The 6 best AI app builders in 2026 | Zapier

Even using no-code, building a new app can take a big chunk of your time. Setting up data sources requires smart planning and foresight. Building an intuitive user interface takes multiple tries until you find the perfect layout. And tying it all together with bug-free app logic demands attention to detail and many rounds of testing.

AI helps in two ways here. The first is by turning your prompt into a first-draft app, speeding up setup. The other is by building solutions with code and placing them in the right place. It can’t do 100% for you yet—but it’s getting really, really close.

Every time I update this list of the best AI app builders, I find new options that keep pushing the boundaries of what AI can do in this category. It’s evolving at an exciting rate. Here are the best AI app builders available out of the 30+ I tested.

The 6 best AI-powered app builders

What makes the best generative AI app builder?

This list focuses on platforms that help you create apps using natural language prompts. But the AI app builders you’ll discover here come in two flavors. The first are established app-building platforms that added AI to the development process. Their main advantage is that they already have a suite of editing tools to fine-tune the result of the prompt. The others are platforms that have popped up recently, focusing on building only with AI prompts. The way to control them is using detail-oriented English with a programming mindset, which can take a few tries until you get comfortable with it.

Here’s what I paid attention to during my search. These AI app builders:

• Interpret prompts accurately. This is the test to see if you’re dealing with real AI or a well-designed template remixer (super useful, but not true AI).

• Automatically build basic functionality. This means these AI app builders go further than just assembling the user interface. They can also set up basic functionality such as creating or updating records.

• Are fully no-code. This means that you don’t have to know HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any other complex programming framework to customize the app built by the AI.

• Offer good customization tools. I looked out for the possibility of adding more prompts or using no-code controls to tune the app.

• Have easy publishing methods. These apps don’t require you to handle any server configuration or other complicated controls before sharing it with the world.

I had three fun weeks of testing. I signed up for each of these apps, noted down a few app ideas (and generated others with ChatGPT), and pasted them into the prompt windows. I made changes to the prompts to check how sensitive the AI engine was and then continued editing to gauge each platform’s flexibility. Here are the results.

The best AI app builders at a glance

Best AI app builder for ease of use and speed

Softr

Softr pros:

Softr cons:

Softr is already on Zapier’s best no-code app builders list. I’m still amazed at how easy it is to use without completely sacrificing functionality, removing “more power means more difficulty” from the equation.

It’s the fastest platform to get you from the prompt window to an app that’s close to ready to use. When you visit the Softr AI page, you can select a category and enter what you’d like your app to do. After you send in your prompt, it captures the gist of what you want: it assigns a name to your app, and then you can choose a starting color and design look before it starts generating.

It may take a few moments to complete your app. After the engine finishes setting up, you land on the Softr editor with everything ready to go: an app with a dashboard, login pages, list pages to display data, and input forms. To top it off, there may be a couple of user roles available, depending on the type of platform you asked to generate.

You can click on any of the components on each page to configure how they look and behave at a basic level, as well as connecting a Google Sheet or Airtable base to store data. There’s no way to edit your app using AI, but growing your app is easy. Softr has a collection of user interface components that help you work with your data and set up new actions.

This burst of speed from idea to first app draft is Softr’s greatest advantage. And if you need to configure advanced actions, get into workflow automation, or sync data across your apps, Softr integrates with Zapier to make that happen. For example, when someone submits a form in your app, AI can generate a summary, route the request to the right team, and create follow-up tasks in your project management tool—keeping operations and support aligned without extra effort. Learn more about how to automate Softr.

Softr price: Free plan available; Basic plan starts at $59/month

The best AI app builder for automation

Zapier

Zapier pros:

Zapier cons:

We’re on the Zapier blog, so let me cover the product’s evolution over the past few years—I understand any skepticism, and I promise to keep this nuanced. Zapier is different from other AI app builders on the list: it’s not as flexible when building a UI for your tools. You won’t have pixel-perfect control over the frontend. It’s about building internal automations that power your business.

Zapier allows anyone in your organization to create the automations, agents, and apps they need by simply typing their request into Copilot, Zapier’s AI assistant. As a result, business teams like marketing, sales, and customer support can automate their workflows as easily as technical teams can.

Copilot is the starting point for anything you need. Just type in your request, and Copilot makes a plan, identifies the Zapier products and external apps needed, and builds it for you. It might build you a form, a database, a chatbot, an agent, or any combination. Then, you can continue making changes with AI until you have what you need.

