Low-Code in the creation of corporate websites and portals: see possibilities and limitations

The speed at which new websites and platforms must reach the market has never been higher. At the same time, companies face recurring bottlenecks, including talent shortages, lengthy projects, high costs, and difficulties in integrating technical and business areas. In this scenario, Low-Code comes into play, establishing itself not as a passing trend but as a strategic pillar within modern digital architectures.

By combining visual development, automation, and integration with traditional code, Low-Code platforms enable companies to accelerate deliveries, reduce operational costs, and gain efficiency without giving up security, performance, and governance. It is an approach that not only facilitates application creation but also transforms the way organizations think, build, and scale their digital solutions.

In this article, we take a deeper look at what Low-Code is, how it works, its practical advantages, when it should or should not be used, its role in relation to Drupal, and how this approach connects to the future of development with Artificial Intelligence.

Talk to a specialist and see if Low-Code is strategic for your company

What is Low-Code, and how does this technology work

Low-Code is a development approach that combines visual interfaces, reusable components, and automation with the possibility of traditional programming to create applications, websites, and systems in a faster, more flexible, and scalable way.

Contrary to the simplistic idea of just dragging and dropping, Low-Code is supported by a powerful technological architecture made up of three main layers:

→ Visual layer

This is where users build interfaces, pages, forms, and flows using reusable components. In practice, this allows a marketing team to assemble a landing page or an operations team to create an administrative screen without relying on development from scratch.

→ Logic layer

This layer controls business rules, validations, automation, and process flows. For example, a form created visually can have rules that validate data, trigger automated emails, update a CRM, or generate orders in internal systems.

→ Integration layer

This connects the application to external APIs, databases, payment platforms, ERPs, CRMs, and legacy systems. Here, Low-Code integrates into the company’s technological ecosystem and ceases to be just another isolated solution.

The key lies in combining these three layers with the possibility of inserting code when necessary, ensuring a high level of customization without losing agility.

What is the difference between Low-Code, No-Code, and traditional development?

With the popularization of new development approaches, it is common for the terms Low-Code, No-Code, and traditional development to be confused. Although all share the same final goal of creating digital solutions, each model serves very different profiles, complexity levels, and strategies.

Understanding these differences is essential to choosing the right approach for each type of project, avoiding technical limitations, unnecessary costs, and operational frustrations. We will explore these distinctions in detail.

Low-Code and No-Code

No-Code is aimed at users with no technical knowledge at all. It allows the creation of simple solutions such as forms, basic pages, internal automations, and quick prototypes using only visual interfaces and preconfigured logic. Its greatest advantage is ease of use, but its main limitation lies in customization and scalability.

Low-Code, on the other hand, serves both business users and developers. It blends visual construction with the possibility of programming, enabling everything from simple solutions to complex corporate systems. This provides architectural freedom, greater technical control, and deep integration with other systems.

Dexa Tip: No-Code is excellent for quickly testing ideas. Low-Code is the right choice when the solution needs to grow with security and robustness.

Low-Code and traditional development

In traditional development, the entire application is built manually through code, which guarantees absolute control over every architectural detail. In contrast, projects tend to be longer, more expensive, and highly dependent on specialized technical teams.

Low-Code accelerates this process by delivering ready-made structures, native automation, and integration resources that drastically reduce development time. Even so, code remains present for advanced customizations, specific integrations, and performance optimization.

Dexa Insight: “We have entered an era in which creating websites and applications has shifted from being a slow and highly technical process to becoming visual, agile, and strategic.”
— Luiz Petri, Director of Solutions at Dexa

Find out which of these solutions is ideal for your project

Why has this approach grown so fast in the market?

This accelerated growth is directly linked to structural changes in the technology market. The digitization of business has created a massive demand for software, while the availability of qualified professionals has not kept pace.

Studies from major consultancies such as Mendix show that most companies already use low-code platforms in at least part of their digital operations. Recent reports indicate that a significant share of new corporate applications are already born on these platforms, driven by the need for agility, cost reduction, and operational flexibility.

Another decisive factor is the shortening of the innovation cycle. Products that once took months to reach the market now need to be launched in weeks. Low-Code shortens this cycle by reducing steps, integrating business areas into the development process, and enabling rapid iterations.

In addition, the consolidation of cloud computing, API-based architectures, and the culture of continuous integration has created the ideal environment for low-code development to become an essential part of the corporate digital stack.

Expand your knowledge: What drives true digital performance →

Who benefits from this solution?

