Having worked with a no-code product for a family member who ran for a local position, you can get pretty far with them. The issues are usually when you want to go outside their happy path and do your own thing, and unfortunately a large part of campaigning is branding. The tool we used let us write our own HTML though, so that’s where I came in to bring some custom CSS so that the website could look a bit more unique.
In general, for a small campaign, I agree with the author’s decision to go no-code. Writing a site from scratch is doable and maybe not that hard, but hooking up stuff for campaign donations, emails, etc was way too much for me to try to do on my own in my free time. Better funded campaigns can probably go further, though not sure if it’s even common there to go custom or just use one of these tools.
I didn’t mention some other systems, but for bigger campaigns ActionNetwork is one of the most used tools and has a lot of integrations, for instance with N8N. I do run some systems with ActionNetwork, mostly for newsletters. The thing of using N8N as a glue layer is that you can integrate with more specialized tools if the need arises, maintaining your custom systems for more niche cases.
Having worked with a no-code product for a family member who ran for a local position, you can get pretty far with them. The issues are usually when you want to go outside their happy path and do your own thing, and unfortunately a large part of campaigning is branding. The tool we used let us write our own HTML though, so that’s where I came in to bring some custom CSS so that the website could look a bit more unique.
In general, for a small campaign, I agree with the author’s decision to go no-code. Writing a site from scratch is doable and maybe not that hard, but hooking up stuff for campaign donations, emails, etc was way too much for me to try to do on my own in my free time. Better funded campaigns can probably go further, though not sure if it’s even common there to go custom or just use one of these tools.
I didn’t mention some other systems, but for bigger campaigns ActionNetwork is one of the most used tools and has a lot of integrations, for instance with N8N. I do run some systems with ActionNetwork, mostly for newsletters. The thing of using N8N as a glue layer is that you can integrate with more specialized tools if the need arises, maintaining your custom systems for more niche cases.
I’ve been using n8n for years, but their constant (admittedly mild) nagging to upgrade is bugging me lately, so I’ve been looking into alternatives.
Kestra looks promising, but I haven’t played around with it much.
Anyhow, I’m appreciating the perspective of the article you shared. Thanks!