If you’re a startup founder or builder using low-code tools like Bubble, Glide, Adalo, Appsmith, or Retool, you know how powerful these platforms are. They let you build and launch apps quickly without writing tons of code and technical programming knowledge. But as your app grows, you’ll hit roadblocks—especially when working with real-time data or building event-driven workflows.
That’s where GlassFlow adds value. GlassFlow simplifies real-time data pipelines to manage and process data seamlessly in low-code environments. In this article, I’ll explain how GlassFlow helps startups using low-code tools build faster, scale better, and focus on what truly matters—creating value for customers.
Why Startups Use Low-Code Platforms
Low-code tools are a game-changer for startups. You can quickly build MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) and iterate based on user feedback. Here’s why many founders rely on platforms like Bubble or Retool:
- Speed: You can launch apps in days, not months.
- Cost-Effective: No need for a big engineering team upfront.
- Flexibility: You can customize workflows without becoming a coding expert.
However, as your app grows and data becomes central to your product, you’ll need to solve challenges around real-time data updates, automation, and scalability. Low-code tools alone can’t always handle this efficiently.
Common Problems Startups Face in Low-Code Tools
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Real-Time data updates
Low-code tools are great for building apps, but keeping your data updated in real time is a challenge. Two common approaches—Polling and WebSockets—may seem like solutions, but they come with significant drawbacks:
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Polling with Intervals:
Polling means repeatedly checking for updates at fixed intervals (e.g., every 5 seconds). While simple to set up, it’s inefficient because the app constantly asks for updates, even when there’s no new data. This increases server load, wastes resources, and creates delays between updates.
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WebSockets:
WebSockets provide a way for the server to "push" updates to the client in real time. While they’re better than polling for frequent updates, they require persistent connections between the server and the app. Managing these connections at scale can get complex and resource-heavy, especially when the UI client goes offline suddenly, there is no way to know the current state of the data.
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Complex data workflows:
As startups grow, multiple workflows become more complex. For example, you might want to automatically send data from your app to an analytics tool like Mixpanel or route customer events to a Postgres database. Building these workflows manually in low-code tools can be tricky and time-consuming.
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Need for event-driven data exchange:
If you want to scale the application for multiple user sessions, you might want to apply event-driven data flow between UI and backend services. ****Event-driven applications need to react to user actions immediately. For example, processing form submissions, sending notifications or triggering workflows based on user activity. Without a streamlined data pipeline, handling these tasks at scale can slow your app down.
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Manual integrations:
Low-code tools often require custom integrations for third-party services. Setting up APIs and managing data flow can become a bottleneck when you’re working on tight deadlines.
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Frontend is not suitable for long data-processing tasks
Low-code solutions often require custom JavaScript code to achieve advanced functionality. For more complex workflows—like real-time data processing—shifting the logic to a backend service is a better approach. This keeps your frontend app lightweight while removing the need to manage infrastructure manually. At this point, you start to think about using serverless functions that do specific tasks and run heavy code in response to some events that happened in the front end.
How GlassFlow Helps Solve These Challenges
GlassFlow was built to make real-time data and event-driven workflows accessible for startups. GlassFlow simplifies this by enabling you to write serverless transformation functions in Python—a perfect choice for data manipulation, processing, and automation. Here’s how it helps you scale your low-code apps effortlessly:
1. Real-time data made easy
With GlassFlow, you can set up real-time data pipelines that keep your app updated instantly. If you’re building a dashboard in Bubble or Retool, GlassFlow connects directly to your data sources and streams updates in real time.
No need for manual API configurations or polling data every second—GlassFlow handles it by reacting to a specific event.
2. Automate Complex Workflows
GlassFlow’s event-driven pipelines make it easy to automate tasks and workflows. You can route events like form submissions, customer activity, or payment updates to different tools and databases without writing custom backend code.
- Example: When a new user signs up in your Bubble app:
- The event triggers GlassFlow.
- GlassFlow sends the data to Stripe for billing.
- A Slack notification is sent to your team automatically.
You no longer need to build and manage these workflows manually; GlassFlow automates the entire process.
3. Integrate Data Without the Hassle
GlassFlow comes with built-in integrations for popular tools, databases, and services. Whether you use Supabase, BigQuery, Snowflake, or external APIs, GlassFlow simplifies data connections so you don’t have to configure them yourself.
