Think fast
Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.
Top 16 IT Newsletters for 2025
The IT department is probably the team under the greatest pressure to stay informed. The problem is finding the time. IT teams already have some of the busiest, most varied workloads across the organization. How do you carve an hour to get to grips with the latest AI fads when you’ve got a full backlog of tickets to work through? To try and alleviate this pressure, countless brands run IT newsletters, claiming to give you the key facts in your mailbox.
Ronan McQuillan
Feb 5, 2025
How to Build a Compliance Management System in 6 Steps
Businesses today face a hugely complex, varied regulatory environment. Between national, international, local, and internal policies, managing compliance can be a massive undertaking. Adopting an appropriate compliance management system is critical. Specifically, we need a singular, centralized solution for handling key data related to our compliance efforts. The trouble is every business faces unique compliance challenges. We’re all constrained by different internal policies, with distinct processes that must adhere to them.
Ronan McQuillan
Feb 4, 2025
Top 10 Retool Alternatives & Competitors in 2025
Retool is one of the biggest players in the low-code space. However, that doesn’t mean it’s viable for every business; it’s far from it. Today, we’re checking out some of the top Retool alternatives from across the market. And it’s a crowded market nowadays. However, there’s huge variation between different options - across their pricing, features, target personas, use cases, and more. Today, we’re covering the following: What is Retool? Why would you look for an alternative to Retool?
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 30, 2025
Jira Service Management vs ServiceNow
ServiceNow and Jira Service Management are the two dominant platforms in the ITSM software space, together holding well over half of the market. But, despite sharing a core use case, each platform is aimed at a distinct type of organization. To pick the right one for your specific needs, we’ll need to take account of a range of factors, including the scale of your service portfolio, your available resources, the size of your IT team, and any technical requirements you have.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 29, 2025
6 IT Risk Management Tools for 2025
Risk management is one of the key challenges for IT teams of all sizes. This comprises all kinds of operational, technical, financial, security, compliance, and other risk factors. Recording, assessing, and acting on these can be an enormous undertaking. These days, there’s a huge market for software tools to help IT teams stay on top of risks within their organizations. These range from relatively straightforward solutions for gathering and managing data to more complex platforms that offer advanced capabilities for specific types of risks - like regulatory change monitoring or network threat detection.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 28, 2025
8 Jira Service Management Alternatives for 2025
Atlassian’s Jira Service Management (JSM) is one of the biggest players in the ISTM space. With extensive customization and configuration on offer, Atlassian have managed to corner a huge portion of the market for IT service management software. However, JSM isn’t necessarily the right choice for every IT department. Rather, there are a few key areas where it shines. For instance, it’s highly integrated with the wider Atlassian ecosystem. Naturally, if you already have their project management, release management, or documentation tools embedded, this can be a real boon.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 23, 2025
10 best open source low-code platforms (tried and tested)
Low-code and no-code are the latest phenomena to take over our strategy meetings and development chats. These solutions are not new, but the emergence of new technologies and a shift in how we work has accelerated their need within the workplace. The statistics below provide an overview of the scale of the low code market: Forrester states that as much as, 75% of application development uses low-code platforms. Gartner places worldwide low-code market growth at 23% in 2021 According to the market research study published by P&S Intelligence, the global low code market will witness a 31.
Joe Johnston
Jan 5, 2025
8 Filemaker Alternatives & Competitors for 2025
Claris FileMaker Pro is one of the oldest names in the low-code space. Claris is a subsidiary of Apple, so FileMaker was originally conceived as essentially being a Microsoft Access alternative for Mac users. This is an important piece of context because it means that FileMaker started life as an integrated relational database engine and GUI. This remains its core offering, but it’s also evolved to include functionality around building custom interfaces and automations.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 2, 2025