Retool Blog

>The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem. >Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options that can quickly get expensive. A RAD tool like Visual Basic, Borland C++ Builder, Borland Delhi, QT Designer doesn't mean no code. Rapid application design helps the developer quickly build the UI using already made components and using some predefined behaviors like gluing a database table to an UI component. But the developer has still to provide the application logic and to write whatever else is not covered by the RAD tool. It helps you build faster, write less code, but it isn't no code.

I am building https://github.com/claceio/clace. It is focussed on building operational web apps, with a focus on security. The end goal is to build something between https://www.rundeck.com/ and https://retool.com/, allow automation of operational tasks through a web interface while also allowing fully custom web apps. Clace also works great for running simple web apps locally. Building and deploying a web app should be as easy and common for backend engineers as creating a CLI app is.

Hi - PM from Retool here. Have you tried our product? Should be super easy ~5 min to spin up a table + form CRUD application for your database tables. Plus, we can be deployed on-premise with SSO and source control. https://retool.com/ Would love to hear what you think!

Retool | Remote(currently) Hybrid (09/2022) | Full-time We enable developers to build internal tools remarkably fast: https://retool.com/. Lovely to see some of our customers here! We recently raised our series C2! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264454 Please checkout the career site https://retool.com/careers/

Depending on what you're trying to do, Retool (https://retool.com/) can get you up and running very quickly. It's great for quick and dirty internal tools, but maybe not that suitable if you are going to build something large and complex that you need a lot of custom functionality for. In that case, I recommend Flask [1] + SQLite [2] (you can swap out SQLite for Postgres if you start hitting scaling issues). Flask is a very cleanly-designed Python-based web framework that makes it simple to get started, yet is quite powerful. SQLite3 is a whole database in only a single file, which makes deployment and backups very easy. [1] https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.1.x/tutorial/ [2] https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.1.x/patterns/sqlite3/

Maybe this isn't what you're looking for but Retool (https://retool.com/) is a really great platform for building internal apps faster. I have no association with them, just think they're cool and do a useful thing.

Thank you all for the many great answers! Definitely a lot to look at! Currently Appsmith (and/or) Lowdefy seem to fit best for me. In case you're interested, these are all the products/resources given so…

Retool is great software and has a great team. (https://retool.com/)

Hi! I'm working on a project called Retool (https://retool.com), and it's basically Access, in the cloud. We connect to any sort of cloud database / API, and let you build UIs quickly. It's good for building forms that write back to APIs, tables that read data from databases, etc. I'd really appreciate HN's feedback on this -- if anybody has thoughts -- I'd love to hear them! I'm also david@ if you'd rather email me anything. Thanks!

Airtable has a huge userbase. Some non-tech people have built products making tens of thousands of dollars in MRR, using bubble.is. Then there are tools like Shopify which is good enough for a large set of e-commerce use cases. There was one called Retool (https://retool.com/), that got great positive reviews on HN few months back

WOW. Okay, this is really, really cool and is exactly my niche, as you mentioned it's kinda a combination of things like Stylus/uBlock Origin filters and custom filters/etc. This is really needed, as for example GitHub code preview is completely and utterly fucked, to put it lightly. Showing symbols, not being able to select code properly without weird visual glitches happening..... requires a bunch of scripts to fix. (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/54962). What's your funding plan? You mentioned paid plan, but what's the actual benefit for users that they would pay for this? (I totally would, FWIW). Do you foresee companies who need to build special widgets for whatever reason for random websites they use as kind of "Extension light" alternatives - your product reminds me of Retool (https://retool.com/), but for website tweaking. Very cool product, love the ability to do "extra things" which will fix a whole bunch of websites I use everyday that I CBF'd either making an extension to fix or battling the uBlock/stylus filters. Discoverability will also be needed, kinda like [karabiner elements complex modification rules](https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/) edit: no firefox support, sadpants.