- Example:
- GlassFlow captures changes in your app’s database (like a new user record).
- It sends those changes directly to your email service, analytics tool, or CRM.
Instead of stitching together APIs with Zapier or writing custom scripts, you let GlassFlow manage your data connections for you.
4. Scalable Event-Driven Pipelines
GlassFlow is designed for scalability. As your startup grows and you need to handle more events (e.g., user actions, data updates), GlassFlow scales automatically. Whether you process a few hundred events or millions, it works smoothly without extra setup.
5. Built for Python-Loving Startups
GlassFlow works natively with Python, making it easy for startups with data engineers or developers familiar with Python libraries. You can use tools like Pandas, NumPy, and TensorFlow directly in your workflows to transform or analyze data.
If you’ve built custom Python logic for your app, integrating it with GlassFlow is seamless.
Use Cases: How AI-powered video translation solution use GlassFlow with low-code tools
Consider a video translation service like ContentBy, we’re building a real-time video translation app where users upload videos and choose a target language from over 170 languages and AI does magic to translate the video with the author's own voice and perfectly synced lips. You need multiple backend tasks to:
- Generate transcripts for the video.
- Sync speaker lips with the translated audio.
- Translate the audio into another language.
- Combine all outputs and notify the frontend app when processing is complete.
- Show real-time progress updates to users, like “Translating…,” “Syncing Audio…,” and “Translation Complete.”
These tasks need to run in real-time after the video is submitted and keep users updated with progress. ContentBy uses Appsmith and Wix for its UI, but it faces key challenges:
- Custom workflows need backend processing for tasks like data manipulation, API calls, and content delivery.
- Relying on JavaScript alone becomes inefficient for heavy workloads. We need to implement business logic in Python for tasks like transcription, translation, and lip-syncing using libraries like OpenAI Whisper, Transformers, or PyDub.
- Infrastructure management for server-side tasks adds overhead, slowing down development.
- Polling approach did not work well. For example, if the video translation pipeline finishes just after the polling check, the user must wait until the next interval to see the status, leading to a poor experience.
How GlassFlow Solves These Challenges
Now what if we introduce event-driven pipelines to handle multistep video translation tasks? We can invoke pipelines for generating transcripts, sync speaker lips and translate audio into the target language after the user submits a new video for translation. These pipelines might right independently in parallel and only be left to combine output from these pipelines and let the UI app know about the output result.
If we don’t want to write any code for the pipeline creation and integration, GlassFlow Visual Editor provides a low-code interface to build and manage event-driven pipelines visually. We can set up workflows, connect data sources (in this case, we can connect to Appsmith via Webhook URLs), and create transformations logic Python without diving deep into backend logic. This means even non-technical team members can design and monitor complex pipelines in just a few clicks.
The benefits are clear with this improvement:
- Event-Driven Execution: Each part of the workflow—transcripts, sync, and translations—runs as an independent pipeline, but they are seamlessly connected.
- No Infrastructure Management: GlassFlow eliminates the need to manage backend servers compared to creating multiple APIs and deploy them to any cloud server to handle different cycles of video translation.
- Real-Time Notifications: GlassFlow can send webhook updates to Appsmith to make sure that the frontend UI stays updated with task progress.
Why GlassFlow Is Perfect for Startup Builders
- Faster Development: No need to set up complex backend services—GlassFlow does the heavy lifting for you.
- Cost-Effective: Avoid spending on unnecessary infrastructure or DevOps tools.
- Scalable: Whether you’re handling 10 events or 10 million, GlassFlow grows with your startup.
- Low-Code Friendly: Works seamlessly with platforms like Bubble, Appsmith, and Retool.
- Easy Integrations: Connect to tools, databases, and APIs effortlessly.
Conclusion: Build Real-Time Apps Faster with GlassFlow
Low-code tools are fantastic for building apps quickly, but real-time data and event-driven workflows are often a challenge. GlassFlow fills this gap. It simplifies real-time pipelines, automates workflows, and integrates data seamlessly—all while scaling with your startup’s growth.
GlassFlow helps you move faster, automate more, and deliver a better experience to your users. Focus on building your app, not managing backend systems.
Start building smarter, event-driven apps with GlassFlow today! 🚀
