· Quick Take · 3 min read
No-Code Tools' Limits: Testing Logic Beyond Dashboards
Testing Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new shows their struggle with custom logic. A comparison of no-code platforms' real capabilities.
No-code web app makers such as Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new are known to be very good at making beautiful modern landing pages and dashboards showing insights from your database. If you are in need of them (especially making interactive dashboards to share the results of your projects with your stakeholders), they are a very quick and reliable way to go. You can get an appealing dashboard in a couple of minutes.
Here, I wanted to get outside their comfort zone a bit to see how good they are now. I asked them to make a couple of basic web apps, but with a bit of logic they need to get right for the app to work.
A Wheel of Fortune for Lunch
We all need to decide what to get for lunch, so this app helps you do that. I also want them to make the app blink while spinning to mimic the game Wheel of Fortune.
- Lovable: Stops midway, mismatched output with the wheel
- Replit: Beautiful, works fine, except mismatched output with the wheel
- Bolt: The blinking circle is off. Texts not readable
A YouTube Break Player
I want it to automatically remind me to take a rest from watching YouTube. So I want to embed a YouTube video on the page, play it for 30 sec, auto-pause for 5 sec, then auto-continue. This seems simple but all of them needed two rounds, where I took a screenshot of the bug to guide them to fix it.
- Lovable: Behavior not as intended: after 30 sec, it goes back to the beginning
- Replit: Can’t load the video
- Bolt: Behavior not as intended: after 30 sec it moves back 5 sec and plays immediately, and keeps looping
Conclusion
Every AI tool is good for some use cases and not for others. If you want a dashboard, no-code app makers are the way to go. If you need extra logic, you may have to use Cursor or Claude Code to build it step by step.
Caveat: Quick personal test in Aug 2025 with the same prompts. These tools update fast, so they may work better the next try.
Quick background
In case you haven’t heard about Lovable, Replit, and Bolt, here are some quick info about them. Note that These numbers are company-reported or estimates.
- Lovable only launched late 2024, but by mid-2025 they’d already raised a big round at a billion-plus valuation, with ARR climbing fast, past $100M in ARR in July 2025.
- Replit has been around longer (since 2016). They became a unicorn in 2023 and by 2025 they’re already past $100M in ARR.
- Bolt.new (from StackBlitz) is the newest of the three. Launched in late 2024, and within months they reached $40M in ARR and raised a big Series B early 2025 .
