An Adalo alternative that ships on the free plan

Most tools in this category price by usage or by seat. Adalo prices by how many apps you are allowed to publish: Free publishes zero — it is a build-and-test sandbox with a 500-records-per-app database cap — Starter at $36 a month (billed annually; $43.20 monthly) publishes exactly one, Professional at $52 publishes two, and Team at $160 publishes five.

Read that against your own plans. If you are a founder with one app, Starter is a clear, fair deal — $36 a month with automated store publishing included. If you are the kind of builder this category increasingly attracts — testing several ideas a year, the validate-then-decide workflow — every additional live app moves you up a tier, and the meter is your ambition itself.

The free tier deserves a plain sentence, because comparison shoppers assume free tiers are trials of the real thing: on Adalo's free plan you cannot publish an app at all. You can build and test, inside 500 database records. Whether the product fits you is discoverable free; whether your app survives contact with the store is not.

Modaal's axis is different by design: the free plan is one active project with unlimited prompts and a real, exportable native app, and Pro — €9 a month billed annually — is unlimited projects, both platforms, and App Store distribution. The thing you get free on one platform is the thing that costs $36 a month on the other; the honest counterweight is in the next section, because Adalo's $36 buys something Modaal does not sell.

Adalo's product page makes one promise Modaal cannot match, and it is quoted here in full because it is the real reason to choose them: "One-click publishing to the Apple App Store and Google Play. Adalo handles the build pipeline — IPA, APK, code signing, submission."

If certificates, provisioning and App Store Connect are the part of app development you dread, that sentence is the product. You assemble; they build on their machines, sign, and submit. Your own computer never matters. Modaal sits on the other side of this trade deliberately — it drives Xcode on your Mac, you hold the signing keys, and you press the submit button — which is more control and, unavoidably, more ceremony.

Their AI story is also worth stating fairly. Ada, Adalo's AI builder, "generates a full multi-screen app from your description — with real database structure, navigation, and working UI." That is the same promise this whole category now makes, delivered into their visual canvas: AI drafts, you refine by pointing and clicking. The difference from an agent-driven tool is what exists underneath the description — on Adalo, a platform-hosted app; on Modaal, Swift in a repository. Which brings us to the question their two websites answer differently.

Adalo's marketing page is emphatic about the output. iPhone: "True IPA output — not a web wrapper. Runs natively on iOS devices." Android: "Real APK builds that run natively — not a React Native wrapper or PWA."

Adalo's developer documentation describes the same platform differently. To build a custom component, "you must write React Native code for mobile" — and the docs assume "a working knowledge of both React and React Native."

We are not going to resolve this for you, because we cannot. A compiled React Native app genuinely is a real IPA and a real APK — that is not a web wrapper, and the marketing sentence can be defended on those terms. But a platform whose own extension model is React Native is, at minimum, not what most readers picture when they read "not a React Native wrapper." Both statements are live on Adalo's own properties as of 31 August 2026. If the runtime underneath your app matters to your decision — performance ceilings, native SDK access, what a future developer inherits — ask Adalo directly what a published app is built with, and write down the answer.

For contrast, the equivalent answer here is one sentence with no second website: Modaal generates Swift and SwiftUI for iOS and Kotlin with Jetpack Compose for Android, as a standard Xcode project on your own disk, openable without Modaal installed.

Which leads to the last structural difference: we could not find a documented code-export path anywhere in Adalo's pricing, product pages, or documentation. That is a statement about our search, not a verdict about their product — but if leaving with your code someday matters to you, make them show you the door before you move in.