I started in Visual Basic 3 and then moved to Delphi. My first job at 18 was working for one of the large ActiveX component libraries, providing technical support to many developers when I wasn't one myself yet! On my first day, I found a book on my desk—"Learn Visual Basic 3 in 21 Days"—along with a brand new 486DX250 and a 14" monitor. I learned a lot quickly! We answered support queries by fax back then. I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off. Building business apps beyond Access or Excel was so straightforward. It was great to get an .EXE that you could package up with InstallShield or Wise Solutions and send to anyone. I guess the web came soon after, and trying to do WYSIWYG for HTML and CSS has never gone well—even today. FrontPage came out but died soon after, and mixing desktop apps with web apps was never great. Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days. Sometimes, I think there are only so many ways to control the appearance of business apps. I'd constrain visuals but provide the most straightforward visual builder possible. The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem. Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options…

> I’m looking for AI that can do things other than make capitalism more efficient at parting people from their money. I think you're really under-estimating the positive, human value that can come out of what I'm describing. If you leave the world of software companies you'll find that a lot of humanity is wasting huge amounts of time on tasks that could be easily be automated. My most recent experience was the Electronic Vehicle research space - I was able to rather straightforwardly reduce testing cycles for certain key components from 1 year to 1 month through some straightforward software and collaboration with some scientists. Most of what I accomplished could have been achieved by the scientists if they had used something like Retool[0], but Retool is too sophisticated a tool for them to ramp up on. If AI could make Retool accessible to someone with the technical sophistication of Material Scientist who can write a little Python, it might greatly speed up the rate at which we advance EV technology. The point I'm making is that making it easier to make products that are accessible means that it's easier to distribute the positive effects of innovation to the rest of society faster. If anything, there's the potential to lower profits long term because today creating a product that is both valuable and accessible is an incredible moat. [0] https://retool.com/

Haha. I was an engineer on Honeycode in 2017. I initially joined the project because the best talent was flocking to finally make a frontend builder for developers. When I was there, the vision was there (allow people to build apps with spreadsheet skills), but the execution was all over the map: we had engineers mostly interested in getting promoted, so it was super political. I remember that every team had their own redux store (including one for the navbar, one for the login screen, one for the home screen, etc.). It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer! Today, I’m pretty skeptical about no-code. It just feels like the citizen developer is a dead-end. I think Honeycode was in this uncanny valley where you can’t really use it for real applications. Honeycode didn’t have source control, custom React components, nor testing). Now, at my current company, we use Retool (https://retool.com). It comes with source control (not perfect, the diffs can be overly complex at times), custom React components (so I can import whatever libraries I want), and good developer ergonomics. 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. I think that, combined with AI, might be the future of programming.

I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc. For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of these requirements is true. It does provide a lot of value. But, there's no network effect, and their expenses do not correlate with users on the platform. That last point is the craziest one; being long-time users of Meteor and Apollo, I've always questioned the technical and executive leadership behind the Meteor Development Group (now Apollo), and they've done nothing in recent history to give faith that its a well-ran organization. Retool (https://retool.com/) is another weird one. Amazing, amazing product. Truly transformative; what they're building there is unreal. There's a very light network effect in play, and usage may correlate better with users-in-app than it would with Apollo Engine, but charging per-user still feels weird. For them, I feel some form of bucket'ed plans, which allot X users, Y "applications", plus gated feature sets like SAML and Audit Logging, would make more sense. But, what do I know.

Hi, I’m Yogi, the engineer who worked on templates. Retool (https://retool.com) itself is a fast way of building custom internal tools (think Visual Basic, but in the cloud). One thing that’s been challenging for us: because Retool is such a horizontal product, it was always hard for us to explain a) what exactly Retool is, and b) what people use it for. That’s why I decided to work on templates. A template is a pre-made app that you can plug your datasource (Stripe, Postgres, Github, etc.) into. Think old-school MS Word templates but for apps instead. You can plug in your credentials to get an extensible UI for your data. These templates aren’t meant to be 100% usable out of the box, but really to give you an idea of what you can do with Retool, quickly. (For example, here’s a video of us building the Github PR dashboard, which I mention below, in 15 minutes: https://cdn.tryretool.com/github_dashboard.mp4) All of these templates are built from real-world use-cases that other companies are using Retool for. For example, we have customers using something very similar to our “Stripe refund tool” template. It pulls in data from Stripe, joins it to purchases in our database, and lets you refund an order in one click. (It updates the database, POSTs back to Stripe, and sends an email to the customer.) My favorite is probably the Github PR dashboard. As an engineer myself, I want to start work everyday knowing who I’m blocking (i.e. I need to review their PR), and who I’m…

