“I’ve been using Retool on and off for internal tools, and it’s fine… but lately I’m seeing more platforms claiming they can generate whole apps from an AI prompt — not just templates or code snippets, but actual UI, logic, and data hookups.”
“It's becoming a nightmare to maintain. when i need to update validation logic, Im hunting through multiple components to find where i wrote similar code before.”
“We have been using Retool for two years now, and we absolutely love it. Previously, we managed hundreds of our program data in Google Sheets, but now our entire back office operation is run through Retool.”
“You may want to sign up for the Retool copilot waitlist. It's definitely changed how fast I can whip something up, beginning with a data source as inspiration. Here's the [wait list link](https://retoolin.tryretool.com/form/d56c26d9-4847-449b-a4f5-bddda838d9bf) and [tweet](https://x.com/retool/status/1922693085340876913) showing a preview of it.”
“I'm researching no/low-code tools for an internal app and your list is a good indicator that Retool could meet the requirements. However there are still a couple questions I'd like to clarify, if possible:”
“We’re an agency building internal tools for companies, and Retool has become our default stack for 90% of projects. It’s fast, flexible, and great for turning messy ops workflows into something clean and usable.”
“My issue with retool is: I can 90% add a complex feature to my MRP in a hour, then I have to spend 4 hours working around dumb quirks to do the final 10%.”
“I fought hard for Retool as an solution to shipping RAD apps when the low-code aspect was appealing as a pathway to self-service and GPT 3 was yet not available.The ultimate way to go in my situation was to build a library of single-use Streamlit or Gradio code with the aid of an LLM.”
“If you are interested in Retool but with public facing apps, checkout SkyMass. It’s a code-first alternative to Retool that gives you the high level UI components, auth etc + flexibility of writing normal code.https://skymass.dev”
“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).”