The impact of Low-Code is broad and affects different levels of the organization. For developers, the gain lies in productivity and strategic focus. It reduces the time spent on repetitive tasks, basic structures, and manual configurations. As a result, technical teams can concentrate their efforts on architecture, security, complex integrations, and performance, raising the level of their deliveries.

For marketing, content, and operations teams, the benefit is autonomy. Teams begin to create pages, structure flows, adjust interfaces, and test campaigns without fully depending on developers. This accelerates time-to-market and increases the efficiency of digital strategies.

For managers and leadership, the impact is even more visible. The solution reduces IT backlog, shortens solution launch times, optimizes investments, and improves project predictability. In practice, the company gains more control over its digital transformation and greater adaptability.

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Benefits for companies

The advantages of Low-Code go far beyond sheer development speed. It represents a structural change in how companies build, evolve, and sustain their digital solutions.

The reduction in time to market is one of the first gains perceived. Projects that once required long development cycles can now be implemented in shorter timelines, allowing companies to respond quickly to opportunities and market changes.

The financial impact is also significant. Fewer technical hours, less rework, greater reuse of components, and higher standardization significantly reduce operational development and maintenance costs.

Another important gain lies in cross-functional integration. This approach brings technology and business closer together, creating a collaborative environment in which both sides participate in solution building. This increases alignment with real business needs and reduces communication failures.

Dexa Insight: “Low-Code marks the definitive shift between technical development and business agility. Today it is possible to create, test, and evolve digital solutions in much shorter cycles without losing quality.”
— Luiz Petri.

Where it is widely used today

The versatility of Low-Code allows it to be applied in different contexts, from simple projects to high-complexity corporate initiatives. Below are the areas where it is most commonly used today.

In essence, Low-Code acts as a transversal accelerator, connecting marketing, operations, technology, and digital strategy. This integrative capacity sets the stage for an essential point: understanding when this approach is not the right choice.

When this solution is not the best choice

Despite its versatility and acceleration potential, low-code development should not be treated as a universal solution for all development scenarios. There are contexts in which technical, regulatory, or performance requirements exceed the natural limits of this approach, making its exclusive use a high-risk decision. These include:

• Highly regulated environments, such as financial systems, healthcare platforms, payment solutions, and applications subject to strict compliance standards, require absolute control over every layer of the architecture. In such cases, excessive abstraction can create vulnerabilities, hinder audits, and compromise legal compliance.
   
• Applications that demand extremely high performance, real-time processing, or large volumes of simultaneous transactions also represent a practical limit for many platforms. When milliseconds matter, when scalability must be extreme, or when there is intensive use of computational resources, traditional code-based construction still offers greater predictability, stability, and efficiency.
   
• There are also digital products that form the core of the business model, with a high degree of customization, complex rules, and direct architectural dependence for value generation. In these situations, every structural decision directly affects performance, security, scalability, and future evolution. Low-Code may serve as a support layer in peripheral modules, but it should rarely sustain the system’s core.

It is essential not to frame Low-Code and traditional development as competitors. The ideal approach is to understand that both serve distinct roles within a mature digital architecture. The most common mistake is forcing the use of low-code platforms in scenarios for which they were not designed, which usually results in technically fragile solutions that are difficult to maintain and costly to correct in the future.

When used with discernment within a clear architectural strategy, Low-Code enhances results. When applied without this filter, it becomes a silent risk to the technological sustainability of the business.

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Challenges and risks

Despite all gains in agility and efficiency, adopting Low-Code without a well-defined strategy can cause significant impacts on a company’s digital architecture. The main risk lies in the uncontrolled use of these platforms when business areas start developing solutions in isolation, without alignment with the technology team. This context, known as shadow IT, directly compromises information security, creates data silos, hinders future integrations, and weakens digital governance.

Another relevant challenge is vendor lock-in. By concentrating a large part of solutions on a single proprietary platform, the company may become technically dependent on the supplier, facing difficulties in system migration, contract renegotiation, or long-term architectural evolution. This dependence tends to generate financial impacts and limit technological freedom.

It is also important to consider the inherent limitations of the platforms themselves. Although some solutions offer a high level of flexibility, they do not always precisely address scenarios of extreme customization, highly specific business rules, or architectures that require absolute control over every software layer. When these restrictions are not correctly mapped from the start, the project may accumulate workaround solutions that increase technical complexity over time.

Information security risks gain prominence when there is no clear policy for access control, permission management, authentication, encryption, and external integration monitoring. In corporate environments, any weakness in this area can compromise sensitive data, generate legal liabilities, and directly affect the company’s reputation.