You can see Copilot’s thought process in the sidebar, along with all the actions it’s taken, plus anything it needs from you (like authentications for external apps). You can also interact with your automation manually in the visual builder by adding paths, delays, filters, human-in-the-loop steps, and more.

Zapier’s ease of use means there’s little to no learning curve for most users, which saves time and speeds up onboarding. But the bigger picture is adoption: Zapier is designed to spread AI automation quickly within your organization by empowering business teams to build what they need rather than waiting for IT.

Zapier pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $19.99/month

Best AI app builder for creating and editing with AI

Microsoft Power Apps

Microsoft Power Apps pros:

Microsoft Power Apps cons:

Microsoft is rolling out Copilot features across its entire product lineup, and Power Apps is no exception. Featured in Zapier’s list of the best internal tool builders, it’s already a powerful app builder, offering deep functionality without requiring coding knowledge. It uses a function-based language for app logic, close to the one available in Excel.

In the Power Apps dashboard, you can now choose to start a new app from a prompt. I suggest you start with a small description of what you’re looking for. Here’s why: in the first step after submitting the prompt, you’ll see the generated database schema. You can use a chat window on the right to add, remove, or change the fields with prompts. After you save this, Power Apps will put together the main page to display and interact with this database. Starting small is better because you can only generate the starting point, not the entire app.

Going through these first steps is already pretty cool, especially if you struggle with database schemas like I sometimes do. But what came next surprised me: the Copilot chat window remains open on the app editor, and you can ask to add new elements to the app in plain English. I asked to add a couple of buttons and a new form. I was impressed with the accuracy of what the AI engine implemented, even if there were a few comical mishaps from time to time—apparently, AI doesn’t know where the “bottom of the screen” is.

You can write what you want and get it on your screen a few seconds later—just position the elements where you want them. New pages? Buttons? New lists? Ask, and you shall receive.

Microsoft Power Apps pricing: Premium plan goes for $20/user/month. Full access to all features may require subscribing or configuring other Microsoft services, such as Dynamics 365 or Azure Cloud.

Best AI app builder for data views

Airtable Omni

Airtable Omni pros:

Airtable Omni cons:

Airtable is a popular data management solution that proved that databases don’t have to be scary, and it’s doing the same for building apps: Airtable Omni, the upgraded version of Airtable Cobuilder, configures interfaces, forms, and views starting from text prompts.

After you fill out details about your company and your team, tapping to start with Omni pre-loads the prompt with a personalized suggestion of an app you could build. For me, it proposed a campaign management app, so I used that as a starting point. Alternatively, you can upload your spreadsheet so the engine can build the structure on top of your data.

When you tap to build, the platform procedurally generates the app. It’s best not to interact with it for the 2 to 5 minutes it needs to finish working. You’ll see it getting busy with creating new bases, applying views on top, designing colorful dashboards, and wrapping everything up with navigation links.

Omni provides a thorough first draft that’s ready to use with a couple of clicks. If you want to keep customizing it, you can do it manually with Airtable’s native tools—they’re very intuitive—or choose to keep prompting AI to ask for changes. The process is similar here: Omni goes back to the interface, makes edits based on your instructions, and then gets back to you once done.

Airtable and its Omni engine sit somewhere between Softr and Retool. They’re a bit more mature than the former, having been on the market for longer; they’re less complex and require no technical skills to use when compared with the latter. This makes it a perfect middle-weight if you’re past the basic use cases but don’t want to graduate to enterprise-grade software yet.

If you already have data somewhere else or want Airtable to be the base where you automate your workflows, you can connect it to Zapier. For example, when new records are added, AI can categorize the data, push updates into a business intelligence (BI) dashboard, and send a summary to stakeholders in Slack—keeping analytics and communication in sync automatically. Learn more about how to automate Airtable.

Airtable Omni price: Free plan available. Team plan from $24/user/month.

Best AI app builder for MVPs and products for web and mobile

Bubble

Bubble pros:

Bubble cons:

When you’re building an MVP, a prototype, or a new digital product, there’s always a tension: you want to go as fast as you can, but the result can’t be clunky or lack polish. Bubble hits the sweet spot here: the AI features get a working draft in your hands in minutes, while still having all the visual development tools to dive into each feature and make them actually work as intended.