Definitely recommend reading https://retool.com/pipes about the history of Pipes, with lots of input from the people who worked on it (It’s not super obvious, especially on mobile, but once you see the site, just scroll down to see the content)

Along the same lines, I recommend Retool's retrospective article [0] about pipes, for some of the perspective on how it looked from inside yahoo. I'll grant that, towards the end, it is an ad for their service. [0] https://retool.com/pipes

As mentioned by another poster, check out "Partner portals" section on https://retool.com/

If I were to really invest in dbms, and only able to read-only the data (analyze, query, etc) something like Metabase is my go to choice (https://www.metabase.com). If I also need update the data itself, internal tools builder like Retool (https://retool.com) probably good enough. But, it all depends on the use case.

This seems to mainly be useful for spinning up quick and dirty internal tools. But for that use-case, isn't it easier to use something visual and established like Retool (https://retool.com/) or that generates nice react code, like MUI Toolpad (https://mui.com/toolpad/)?

These retool articles * Pipe Dreams - https://retool.com/pipes * Work flows - https://retool.com/workflows Were both great.

I work for Pinecone so my bias is obvious, but objectively: Pinecone is ranked as the most popular vector DB according to multiple sources [1][2][3][4], the best funded ($100M Series B), and is used in production by the likes of Shopify, Gong, Plaid, Zapier, Midjourney, CVS, and thousands of others. [1] https://retool.com/reports/state-of-ai-2023 [2] https://state-of-llm.streamlit.app/#third [3] https://db-engines.com/en/ranking/vector+dbms [4] https://www.g2.com/categories/vector-database

You can export the app artifact and share it. The artifact is human readable and in a JSX format (called Toolscript). In this way it can be meaningfully interpreted, improved and customized by others in an open source manner. As for running the software the platform has a proprietary license obviously but you can host your own Retool backend from which to serve the apps to your end users (check the docker repo). This is an alternative to the SaaS/cloud based app hosting at https://retool.com/. There's a free tier to edit and run the apps but professional usage will have a license fee. This is not unlike making an app with VB which required buying VB and having end users buy and run Windows.

Well this isn't related to django, but it sounds like Retool may be what you're after: https://retool.com/

Totally agree, we were looking for a similar “some code” approach. Automatisch and other no-code automation products (Zapier, n8n, etc) are awesome for non-technical users to automate simple tasks. We started building Workflows (http://retool.com/workflows) because we were looking for something faster than writing cron jobs/spinning up more infra. Products like Zapier, often times weren’t customizable enough without the ability to really write code or secure enough to connect to something like our production databases. Would love any feedback!

Have you seen Retool (https://retool.com)? It feels familiar to HyperCard / Visual Basic, but now in the cloud. I’ve used it and like it.

It really depends on what you plan on doing with excel. One alternative may be mysql with a solid gui tool to design your database the way you want. https://retool.com/blog/top-5-mysql-gui-tools/ There are SAAS solutions like airtable. https://www.airtable.com/ Hosted and managed databases in AWS, Oracle, and Azure. As I mentioned it's best to get a good idea on what you're trying to do with excel, there may be a purpose driven web app designed to do exactly what you're looking to accomplish.

How many people will use it and how will it be used? What is the app exactly going to do? Whe first thing that comes to mind i Notion, which is a true no-code alternative if you want to build internal CRUD apps. The next step would be to use a managed backend and a no-code frontend. For backend you can use services like Firebase [1], Nhost [2], or Supabase [3]. For frontend you can use something like Retool [4]. [1] https://firebase.com/ [2] https://nhost.io/ - Discloser: I'm the co-founder of Nhost [3] https://supabase.com/ [4] https://retool.com/

I've been using the free, open-source React Admin https://marmelab.com/react-admin/ framework for this use case, and I really like how it works and how little code I need to write. I used it to quickly build an internal CMS, and it handles relational stuff well. For instance, if I have pieces of content, each of which can have multiple tags, it handles all the tag lookups using typical REST API calls. Also integrates well with our existing auth system (AWS Cognito). There are some other low-code tools that have similar premises and offer things like ETL tools. We evaluated one called Retool https://retool.com and it seemed pretty cool, but because it's a per-user pricing model, the costs can be pretty substantial when you have a lot of people using the tool.