Mitigating these risks requires a mature and structured approach supported by some fundamental pillars:

• Clear definition of architecture and roles, establishing well-defined responsibilities between technical and business areas, avoiding overlap in critical decisions, and ensuring solution coherence.
• Consistent governance, versioning, and continuous auditing policies, ensuring traceability of changes, access control, change history, and compliance with internal and regulatory standards.
• Full integration of Low-Code solutions into the company’s official IT ecosystem, connecting these applications to corporate systems, APIs, databases, and monitoring tools.
• Active participation of the technical team throughout the entire project lifecycle, from architecture to continuous evolution, ensuring performance, security, and long-term sustainability.

When these premises are respected, low-code development ceases to be a risk vector and becomes a powerful strategic accelerator capable of combining speed, security, and technological sustainability.

How to strategically choose the ideal platform

This choice is not an operational decision. It is a strategic one. The first analysis must be the tool’s fit within the company’s technological ecosystem. The easier it is to integrate with APIs, databases, and legacy systems, the greater the value generated.

Security is another fundamental point. The platform must offer access control, audit trails, compliance with best practices, and data protection.

Scalability must also be evaluated. A solution that works well today may become a bottleneck tomorrow if it does not keep up with business growth.

Finally, the licensing model, total cost of operation, community maturity, and support quality are determining factors for ensuring long-term sustainability.

Rely on a specialist to choose the right platform

Low-Code in Drupal

Within the Drupal ecosystem, low-code development gains an even more strategic dimension through tools such as Acquia Site Studio. This solution enables the construction of pages entirely based on reusable components with absolute control over structure, SEO, performance, and visual identity.

In essence, content teams gain the autonomy to create pages, while the technical team defines the standards, blocks, templates, and rules that ensure consistency, scalability, and security.

This combination transforms Drupal into a powerful Digital Experience Platform (DXP), capable of uniting structured development, creative flexibility, and high-level technical governance.

Learn how to apply Low-Code in your Drupal environment with security and performance

Low-Code, Artificial Intelligence, and the future of development

The evolution of Low-Code is directly connected to the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and this convergence is already objectively transforming the way digital solutions are conceived, structured, and scaled. Development is no longer a technical process based on manual effort and has become guided by intelligent models, advanced automation, and predictive capacity.

Currently, Low-Code platforms already use AI to automatically suggest layouts based on advanced patterns of user experience, accessibility, and navigation behavior. Instead of starting an interface from scratch, teams receive optimized structural suggestions for usability, performance, and conversion.

Another relevant advancement occurs in the automatic generation of flows and business rules. From natural language descriptions, Artificial Intelligence is already capable of structuring complete automations. A manager can, for example, describe that a lead must be validated, integrated into the CRM, classified, and forwarded to the sales team, and the platform itself proposes the entire automation logic with triggers, integrations, and preconfigured validations.

AI is also beginning to play a decisive role in assisted code generation, accelerating specific integrations, advanced customizations, and complex validations. This significantly reduces technical effort in critical stages without compromising the architectural flexibility required in corporate environments.

Within composable architectures, in which solutions are formed by independent blocks connected through APIs, Low-Code assumes the role of an orchestration layer. It coordinates data, interfaces, business rules, and experiences across multiple platforms in a visual, rapid, and governed way.

In the universe of DXPs, the combination of Low-Code and AI enables real-scale personalization. Portals, systems, and applications automatically adapt to each user profile based on behavior data, navigation history, CRM information, and access context. A single environment can display completely different experiences for different audiences without requiring manual development rework.

This convergence inaugurates a new stage in digital development, increasingly less centered on isolated lines of code and more oriented toward intelligent automation, continuous integration, and real-time experience construction. Low-Code takes on a structural role in the creation of dynamic, scalable, and highly personalized digital ecosystems.

In the medium and long term, this evolution tends to redefine the role of technical teams. Developers act less as builders of basic structures and more as solution architects, curators of complex integrations, and strategists of performance and digital experience.

See more: Not sure which DXP to choose? Learn about Acquia and its advantages →

How Dexa applies Low-Code in high-performance digital projects

At Dexa, this approach is part of a complete digital architecture integrated with strategy, design, technology, and marketing. Each project begins with an in-depth analysis of the business context, the company’s digital maturity, and the required integrations.

Componentization is strategically designed, ensuring standardization without stifling creativity. Marketing teams gain autonomy, while technology maintains full control over stability, scalability, and security.

In this way, the solution operates as a digital performance accelerator without compromising architectural solidity.

More than implementing tools, Dexa structures digital ecosystems prepared to grow, scale, and adapt to market transformations.

If you want to apply Low-Code in a strategic, secure way aligned with your business objectives, count on Dexa.