Did vibe coding kill no-code?

No-code promised that anyone could build software without writing code. Then AI coding tools made writing code something anyone could do, by asking. Since early 2025 the obituaries have been easy to write: Airtable sold for a fraction of its peak valuation, Wix and Webflow cut staff, and one visual app builder shut down saying AI had made it obsolete. Meanwhile Lovable says its run rate passed $600 million, and Wix says Base44 went from a few million to about $150 million of ARR in a year.

The obituaries are half right. We compared the two camps on the same scales: sites each platform publishes on its own default domain in the public web crawl, domain popularity in the Tranco ranking, the share of businesses paying each vendor on Ramp, the filings of the one public incumbent, Wix, and the deals and layoff memos of the private ones. The data splits no-code in two. The tools for building apps without code lost that job to AI builders. The tools for building sites and automations held, and some grew fast. Every incumbent we checked bolted on AI; Airtable was sold and Bildr shut. Company numbers are the companies' own claims, and every number links to its source. The methodology has the details.

Two kinds of no-code#

"No-code" has always covered two different jobs. One is building an app: a database, logins, screens and logic, without writing code. Bubble, Glide, Softr, FlutterFlow, Adalo and Bildr sell that. The other is building a site or automating work: a marketing site, a portfolio, a landing page, or a workflow that moves data between tools. Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer, Zapier and n8n sell that. Airtable and Retool sit in between, as databases and internal-tool builders.

Vibe coding competes head-on with the first job. Lovable, Bolt, Replit and Base44 take a description and return a working app with a database and sign-in, hosted on their own domain. They compete with the second job much less: a marketing site needs a designer and a marketing team to keep editing it, and an automation needs connectors to a hundred other tools. The data below follows that line almost exactly.

The app builders lost the job#

Every app builder, old or new, gives its users a free default address: name.bubbleapps.io, name.softr.app, name.lovable.app. Common Crawl, the open web crawl, records the sites it finds under each. That's a count of apps that someone published and linked in public and that the crawl happened to fetch, a sample rather than a census of apps that exist, and it misses every custom domain. But it's the same method for both camps.

The no-code app builders didn't collapse; they stalled. Their public footprint in October 2026 (966 sites) is about where it was in early 2023 (937). The AI builders went from 235 to 10,970 in 21 months, and Lovable accounts for most of it.

The domain ranking tells the same story. Tranco combines several traffic and DNS sources into a list of the most popular domains. One by one, the AI builders passed the no-code app builders, and then started on the site builders.

The incumbents who build apps say much the same in their own words. Bubble's co-CEO Emmanuel Straschnov called the idea that anyone can vibe-code software that scales "a false promise" in October 2025, when Bubble said it had nearly 6 million builders and nearly 7 million apps. Five months later he told users that "our AI offering is not yet at par with some of the AI-first companies in our space", and in July Bubble said it was exploring letting outside models build Bubble apps: "We don't want to be a separate ecosystem that people cannot interact with".

Bildr was a visual platform for building full web apps. On the day it shut, Magnuson wrote that a user who had spent months building an app on it, with significant help from his team, moved it off the platform "in a couple of days" with Claude Code, without any support from that team: screenshots of every screen, a migration plan Claude helped write, then Claude implementing it.

Sites and automations held#

The other half of no-code looks nothing like an obituary. Tranco's provider mix changed in August 2023, so we compare ranks from then to 22 October 2026. Nine of twelve no-code platform domains rose.

n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool, and agents made it more useful, not less: an AI agent is a step in an n8n workflow. Framer moved from design tool to site builder in 2022 and is the only incumbent here we found raising at a higher valuation since 2022: $100 million at a $2 billion valuation in August 2025, saying it had been break-even for a year. Its sites on its three default domains grew from 436 in the crawl of February–March 2024 to 5,107 in October 2026.

None of this means the site builders are untouched. Wix's own homepage slipped in Tranco, and Webflow's share of paying businesses is falling, as the next section shows. But people are still publishing sites on them at the same pace, and on Framer at a much faster one.

Who businesses pay#

Ramp, a corporate card and spend platform, publishes for each software vendor the share of its customers in a category who paid that vendor in the trailing 12 months. In "web hosting & site builders", it covers businesses on Ramp only, which skews toward US startups and small companies. Bubble, Glide, Softr, Adalo and Base44 don't have Ramp pages, so this is the site-builder half plus the AI builders that do.

