Building a Prototype with ninox.com for your SaaS Product
Tags: ninox, saas, lowcode
Published: 2023-01-29 20:37:44

Hi,

I am very excited to work on our SaaS product. In the [Minimalempires Community](https://community.minimalempires.de/) I found a great CoFounder with a great idea. With the low-code platform [ninox.com](https://ninox.com) we want to validate this idea and build a prototype. So far I had no experience with low-code and could not imagine that such would be useful for me, since I already have a lot of experience with frontend and backend. I was clearly taught better! In the next paragraphs I will explain what ninox.com is and how it helps us to develop a prototype.

## ninox.com

[Ninox.com](https://ninox.com) is a cloud-based low-code platform for building software solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. Ninox was founded in 2013 by [Frank Böhmer](https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-boehmer/) in Germany. As of 2021, Ninox had more than 6,000 customers. Also worth mentioning is the [YouTube channel of Ninox](https://www.youtube.com/@ninox1273) with lots of content about Ninox. As well as the weekly Open Office Hours in English and German. Here customers can ask their questions and problems about ninox to a ninox employee*.

## My experience with ninox.com

The development of a prototype is super fast with ninox.com. The definition of the table, i.e. which columns and column types the respective table has, also serves to create the UI. Thus, a data model and a UI based on it can be developed super fast. Ninox.com has come up with some really cool and smart ideas on how to connect a database with a configurable UI in a meaningful and native way.

Also the already existing user management works very well. With it, simple roles and permission schemes can be mapped well.

The community of ninox.com is very active and super helpful. They always helped me when I had problems with the implementation. I only had problems with the implementation when I had to use the ninox.com native programming language. This was the case, for example, when the database needed queries and had to do certain calculations on them.

## With ninox.com to the complete product?

No! We already encounter limitations that would be easier to fix with traditional tech stacks like [MERN](https://www.mongodb.com/mern-stack). Also the lack of a Git integration which makes the development harder because important tools like versioning and pull requests are missing.

## Conclusion

Ninox is great for rapid prototyping. Beyond that it is probably not suitable for the development of a SaaS product. That was and is not the use case of ninox.com which is why that is totally ok. Nevertheless, I am super impressed with how well it worked for our prototype and am more than willing to use ninox.com again!

Many thanks also to my CoFounder. I super enjoy working with you on our product, vision and future. You are super motivated and dedicated. I'm really looking forward to our future collaborations in 2023 :)!

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