After you click the Generate with AI button on the dashboard, describe your app—what it does, who it’s for, the core features you need—and Bubble adds finishing touches to the prompt to make it easier to interpret. Hit Generate, and a few minutes later, you’re looking at a functional starter app. Real pages, a working database, and frontend workflows: all following the platform’s development best practices so you don’t have to go back and fix what AI generated.

You now have your starting point. What’s next? You can start editing manually: drag and drop visual elements, add new data types and fields to the database, or jump into the Workflows tab. But you can keep moving fast if you want to: click the AI Agent button at the top right, and chat to get your changes. It can explain what the app does, create or modify any designs, and even build workflows. It’s still in beta—sometimes it hits, sometimes it misses—but it does add a vibe-coding element to an otherwise very structured platform.

Bubble isn’t limited to running in browsers anymore. You can now publish to both web and native mobile, sharing the same backend. The AI app generator works for both, although mobile support is more recent. Follow the integration guide to connect Bubble to the app stores, and you can push each version by hitting the Deploy button in the editor. This multi-platform flexibility means less development time when your idea gets traction and access to a potentially wider market of people interested in your product.

Focus on building your product, not on doing admin on your work apps. When you connect Bubble to Zapier, you can connect the apps you use for sales, marketing, or customer support directly to your Bubble app, starting actions and updating data automatically. Get started with a pre-made template.

Bubble price: Free plan available. Starter Web for web apps at $32/month, with Web/Mobile at $69/month.

Best AI app builder for building enterprise internal tools

Retool

Retool pros:

Retool cons:

Your IT team’s backlog is a graveyard of requests for “quick internal tools” that never saw the light of day. Retool makes sure those tools are born: business teams can build what they need with full access to all their data, now with AI to speed things up—and with IT still firmly at the reins for security.

When you generate an app from a prompt, Retool’s AI Assist scaffolds the entire architecture. It writes down what the tool should ideally do; it wireframes how it will look, using the native component library; and then it actually gets down to business.

Seeing it work is like watching the platform use itself: new empty cards appear on the canvas, then a large list, then buttons. The cards get filled with metrics, the lists display dummy data, the buttons get labeled. The agent keeps going until all functionality is ready to go. If you need to change anything later, you can always open the Assist tab again, just in case you need to tidy up styling, clean component names, or add new features.

Retool is slightly off the mark on the “no-code all the way” constraint I had for this list. If you want to manually edit any data query, you’ll have to write SQL. For building more complex logic tied to buttons, you need to dust off your JavaScript skills. However, it still remains accessible because it integrates AI into both query and logic builders: instead of going to ChatGPT to ask what you want and pasting it in Retool (what I would do), you get it inside the platform right away.

At the end of the day, Marketing, Ops, and Finance finally get the tools they need, and IT doesn’t have to manage everyone’s expectations while fighting their fires. There are robust governance and auditing tools, along with centralized controls to make sure non-technical folks don’t break anything but still get what they need.

Retool price: free plan available. Team plan at $12/month per builder and $7/month per internal user.

Generative AI app builders vs. building AI features into apps

All the apps above let you use generative AI to build an app. But if you’re looking to build apps that have AI features—say, you want to build an app that summarizes text or turns it into audio—there are other options you can look at.

• You can build your own chatbots with Zapier’s AI Chatbot tool. Start by telling it what to do, connect knowledge sources to ground it on your data, and share it with others. It’s great for implementing robust internal tools, fast.

• OpenAI’s GPTs offer similar possibilities. It’s as if you can customize ChatGPT for unique cases, such as creative writing, handling negotiations, or anything else you can come up with.

• One step more complex, there’s Glide. It’s a no-code app builder that offers AI-powered interface components. When you add them to your app, you can generate text, extract text from images, or render audio into text.

• Finally, if you want to create a unique app with custom AI features, you can do it with any app builder out there that supports API connections. Choose your AI model provider—OpenAI, Anthropic, or a Hugging Face community model, among others—get the API keys, and plug them into the app editor. Then, set up the calls and how they’re received on your app. This option is more advanced, but you’ll be able to create any kind of AI-powered app with complete freedom.

Build faster with AI

Building apps with AI is still in the early days, but there are already surprisingly powerful tools out there. It won’t get you across the finish line with just a prompt, but AI app builders give you a good speed boost to get you there. You can deploy apps faster or use the extra time to work on the more important features, which will improve the quality of your apps over time.

Related reading:

This article was originally published in February 2024. The most recent update was in February 2026.