“I am so confused about this too. retool, tooljet, budibase - why is everyone doing this? Best I can figure out is that no one has found a pricing structure that works otherwise, which would be rather sad if true.”
“I think adding some steerability to the context selection process is going to be key.I also have to admit that while retool is extremely feature rich - the user-experience is clunky and the learning curve is steep.”
“I was at a shop where we adopted retool to take the burden off of the engineering team for internal tooling, and I think this is taking it to the next level. Looking forward to see more.”
“My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.”
“Zapier focus is still on workflow automation and retool is on internal tools. This directly competes with a bunch of startups that recently launched including an open-source project we put out a few weeks back (https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack)”
“Retool isn’t as powerful as code, but it really scratches the itch of “I just need a CRUD front-end, and don’t want to learn redux” really well. We’ve probably built 30 - 50 apps with it at my current company.”
“Retool is an end-to-end tool whereas Refine focuses on the front-end and gives the flexibility in the backend for your business logic, which is often hard to scale out with Retool.”
“On the other extreme, organizations build SAAS/B2B interfaces with 10+ pages/resources maintained by dedicated development teams.Need to deploy atomic internal tools where technical and non-technical roles collaborate? Retool, Superblocks, Appsmith, Tooljet or Budibase are perfect solutions.”
“One of the key differences is our code-first preference over no-code, which distinguish Refine from the drag-drop style workflows of Retool, Appsmith, Tooljet, Budibase etc.”
“absolute basic functionality being stood up in Retool in a couple of hours. It’s sort of similar to presenting a wireframe instead of high-fidelity mock-ups”
“Super stoked for Portals, and to see Retool move outside of the internal tooling niche. Looking perfect for small, customer-facing licensing portals.”
“I could see it working well with Retool and other low code tools effectively giving the operations and customer support teams better tooling to work with.”
“Given OPs request for a friendly UI to sit on top of cube I thought retool could fit well that use case. And thanks for sharing the guide, I use and love Cube but I didn't want to pass as a shill :)”
“At the end of the day, Retool is really primarily providing the front-end components to make all of this happen. If you have the data currently in a way that is accessible via API or direct DB connection - the rest just becomes plugging and playing (quickly) to build the tools.”
“Yes you can create simple stuff just like on retool, but want it to look polished like or be extremely light weight and performant? Still going to have to go in and know enough to fine tune or create custom new components, backends, data models etc.”
“Ive used retool for 5 years now and the new addition of Retool Mobile has been extremely useful for us in the past few months. The scanner and the camera components are especially useful and I think can have many potential uses in the near future for us.”
“The majority of people using Airplane aren’t comparing it to Retool or any other products, but rather to building internal tools in-house. Since Airplane takes a code-based approach there are lots of eng teams that try it out who would never otherwise consider the low-code/no-code platforms.”
“Can you write well structured and reusuable code on retool? Can I write it in vscode, maybe even in typescript and deploy it up?Most implementations of the "escape hatch" I've come across require scattering fragmented snippets across the project with no support for building out well structured and reusuable code.”
“When will retool be able to do this for native desktop apps? Especially for Windows. Otherwise, you are leaving 2+ billion active devices off the table”
“I legit think with your new workflows you are gonna kill the non open-source competition (Airplane, Superblocks) and now the question remains if being an open-source alternative is strong enough of a differentiation for the rest of us.”
“I don't know how big your team is, but this sounds way too basic to be paying a monthly Retool subscription. A very simple admin app that does all of this shouldn't take more than two days.”
“I am going to opt Retool as it is more enterprise ready from perception wise. Even superblocks that cloned and copied appsmith, I am willing to pay for them as there is trust of some sorts as they have certain upfront pricing.”
“One thing I find missing in every such platform (except Retool) is a user editable code library. It's one thing to be able run code in query transformation and widgets, another thing to be able to organise common code patterns into functions and use them in multiple query transforms and widgets.”