Plugins & Extending Dataiku

In a nutshell no. For a drag and drop experience you need a plugin and for a plugin you need admin access. But plugins are a fundamental part of the Dataiku platform. So if your admin is unwilling to install plugins they are undermining the product capabilities and devaluing the investment the company has done in deciding to use Dataiku. So you need to escalate this internally. You don't need to be an admin to develop a plugin. You can use the free Dataiku version and develop it in your own machine. Then give the plugin to the admin and they can install it on the corporate Dataiku instance. After that anyone can use it. And just recently Dataiku added the option to permission plugins so only certain groups can use them. This allows admins to limit the impact of plugins installed in the platform to only those users that need it.