Webflow lost 7.3 points, more than a quarter of its share, and its share of businesses buying in the category for the first time halved, from 12.9% to 6.6%. The gains went to developer hosts (Vercel, Cloudflare) and AI builders (Lovable, Replit). The site builders aimed at small businesses didn't move.

Webflow's own memo reads the same way. Announcing its second restructuring in May 2026, CEO Linda Tong wrote that "AI tools and lightweight builders are providing a faster path to launch for those with simple website requirements", and that Webflow had to "change the size and shape of the team" to become an agentic web marketing platform for marketing teams. Its first cut, about 8% of staff, came in July 2024. The second came with 16 weeks of severance and no number.

Revenue held, valuations didn't#

Airtable is the clearest repricing. It raised $735 million in December 2021 at an $11 billion pre-money valuation, about $11.7 billion with the new money, when, by SaaStr's estimate, its ARR was around $156 million. In August 2026 Bending Spoons agreed to buy it in an all-cash deal at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, which with Airtable's net cash implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion. The business hadn't shrunk: Bending Spoons put its ARR at about $480 million in June 2026, growing over 20% a year. The enterprise value came to 2.7 times ARR; the 2021 round had valued it at roughly 75 times its ARR then.

It's not only no-code: Bending Spoons signed for Miro a month later at a similar $1.355 billion enterprise value on about $600 million of ARR, and seat-priced software as a whole was repriced over the same period (we covered that in Is vibe coding replacing SaaS?). For scale, Lovable raised at $13.3 billion in August and said it reached a $600 million run rate in September: more than Airtable's ARR, at nearly six times its sale's equity value.

Wix, the only public incumbent, shows the same split between business and price. Its revenue grew from $1.388 billion in 2022 to $1.993 billion in 2025, and it still grew 15% in the second quarter of 2026. Its share price peaked in January 2025 and fell 81% by June 2026.

The incumbents bolted on AI#

All 11 incumbents we checked (Wix, Webflow, Framer, Bubble, Airtable, Zapier, Retool, Glide, Softr, Adalo and FlutterFlow) shipped a prompt-to-app or agent product by March 2026, and most of the launches we logged came after Lovable and Bolt took off in early 2025. Wix went further and bought one. Base44, a young vibe-coding startup, cost about $80 million plus earn-outs in June 2025, when its ARR was "just a few million". Wix reported $100 million in March 2026 and about $150 million as of May, about the size of 8% of Wix's $1.963 billion total ARR at the end of June. Its gross margin was near zero at the start of 2026; Wix expects about 60% in the second half, and with its August results it announced Base 1, Base44's own model, to control compute costs.

The surviving incumbents tell one story about why they'll last. Airtable's Howie Liu wrote that "vibe coding is unreliable and error-prone for building production business apps". Bubble's version: "You can't control what you don't understand." Softr's founder told VentureBeat that "one prompt might break 10 previous steps". The pitch is the same everywhere: AI generates, and a visual layer you can read keeps it maintainable. Only Bildr conceded.

Wix's numbers also show where its own growth is slowing. Its Partners business (agencies and freelancers who build sites for clients, plus resellers) is the part closest to people paid to do no-code, and its growth has slowed every year. In June, Wix blamed part of its guidance cut on "a more pronounced slowdown, beyond our previous expectations, in the growth of our Partners business".

Where the conversation went#

Developers started talking less about no-code tools before vibe coding had a name. On Hacker News, comments naming the incumbents ("low-code", "bubble.io", "webflow", "airtable", "zapier", "retool") fell from 2,214 in 2023 to 1,490 in 2024 and 1,087 in 2025. Comments saying "vibe coding" or "vibe coded" went from none to 6,674 in 2025. "bubble.io" appeared in no comment at all in any of the first three quarters of 2026.

Reddit shows the shift in attention, but not an exodus. On archived snapshots, r/vibecoding had 292,596 weekly visitors in mid-February 2026 against 36,643 for r/nocode at the end of January, about eight times as many. r/vibecoding had 9 members ten days after the term was coined. Yet r/nocode kept growing too, from 74,689 members in July 2025 to 119,042 in April 2026. Interest in building without code grew; the tools people talk about changed.

