and its expanding native action library are closing those gaps faster than the marketplace can produce community solutions.
There is also a pricing dynamic worth examining. Adalo’s pricing has historically been component-based, which means costs scale in ways that can surprise small business owners as their apps grow more complex. Glide’s team and business pricing is structured around users and editors, which maps more cleanly onto how SMB owners think about software costs – as a headcount or seat expense rather than a feature tax. That framing is not trivial. Procurement decisions at the SMB level are often made by the same person who runs payroll, and predictability in software spending matters enormously to that buyer.
The comparison to Airtable’s encroachment on Retool’s agency base is instructive here – when a platform with a stronger data story enters the territory of a tool built for builders, the incumbent rarely wins on features. It wins on switching costs, and those erode over time as migration tooling improves and integration options expand across the no-code ecosystem.
The SMB Decision Point
For a small business evaluating no-code app builders right now, Glide presents a genuinely faster path from zero to deployed. That is not a speculative claim – it follows directly from the platform’s architecture. Starting from existing data, skipping the app store, and pricing on seats rather than complexity means fewer decision points, lower upfront investment, and faster feedback loops. For a company running on thin margins with one person wearing three hats, that calculus is almost always decisive.
Adalo’s most defensible ground remains native mobile app publishing for users who specifically need an iOS or Android presence, and for founders building consumer apps where mobile distribution matters more than internal tool speed. That is a real market. But the internal tools and small business operations space – field apps, staff directories, client portals, scheduling tools – is exactly where Glide is winning, and where Adalo built much of its early momentum.
The harder question for Adalo is whether its existing paying customers are already evaluating alternatives, or whether they have started migrating quietly, one app at a time, the way most platform switching actually happens – not as a dramatic decision, but as a slow reallocation of new projects until one day the old tool stops getting the new work.
