Wonder

Research Outline

Prepared for Gabriel | Delivered June 3, 2020

Visual Programming Market Overview

Goals

To build a list of companies operating in the visual programming market including parabola.io, bubble, and codeflow.co. To also find relevant details pertaining to each of these companies including a brief description of their business model and its pros and cons, investment history, pricing, user base, key projects,etc.

Early Findings

Parabola.ioParabola was founded in the year 2015 as a drag-and-drop visual programming platform to help users create custom reports, workflows, integrations, etc.
Till date, the company has raised a total of US$2.2 million in funding from two funding rounds.
The latest funding came from the lead investor Matrix Partners on May 22, 2018.
Some major clients served by Parabola include the likes of Netflix, Juice Press, Volcom, Panoply, Jobvite, Souvla, etc.
Users require credits to run flows in Parabola. The number of credits required depends on how many rows of data the client is processing at a time.
Users can have 15 run credits for free per month. To avail 50 run credits per month, clients have to pay US$4 at a rate of US$0.08 per credit.
A detailed overview of Parabola’s pricing can be found at this link.
Some drawbacks of Parabola, as evident from user reviews, include its crowded space, bugs, and the unavailability of most of the features in the free plan.
BubbleBubble, headquartered in the greater New York area, was founded in the year 2012 as a visual programming language for web and mobile applications.
Till date, the company has raised US$6.3 million in funding from a total of 20 investors.
Bubble helps users to build applications without typing codes. 
Some applications that are considered as alternatives to Bubble are Ruby-on-Rails and Django.
 Companies that used Bubble to build their own platforms, tools or tracking systems include the likes of Dividend, Comet, McKinsey and Company, and Plato.
Bubble provides four types of pricing options to their users. These pricing plans are termed as hobby, personal, professional and production.
While hobby counts as a free plan, users can avail personal, professional and production plans at monthly rates of US$25, US$115 and US$475.
As opined by one industry publication, one drawback of Bubble is that it slows down websites and apps that are developed through it. 
GamesaladGamesalad, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a company that was founded in 2007 in order to provide a development platform for anyone to create their own games with a visual programming interface.
Till date, the company has raised a total of US$7.4 million in funding from 5 rounds.
The platform of Gamesalad has been used by over one million aspiring game developers till date.
Gamesalad does not have any free version to offer and it's pricing starts at US$17.00 per month, per user.
However, the platform offers free trial options to users to check its features and modes of application.
CodeflowCodeflow, headquartered in Bangalore, India, is an open source visual programming language.
The language is fully compatible with Node.js™ and NPM™ packages.
Other PlayersApart from the visual programming platforms or languages mentioned above, there are several other players in the visual programming market which are considered as commercial or enterprise focused.
These players are Embrio, DG Solution Builder, AT&T Flow Designer, ReactiveBlocks, GraspIO, Wyliodrin, Zenodys, miniBloq, Blocky, Rasplogic, Noodl and Wia.