Understanding FlutterFlow: Features, Use-Cases, Pros and Cons

Forrester estimates that the combined low-code and digital process automation (DPA) market reached $13.2 billion by the end of 2023. This represents a growth rate of roughly 21% since 2019! Looking forward, they expect this growth to continue, with the market reaching approximately $30 billion in 2028.

These are pretty impressive numbers, aren’t they? We can’t say for sure how accurate this forecast will be, but we do know that low-code and no-code solutions offer so many benefits that they’re definitely worth checking out and considering if you’re thinking about creating a digital product.

I’m Alex, a Product Manager and Scrum Master at Droids On Roids, where I’m engaged in every phase of the digital product development process. I’m keen on keeping up with the latest developments in this area, and FlutterFlow has been my latest dive. I see it as a breakthrough innovation in validating ideas and finding product-market fit. 

Matching the right technology to your project can be your leverage for winning the market. I’m eager to let you in on what I’ve discovered. Let’s go!

What is FlutterFlow?

Founded by ex-Google engineers Abel Mengistu and Alex Greaves, FlutterFlow aims to reduce development time tenfold^[2] compared to traditional methods. 

It not only speeds up development but also simplifies the process for designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. The platform is developing rapidly and is constantly enhanced by new features.

What’s more, FlutterFlow:

• raised $25.5 million in Series A, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Y Combinator. 
• has hit one million users (March 2024) and is intensely working on building an engaged community.

At its heart, FlutterFlow utilizes the Flutter framework and Dart programming language. Its 1.0 version was launched publicly on May 19, 2021 at Google I/O 2021.

FlutterFlow pricing

FlutterFlow offers a free tier that allows you to start building and testing your digital product with no cost. This tier includes basic features suitable for getting started with app development. For more advanced features and capabilities, FlutterFlow provides various paid plans (Individual/Team or Enterprise). 

How does FlutterFlow work?

The FlutterFlow core is a drag-and-drop interface featuring over 170 pre-built components and over 80 widgets. With this interface, users – even non-technical ones – can create an app from scratch or use pre-designed app templates. By putting widgets and components on the canvas, users can make the app screen by screen.

A visual block builder helps users quickly create app features. In a visual tree, you can build the logic and rules between screens, widgets, and components. Apps can be previewed, tested, and published directly from the browser-based platform in real-time. FlutterFlow provides seamless API integration with various supported third-party tools to add advanced modules quickly.

What’s more, FlutterFlow enables you to extend your app by adding custom Dart code and external Dart libraries (e.g., from the pub. dev). Then, custom actions, components, and functions can be created to enhance your app with new features. By exploring the FF platform deeper, you can find advanced tools and options to optimize your app and improve its performance and stability. 

It’s good to add that FlutterFlow automatically generates code from projects you can export to a Flutter project or Github. However, you can’t import FlutterFlow code and directly use it in other FlutterFlow projects.

The platform also offers an AI Gen assistant for app creation. Developers simply describe their vision and let the AI generate a template tailored to these specifications. It can then be imported into your FlutterFlow project for further customization. 

You may also like: 10 Best AI Coding Assistant Tools

Who can create apps with FlutterFlow?

Anyone can begin building apps with FlutterFlow, including beginners. However, experienced developers bring a deeper understanding and better navigate the platform’s limits. To really tap into FlutterFlow’s potential for creating refined apps, it’s wise to entrust the project to a seasoned development team, ideally one with a strong background in “classic” Flutter.

FlutterFlow use cases

FlutterFlow enables you to:

• build MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) rapidly and learn about the market and users quickly. 
• explore new market opportunities or experiment with new channels to support your business goals. 

However, that’s not all. Here are a few example use cases for FlutterFlow:

Creating low-code MVPs 

Using a low-code solution, you can create things that may have been beyond your budget with traditional development. FlutterFlow helps you significantly reduce time-to-market and cut initial-stage development costs. This gives you more “trials”, which means more opportunities for product experiments to achieve product-market fit before money burnout.

Fast prototyping and validating your MVP with real users enables you to gather data, numbers, and insights for a good pitch deck and work out a business model. Then, you can raise funds from VCs (Venture Capitalists) or apply to a start-up accelerator program/ hub. 

You may also like: 

• The low-code guide that every business owner should read
• Low-code vs. No-code development – comparison for business owners
• MVP, Core Path, MMP – Product versions in app development

Real-world product discovery

As you already know, FlutterFlow highly supports a culture of product experiments. User research is important but, sometimes, getting real is best, as market data has made highly evident. You’ll learn faster by shipping features and experimenting in the real market. Imagine building different feature logic for A/B testing from pre-defined templates in a day and collecting user feedback for further iterating.

As Pendo Research suggests, 80% of features are rarely used. In early startups, investing in the right things is a make-or-break situation. You can rapidly learn via a low code MVP and then invest in precisely what customers need. Don’t worry if some ideas fail – it only takes a few days, not weeks, and gives you valuable feedback to improve your product.