What this means if you build with AI#

1. For an app with data, logic and logins, the market has moved to AI builders and coding agents. The no-code app builders' public footprint has been flat since 2023 while AI builders' grew 47-fold in 21 months, and Bubble admits its AI is still catching up. If you're starting an app today, that's where the tooling, templates and community answers are (we compared the big four in AI app builders in 2026).
2. For a marketing site someone else will edit, visual builders still earn their keep. Framer, Wix and Squarespace held or grew; Webflow's own memo says AI tools now offer a faster path for simple sites, and it is refocusing on the ones a marketing team works on every week. Choose by who edits it after launch, not who builds it.
3. Own an export path. When Bildr shut its servers, apps built on it had to move or go offline, and Airtable's new owner laid off a large part of its team five weeks after closing. Code is easier to move than a visual platform's internals: Bildr's example user rebuilt a months-long project in a couple of days with Claude Code. Keep your data exportable and the code in a repository you control.
4. Read "AI-native" on a no-code tool as catch-up. Bubble's co-CEO said in March 2026 that its AI wasn't yet at par; Webflow's App Gen was in public beta in November 2025. Test the AI on your real app, not the demo.
5. Expect the default domain to be where your app lives. Most AI-built apps are published on their builder's subdomain, which is why they show up in the crawl at all. That ties your URL to one vendor: put anything you'll share widely on a domain or host you can take with you.

host0 hosts whatever your agent creates, including apps with a shared database, at a link you can share. It's built for the step after generation, so the app isn't tied to the tool that wrote it.

Methodology#

Common Crawl. For each platform's default user-site domain we counted distinct hostnames in 17 Common Crawl crawls, each a sample of the web rather than a census, (CC-MAIN-2023-06 to CC-MAIN-2026-43), reading the crawl's index files directly from data.commoncrawl.org: a binary search of cluster.idx for every subdomain of the domain, then each index block in that range. Hostnames are lowercased with www. stripped; previews (lovableproject.com) and Replit's retired repl.co are excluded. Crawl budgets differ by crawl and domain, so we compare levels across several crawls. Custom domains, unlinked apps and private apps are invisible to this method, which under-counts the incumbents' paying customers (who mostly use custom domains) more than AI builders' free users. Reading the index files directly also corrects our AI app builders post, whose count through the index API was capped at 15,000 lines per result page and undercounted lovable.app: 7,941 sites in the September 2026 crawl, not 4,485, and 814 in October 2025, not 625.

Tranco. The full top-1M list for the 15th of every month from January 2023 to October 2026, plus 22 October 2026 (47 lists), exact domain match. Tranco changed its providers in August 2023 (Alexa out, Chrome UX Report and Cloudflare Radar in), so every comparison starts at 15 August 2023 or later. A rank is relative popularity, not traffic.

Ramp. The monthly series embedded in each vendor's page on ramp.com/vendors, pulled on 23 October 2026. Ramp defines the metric as the share of businesses that purchased from the vendor, of all businesses that made purchases in the category, in the 12 months to the month shown. Its population is businesses on Ramp, not the market.

Company numbers. Wix's from its quarterly 6-K earnings releases and annual revenue from SEC XBRL data; Airtable's from Bending Spoons' 6-K filings; Webflow's, Bubble's, Framer's and Bildr's from their own posts. All are the companies' claims. Share prices are monthly closes from Yahoo Finance's chart data. Estimates from tracker sites (Zapier, Retool, Bubble revenue) are left out.

Hacker News and Reddit. Exact-phrase comment counts per quarter from Algolia's Hacker News search; subreddit sizes from Wayback Machine snapshots (Reddit replaced member counts with weekly visitors in September 2025, so we compare like with like).

The data pack, with every claim, its tier, the spot-checks and a do-not-cite list, is in our repository at docs/research/2026-10-23-vibe-coding-vs-no-code.md; the series and the scripts that compute them are in docs/research/2026-10-23-vibe-coding-vs-no-code-data/.

Open questions#

• Custom domains. Paying no-code customers mostly publish on their own domains. Counting the custom domains that point at each platform would change the picture most, and needs passive DNS data we don't have.
• Webflow's revenue. It hasn't published a number since "hundreds of millions" in June 2024, or the size of its May 2026 cut.
• Bubble's business. No revenue, round or headcount figure since its 2021 Series A.
• One crawl or a trend. Bubble's crawled apps halved from September to October 2026 (312 to 149), and Lovable's tripled from July to September (2,558 to 7,941). The next crawls will say whether either holds.
• Base44's margin. Whether Wix's AI builder reaches the ~60% gross margin it expects for the second half of 2026, and whether that's what keeps an incumbent's bought-in AI business profitable.