“I really wanted to use Retool but Retool’s pricing and lock in at the time just wasn’t appealing. A few other options I looked at were:* Plasmic (open source)* Jet Admin (proprietary)* Budibase (open source)* Appsmith (open source)And a few others.”
“Retool is fantastic but truly priced for inhouse use cases only. My general advice with low-code / RAD is you only find out it’s showstopping limitation when you’re already too deep into it.”
“It ate my life.I do have a bootstrapped product already in the market, but this is a second, unrelated product for a different audience....a new project entirely.First project is Node + React but considering Retool for a v1 for this next project.”
“Performance with Large Datasets: Sometimes, when working with large datasets, Retool can get slow or even time out. Has anyone else struggled with this?”
“DronaHQ is also a good option when it comes to building CRUD apps, also I have met few Retool users who are switching to DronaHQ as Retool lacks engineering support and becomes too costly when end user grows.”
“UI Bakery isn't as feature rich as Retool, although they are moving at a crazy pace. I like it better mainly out of preference, but you should compare them, Retool, and others based on what features are most important to you.”
“Retool works for your purpose like a charm. It allows writing SQL queries, but also allows doing CRUD operations in a very no-code way (without having to write queries). You can self-host or use their cloud-version (free tier should be sufficient for your use case).”
“With Retool, I tried building a form where if I change one input, the other input needs to conditionally change. I struggled a little with figuring this out, more than I should have.”
“Retool ended being much more complicated and restrictive than our Next.js internal tool app. We went back.I even remember reading on the official retool documentation website saying you should probably not use it if your internal tool is fairly complex.”
“I’m an engineer and the thing I love about Retool is the low-code UI components (saves time sourcing those same libs) + everything done on Retool so I don’t need to dedicate local disk space to my non-important internal app.”
“So as a full stack engineer - don’t you find time saving as a good enough reason to use tools like retool to put a decent frontend across with very less efforts?FWIW- I run growth at DronaHQ ( retool like tool )”
“I have a handful of friends who use it and they say they just use it for notes, which is fine but that's like 10% of its usecases.So... is anyone actually using Retool or similar tools for something meaningful? And what are you doing with it if I may ask?”
“I love the sustainable work you are doing for developer tools.We were emailing back in 2021 about one of the many products you and your team have built for developers.”
“As someone who also tried and really liked Retool but also found it too expensive I can add my reasoning.I help companies with digital transformation, what it usually entails is deploying solutions to small teams and then growing them as we get buy in from the business.”
“Retool will blow through your budget faster than you can say “There Goes all my Venture Capital” if you’re trying your use it for external users. That’s just not its use case.”
“Our users have used Plasmic to build all sorts of things, from websites and e-commerce storefronts, to Retool-like internal tools, to full web apps (major parts of the Plasmic visual editor itself is built with Plasmic!).”
“Having some way to write code in files, and then link it to the table structure makes a lot of sense (having lots of spaghetti code all over the place was one of the core issues of Retool, also it became slooooow at some point). Simplifying to a table + sidebar view is a very good idea (that's all we ever did).”
“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”