Building a companion app 

FlutterFlow is a suitable match for building a companion app to support your business. You can experiment with new channels to boost your sales, increase customer acquisition, build brand awareness, or provide better customer support. You can create an e-commerce, chat, or educational app to promote your business. For those cases, FlutterFlow gives you a lot of opportunities.

These examples scratch the surface of what you can do with FlutterFlow. But that’s not where the story ends. It’s capabilities are expanding, offering more and more ways to innovate and enhance digital products.

FlutterFlow feature review: Pros and cons

Let’s overview the main pros and cons behind FlutterFlow. 

Key FlutterFlow pros

Delightful user experience

FlutterFlow provides an intuitive UI editor for building a mobile or web app. It is simple, user-friendly, and helps make app screens incredibly fast. Also, with the addition of Lottie and Rive, you can create interactive animations and add a “wow” effect to your app. UX could be a key product differentiation today, and investing in this area could be your product growth leverage. FlutterFlow helps you stick users to using your app with great pleasure, fun, and emotions.

Reduced development cost and time-to-market 

Imagine you have an idea. You can hit the ground running by starting with pre-designed templates and screens to build whole application flows and features. By reducing your time-to-market, you can learn and adapt faster and cheaper.

In the FlutterFlows marketplace, you can buy different templates and even whole app designs to reuse in your project. As the visual builder is at the heart of Flutterflow, you can adjust everything by dragging and dropping.

This approach helps you avoid overengineering your product before knowing what your customers really want. It helps you de-risk your product ideas through a series of fast experiments. You can learn better and wait for traction before investing in solid app architecture. Then, you can rewrite FlutterFlow to Flutter and scale your app to the moon! 

Professional team support 

FlutterFlow shines in team collaboration, making it easy to work together on your app. It provides features for an engaging real-time collaboration experience on the canvas. 

From a business perspective, this platform can also be used during an ideation workshop. Thanks to intuitive real-time collaboration, it helps build fast, clickable prototypes together.

From a technical perspective, you can exceptionally extend apps by adding custom components and functions. FlutterFlow’s documentation provides quick insights into its pro features.

FlutterFlow cons

FlutterFlow is great, but here are a few cons to consider: 

Customization limits and deployment concerns

FlutterFlow excels in speedy prototyping and simple app development, yet it faces limitations when addressing complex, specialized features due to its limited structure. The generated code is often hard to maintain and read. Even if you can add custom code and libraries, customization above some level will be ineffective. You have limited access to the more advanced development complexes. Regarding technical project structure, in many aspects, FlutterFlow decides for you.

FlutterFlow doesn’t support a staging environment, so you publish the app directly to production by default. This could be mitigated, but the question is whether it’s worth it, especially for enterprise products.

If you’re making an MVP app from scratch or a companion app, you shouldn’t worry. But if you are an enterprise or growing an app-first business beyond market fit, you should consider development with Flutter.

Read also: What is Flutter and is it right for your product?

Difficult for beginners

FlutterFlow is easy if you work with pre-defined templates and flows, but it’s not enough to publish a production-ready app. In that case, starting from scratch and acknowledging the tool’s advanced features is best. But it may consume a lot of time and be difficult for beginners, especially when compared to other low-code platforms.

FlutterFlow requires a specific app structure, which differs slightly from regular Flutter projects. Developers who have worked with Flutter before could experience frustration. This is why FlutterFlow is sometimes perceived as too casual for developers and too professional for casuals.

• Dependency on platform updates 
• Relying on FlutterFlow means staying adaptive to their update cycle and platform changes, which could impact your feature stability.

Still growing

FlutterFlow is still growing, meaning it’s not perfect yet. The platform is often sub-optimal and unscalable in some situations. You need to make some workarounds to build a real market-ready app. Also, you can sometimes experience random bugs, crashes and app performance downgrades

From MVP’s perspective, the pros outweigh the cons for many use cases. FlutterFlow is rapidly growing and fixing its “pains” by listening to its user community. The next features are being added incredibly fast, and FlutterFlow looks better and better every week.

When is FlutterFlow not an ideal option?

There may be better choices for developing enterprise applications that handle complex business processes and operations than FlutterFlow. This includes apps with many strict roles, permissions, and security levels. Using traditional methods for writing advanced development concepts and maintaining clean code structure is crucial here. It’s necessary to ensure the correct app performance.

FlutterFlow works best with supported integrations. When one is not supported, some problems and bugs may arise. For example, FF works best with Firebase/ Supabase regarding the backend. However, it only provides some functionalities when integrated with Azure. Consider other options if you have “must-have” integrations that FlutterFlow doesn’t support.

What’s more, FlutterFlow might not initially seem the best choice for larger businesses with high data usage and traffic. However, it’s actively enhancing its offerings for the enterprise sector. It’s definitely worth monitoring their progress!

Keep in mind, FlutterFlow isn’t replacing traditional development across the board. It’s smart to get advice from seasoned devs or a software house on the best tech fit for your project.

