Bolt.new vs Zoho Creator

Bolt.new is an AI app builder from StackBlitz, the San Francisco company founded in 2017 whose WebContainers technology runs Node.js entirely inside the browser. Bolt launched in October 2024, grew to an estimated $40 million in annual recurring revenue within months, and in January 2025 StackBlitz raised a $105.5 million Series B led by Emergence Capital and GV. Its core job: you describe an app, website or prototype in chat, and Bolt writes the code, runs it live in the browser and deploys it.

Bolt Cloud adds hosting, unlimited databases, authentication, custom domains and analytics, so small apps can ship without leaving the product. You can start from Figma, a GitHub repo or a template, connect Stripe for payments, and build mobile apps through Expo. Pricing is token-based: the free plan gives 1 million tokens a month with a 300,000 daily cap, Pro gives 10 million tokens with rollover and removes Bolt branding, Teams adds admin controls and shared capacity, and Enterprise is billed by consumption.

Bolt fits founders, designers and developers who want a working prototype or MVP in hours with real, exportable code. It is weaker on large, long-lived codebases: token usage grows with project size, and debugging loops can burn through allowances. Lovable and Replit target the same audience, Bubble and FlutterFlow are visual builders with their own runtime, and Softr fits simple internal tools.

Buying tip: start on the free plan to judge how fast your project consumes tokens; heavy users should take Pro annual, where unused tokens roll over.

Zoho Creator is the low-code application platform from Zoho Corporation, the privately held software company headquartered in Chennai, India. It lets operations teams and developers build custom business apps with forms, reports, pages and workflows, then run them on the web and as native iOS and Android apps. Zoho says Creator has more than 6 million users and 7 million apps, and Gartner named it a Challenger in its 2024 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms.

Apps are built with drag-and-drop editors and extended with Deluge, Zoho's scripting language, or in VS Code. Zia AI agents can plan requirements, generate modules and workflows from plain-language prompts and write test cases, and you can bring your own OpenAI, Google or Anthropic key. Creator includes customer and partner portals, approval flows, blueprints, 1,000+ connectors including SAP and Oracle, and access through MCP for AI assistants. Plans are priced per user: Standard allows one app, Professional and Enterprise allow unlimited apps, and a Free plan covers one app with up to 5,000 records.

Creator fits SMBs and mid-market firms already on Zoho CRM or Zoho Books that want internal tools, field apps or portals without a full dev team. Retool and Appsmith suit developers building on top of existing databases, Bubble is better for public consumer web apps, and Airtable is simpler for spreadsheet-like databases.

Buying tip: yearly billing cuts Professional from $30 to $20 per user a month, and portal users, custom domains and SSO can be paid add-ons.