Xano Review: Development, Features, Drawbacks, Pricing and Examples

With No Code tools growing rapidly fast, there are a lot of apps to choose from to start your development. While Xano is often thought of as a database platform, it’s so much more than that. It’s a powerful No Code BaaS platform that offers a wide range of features for building and managing APIs and databases.

What is Xano?

Xano is a backend development platform that includes a cloud-hosted database, among other features. However, Xano is not solely a database; it also provides a variety of tools and services for building and deploying APIs, managing user authentication, and integrating with other third-party services.

Xano Key features

• Drag-and-drop interface: Xano’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to build and connect APIs, without any coding required.
• Database builder: Xano includes a built-in database builder that allows you to create and manage databases, as well as connect them to your applications. Xano also has a visible database diagram.
• REST API builder: Xano’s REST API builder allows you to create and manage API endpoints, as well as secure them with API keys and authentication.
• Webhooks: Xano allows you to set up webhooks to trigger events in your applications when certain actions are taken on your APIs.
• Scalability: Xano is built on a scalable infrastructure that can handle large volumes of traffic, making it ideal for production applications.
• Highly customizable: Xano not only allows you to do what is presented, but also allows you to write code based on lambda functions.

Xano drawbacks

• Learning curve: There is a bit of a learning curve to Xano, as you will need to familiarise yourself with its drag-and-drop interface and its features.
• Vendor lock-in: Xano is a proprietary platform, which means that you are reliant on Xano to provide updates and support for the platform. 

What can you build with Xano?

Once you have a Xano account you can build a wide variety of applications, including:

• APIs: Xano can be used to build RESTful APIs that can be used to connect to other applications. It has a number of features that make it easy to create APIs, including authentication, authorization, and data validation.
• Data stores: Xano can be used to store data in a relational or non-relational flexible database. It supports PostgreSQL.
• Real-time apps: Xano can be used to build real-time applications using WebSockets. This means that your applications can be updated in real time as data changes.

In addition to these features, Xano is also a very secure and scalable platform. It is SOC2 compliant and supports multiple regions.

If you are looking for a No Code platform that can be used to build a wide variety of applications, Xano is a great option.

Xano Pricing

Xano team has created a lot of plans for you to choose from and they even have a free plan for you to test it out. Here are all of the plans:

• Build: This is a free tier, ideal for personal use or trying out Xano. It includes 1 workspace, 100,000 total records, a No Code API builder, rate-limited API, and live weekly office hours. No credit card is required for this tier.
• Launch: Priced at $85/month (or $1,020 billed yearly), this tier offers dedicated infrastructure, suitable for apps ready for production. It includes everything in Build plus 3 workspaces, no record or rate limits, background tasks, branching/merging, test data sources, JS lambda functions, and compliance with GDPR, ISO 27001, and SOC2.
• Scale 1x: At $199/month ($2,388 billed yearly), this tier provides increased API and databases CPU power (3x compared to Launch), a load balancer, 5 workspaces, 3 team seats, comprehensive data caching, and access to enterprise addons. It’s for apps requiring more power and security.
• Scale 2x: For $356/month ($4,272 billed yearly), this tier offers everything in Scale 1x plus auto-scaling, double the API and databases CPU power compared to Scale 1x.
• Scale 4x: Priced at $673/month ($8,076 yearly), this includes everything in Scale 2x with 4x the API and database CPU power compared to Scale 1x.
• Scale 8x: For $1,267/month ($15,204 yearly), it offers everything in Scale 4x with 8x the API and databases CPU power compared to Scale 1x. 
• Enterprise: This tier has custom pricing and offers flexible hosting (on-prem, cloud, data center), sidecar Docker containers, high availability, priority support and training, 24/7 monitoring, advanced logging, and a custom SLA. It’s designed for large-scale, scalable server, custom needs.

Apps that were built with Xano examples

1. Open Infra

Idea Link has created Open Infra, an internal tool for a communications operator. This tool is used to build, manage, and develop fibre and electrical infrastructure for households, companies, and municipalities. It also has a scalable backend which can be changed any time.

Some of its key features include:

• All-in-one ERP with GPS capability
• Booking appointments
• Automatic email notifications
• Full responsiveness for mobile devices and PC
• Task management capabilities
• Key account information accessible in multiple ways
• Frontline worker location tracking

If you want to read more about the app you can check out Idea Link’s Case Study .

2. Folkd

Folkd is a social bookmarking website that allows users to save, organize, and share links to websites that they find interesting. It was founded in 2003 and has been used by millions of people around the world.

Here are some of the key features of Folkd:

• Data storage for managing bookmarks
• Organize bookmarks into folders
• Share bookmarks with others
• Follow other users
• Find new websites

Xano integrations

There are many tools and external services that you can connect your Xano-based app to.

The most natural applications are connecting it to the frontends of Bubble for complex applications or Flutterflow for simpler web apps. 

You can also connect your Xano app to business-related services such as a CRM (e.g. Salesforce), email software (Mailerlite, Mailchimp, Omnisend), automation software (Make, Zapier) and others. 

Is Xano right for you?

Xano is not the most popular tool in the No Code community, but it is still a great one. There are only about 2000 live projects that were built with Xano. Its growing user base, powerful capabilities, user-friendly interface, rapid development speed, flexible pricing, database storage and active community position it as a strong contender in the No Code market. 

With continued development and adoption, Xano is well-positioned to become a mainstream choice for building modern web applications.

Final thoughts

If you’re looking for a powerful and easy-to-use BaaS platform to build your next application with No Code backend, Xano is a great option. Its No Code development, scalability, flexibility, integrations make it a compelling choice for businesses and individuals of all sizes. 

In addition to that, if you do want to try Xano right now you can click this link to get 10% off for all plans. Just a small gift from us.

And if you are interested in tools like Xano I would highly suggest checking out our other reviews like Bubble or Appmaster.