FlutterFlow integrations 

With FlutterFlow combined with its integrations, you get a full digital ecosystem for your app. These integrations make developing your app quicker and more efficient, enabling you to add complex capabilities to your app, like leveraging AI for smarter interactions, managing data seamlessly, and integrating secure payment methods.

Below you will find a list of sample integrations. If you find it too technical and detailed for you, just skip to the next section. 

Backend

• Firebase – a platform providing a database for defining and keeping your data, which can easily be integrated with FlutterFlow.
• Rowy and BuildShip – Rowy is a CMS (Content Management System) for Firebase. It’s a simple add-on to Firebase that allows you to manage your data without the need for programming. Thanks to BuildShip, you can build logic for the backend and create APIs.
  Imagine building a chain: Firebase for keeping data, Rowy to manage them, and BuildShip to create backend logic and APIs.
• Supabase – FlutterFlow also works well with Supabase and is an excellent alternative for building the whole backend workflow.

AI

• OpenAI – You can integrate the FlutterFlow app with Chat GPT and add AI features to your application.
• Google Gemini – Google Gemini is a competitor of ChatGPT. It could act as an intelligent assistant in FlutterFlow applications. You can use AI features seamlessly as predefined actions in the no-code. It’s a recently added feature with the potential to be a real game-changer! 

Payment

• Razorpay or Stripe – For e-commerce.
• RevenueCat – For subscription and in-app purchases.

Animation

• Lottie and Rive – these two tools provide beautiful animations to enhance the user experience. 

Other

• Algolia – A real-time search service that enables the quick and efficient searching of large data sets.
• OneSignal – It enables you to use push notifications, email, SMS, and in-app messaging to engage and convert your customers into loyal clients.
• Google Analytics – Thanks to this integration, you can analyze user behaviors and make data-driven decisions.

In summary, FlutterFlow’s wide range of integrations bring valuable tools and services under one roof, making it easier to develop, optimize, and scale your digital products. 

Examples of FlutterFlow apps

Below, I present a successful Android and iOS mobile apps built in FlutterFlow. These can give you insights into FlutteFlow’s amazing opportunities and the features that can be built with this tool. 

If you have doubts regarding FlutterFlow’s ability to build market-ready applications, see these examples:

1. Presence – This app is the fifth “Product of the Month” as of writing on Product Hunt. It helps you discover people in your area with shared interests and backgrounds.
   
   Features: Chat, social functions, AI support, and geolocalization.
2. Postaj – The app connects service providers with clients in real-time. It has achieved 3k daily users, 30k+ downloads, and raised 150k+ pre-seed rounds.
   
   Features: Chat, subscription model, social wall, notifications, and a review system.
3. Totoy – You can upload any image with text; the app will explain it in your mother tongue. You can also review documents with AI and ask questions, etc.
   
   Features: Camera integration, image recognition and an AI document assistant.
4. National Park – This app is your personal trip planner and travel guide through national parks in the USA. It’s an example of an app with a stunning user experience and interface. 

FlutterFlow app development with Droids On Roids

If you want to create a solid production-ready app that helps you grow or find external funding, it’s best to choose the right specialists. 

At Droids On Roids, we combine low-code ease with pro skills to build powerful MVPs faster and at a lower cost. We have interdisciplinary teams of product strategists, UX researchers, and designers who support clients in accomplishing business goals. Correct discovery processes are even more important than development itself in the early stage. 

We advise our clients on the optimal technologies based on their project’s specifics and business goals. We know when the best route is native development, when it’s cross-platform, and when it’s low-code. If we decide on FlutterFlow, after de-risking your product idea and gaining traction, we can help you transfer the app to traditional Flutter and scale to new heights. 

Wondering which approach is best for you? Schedule a free consultation with us: Let’s talk about your idea! 

Final thoughts

Various resources, such as Product Board and Tim Herbig, have said that early-stage companies should spend at least 25 to 60% of their time on product and problem space discovery. From our experience, we agree more with the second value.

In an early startup, your key goal is finding your product-market fit. In a nutshell, it’s a repeatable value proposition demonstrated across your target group. You should provide a small feature set with compelling value for a specific use case. But, in order to figure it out, you need tests and experiments between problem & solution space in the real market. Focus on shipping fast, and collect and apply feedback – don’t overengineer and overprocess your product.

And this is where FlutterFlow comes as a perfect solution. It’s a game-changer for anyone looking to get their app from concept to launch without the traditional hassles. Whether you’re a startup dreaming big or a scale-up exploring new territories, FlutterFlow’s got your back with its low-code ease and powerful integration.

What’s crucial? It’s all about making development accessible, faster, and more cost-effective. Now, you can make prototypes and simple clickable apps easier than ever. 

But remember, while FlutterFlow opens up a world of possibilities, it’s always smart to pair its magic with the right strategy for your project. Don’t hesitate to seek expert advice to make informed choices. At the end of the day, crafting digital experiences that not only look good but also resonate deeply with your users is what matters.

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