“Trouble is, we have so much built in Retool that I cant leave. The funny part is, at this point, its probably going to be cheaper/faster for us to build this in to our SaaS tool over switching to another low code platform.”
“Retool has been such a great platform for us in the past. But there are lots of little bugs in the old platform and honestly every time I run into them (which is frequently) it just irritates me so much because it seems all the resources have gone into a platform I can’t use.”
“Give the new builder a try. It works really well, I love building in Claude Code and the experience is similar but in the Retool AI builder I feel things are a bit more simple, especially when you have all the resources already plugged in, you can simply mention @resource and start building.”
“One thing I'd flag from actually building with a few of these day to day (been in the business for a while got my hands dirty on building internal tools using low-code for my org , we recently shifted from retool to tooljet because of high cost) : the”
“The piece I'm most glad to see is import with governance attached. "Build anywhere, ship in Retool" only matters in an enterprise if the governance comes with it, and that's exactly the part everyone else skips.”
“Love that it builds apps using non retool components. I think this is going to unlock a lot of new capabilities for us putting retool into the hands of more business users to solve more niche business problems.”
“the governance layer is real and genuinely valuable, SSO, audit logging, github review before prod... if you're in a regulated industry or have strict IT requirements that alone can justify enterprise pricing”
“I started to hit limitations on retool a few months ago and finally made to jump to Claude code with supabase and next.js. In all honestly I’m annoyed with myself for even using retool.”
“We’ve made some huge upgrades to the chat inside the app builder, and I really think it’s worth another look! If Claude Code is working for you, our new MCP server might be what you want to reach for.”
“It is too slow and labor intensive work to get simple things done. AI has spoiled me. LLMs can do it new few minutes what used to take days in Retool.”
“Hey u/kdanovsky, I'm a student applying for a PM internship at Retool and want to come in with real user insight rather than just my own takes. Mind if I ask you a couple of questions about how you've been using it?”
“Retool shines most when you use it for internal dashboards, admin panels, approval workflows, support tooling, inventory tracking, or anything that normally lives in spreadsheets and Slack messages.”
“the retool mcp open beta is the right move but it won't fix the real bottleneck, which is that llms don't have enough retool-shaped training data to reason about app structure even when they can read it.”
“Start by building a simple CRUD app (Create, Read, Update, Delete) using Retool’s built in database to learn how to connect data to buttons and tables. Focus on mastering the Table and Form components first, and use the "Ask AI" feature to help you write any SQL or JavaScript you need along the way.”
“Retool is good for that, and I’d also compare it with Appsmith or UI Bakery depending on how much structure, permissions, and database/API work you need. The main mistake is starting with a “cool app idea” instead of a painful workflow you already understand.”
“It's definitely not as powerful as Claude Code or Codex outright, but you get a lot more enterprise scalability within Retool. You can use your Claude or Open AI API (I use Claude API myself).”
“I've been building a few Retool apps lately and the only way I've found to use AI is just copy pasting code back and forth into Claude or ChatGPT. Its pretty tedious, especially when your app grows and you've got 50 queries and components to keep track of.”
“On the other hand you have retool which has lots of possibilities é.g. Being able to change data, showing forms or having filters from multiple sources.”
“My current company is looking into ReTool. I'm looking to see if anyone who has used this has any context on the capabilities/limitations of their Dashboards? Specifically vs PowerBI would be very helpful.”
“the retool situation should honestly be a case study in how to lose developer trust. per end user pricing, then self hosting quietly moved behind enterprise, by the time most teams clocked it they were already too deep to leave without a painful migration.”
“A bit of a background, i build mostly internal tools at my 500 ish person organization, been using retool ever since then honestly, i get why people like retool, but the pricing can get pretty spicy once you scale (builders + internal users adds up fast).”
“We’ve been building internal tools with Retool for years and often hit a limitation with text inputs, especially when apps require rich text or structured content.”
“Compared to Retool, you’re not dragging together an MVP you’ll need to rewrite later, you’re shipping real apps from day one, with AI handling the boilerplate and humans staying in the loop. There's also zero vendor lock-in under the hood.”
“PS: Since you are coming from Retool, you might like our pricing model, too. Customers who migrated to ToolJet seem extremely happy about the decision.”
“Of the tools you mentioned seems only UI bakery falls in a category similar to Retool (i.e. a previously established visual dev tool adding ai capabilities). I've seen it does prompt-based ui and jumps straight to design , no review steps”