Retool Reviews: 4.6/5 — Highly Rated

Out-of-the-box functionality means our engineering team spends less time creating internal tools, and our teams can wow customers faster with better implementations, data driven insights, and more.

There is a learning curve to using it...

Enabled our engineering team to roll out a geofencing tool in a matter of days not weeks or months. Dashboard to track automated tasks to ensure customer data gets to where it needs to go.

I love how retool is so easy to use and versatile.

It sometimes has a confusing UI and is not fully optimized for mobile

Customer problems

How easy it is to write SQL queries and transform them with JavaScript

It wasn't very easy to figure out how to grab text from input fields and pass them to a query.

We're using it to create a data dashboard for our team and to support our users.

Super powerful but super clear and guided: I could always find my way to controlling even the most complex, multi-database setups. And if I get stuck, their community is insanely helpful with both Retool support and other users on any arcane problem in minutes or a couple of hours at most. Even as an ex-developer there's a huge sense of just speed and accomplishment building powerful controls on your marketing, sales and product with quick drag and drop buttons and queries.

Very much in love with it right now - hard for me to pick something I dislike. I guess it could use ways to collaborate with your team inside it - we use the Cord extension for that (admittedly biased!). But it's very neat, simple and powerful really.

We've build our core customer tracking & control dashboard with it. It lets us quickly dive deep into 100,000's of customer records, see their realtime data and set settings on them that directly affect our DB, in a way no other system could because any other system would either be JUST a reviewing (no control) dashboard, or it would require tons of custom code.

The fact that you can do so much with retool, the customisable design is the highlight. It makes work so easy and streamlined

It has a slight learners curve, takes a little time to understand where you can customise the design from.

Retool is helping us for streamlining user comments and identifying problems that users are facing

Retool provides detailed and necessary information all at a click away. The user interface is compact but after getting to know the UI with experience it becomes easier to use each time.

It does take some time to load up. Otherwise, all good.

Customer queries and technical support.

Retool makes it incredibly easy to create internal tools. It's hard to understate this. Their platform saves hours of dev time.

The only real downsides are limitations they've purposefully give themselves. The tool is specifically for developers building internal tools. If you're not a developer or you're not building internal-facing tools, then Retool is not for you.

We build internal software using Retool. Retool saves us hours of building frontend UI's for these tools. Instead, our engineers can build just the backend and hook up a frontend in minutes.

Regular updates of UI components and great support

I haven't come across any shortcomings yet.

Admin dashboards and application. It is easier to KT to new users and very fast to build applications.

Everything is well organized and easy to copy

the design of the page, it does not look very nice

To get the information I need, is easy to copy to paste it in another page

I like that there are multiple options to calculate the plan & I love that it's all in one place.

I have not encountered anything I dislike yet, so far loving this tool! Thanks

Roll ins extensions adjustments rebalancing canceling

Retool's drag and drop interface makes it incredibly easy to prototype and build simple internal tools.

It can be a little bit difficult to connect Retool to internal data sources; luckily, Retool has plenty of support available via docs and 1:1 help to overcome these challenges

We're using Retool so that non-engineers (but people with some technical capability) can build their own tools without requiring the engineering team to build them.

Simple UI and unique and valuable outputs with a complete detailed view

The UI could be a bit better to engage more audience,

It is a kind of dashboard that gives valuable outputs and desired results

Super quick to get set up - I was able to build a complex support application (with proper logic) within an hour of clicking "Sign up." We tried the new self-service on-premise option; again, this was very quick to get set up. I had a PoC running on my infrastructure within an hour and could productionize it within a day.

No major downsides to be honest. It'd be great if some of their complex, premium features could be toggled on/off in a self-service manner.

Support staff (both technical and non-technical) can self-service a broad range of new ticket types without escalating. This has significantly reduced our support workload. Typically we'd have solved these problems with scripts & internal tools, which take c. 1w to produce (vs 1-2h with retool).

It's fast. Features that could have taken days, consume expensive engineering work are now super fast and straightforward.

Well, it's weird to say that, but -- The pricing! I believe you can charge more for this product. You are saving companies thousands of $ per month, so $10 per user is underpriced the way I see it. Few other things, it will be cool if you could give an option to only load queries when view is visible. so that the app will load faster

Admin, manage customer accounts, configure DB for customers, etc.. I've realized Retool helps me focus on my product and, as a startup - move much faster. Before retool, I was building API and a Postman request for everything, which isn't friendly for no coders, nor is it a fast solution.

Retool connects to all our databases and microservices in a couple of clicks, and does CRUD out of the box. As a UX engineer, this is critical to me as I can just design workflows that actively pull and push data through our databases. In just a couple of hours I'll have a working prototype of a new tool to share with our collaborators. The high-value prototypes I'll build into a real web app, but Retool works so well that usually, I won't need to.

Retool is kind of ugly for production apps, but that's to be expected from a prototyping app.

Retool has helped us build quick prototypes that can access different sources of data and produce new insights. These prototypes take a couple of hours to build, since we only need to focus on the business logic, not the UI.

Its a great tool to have It can hold a lot of useful information, has many usefull intergrated folders that you can create to help all employees with there day to day work task.

Nothing so far everthing so far is good.

I love the password reste tool, Hitch Mangement tools and just looking up Drivers Information

The simple way to make UI, yet powerful in connecting to various services and APIs. The JavaScript queries add nice functionality to the page and are amazing.

Better Staging environment could have been provided. Current one is pretty difficult to understand. I would like that a completely disconnected staging env be provided to the developers and any change done there does not affect prod.

I make admin panels for the eCommerce company I am working with. They handle lotssss of stuff using retool panels.

The ability to prototype very fast makes the tool very valuable for our company. Our IT-resources are limited and if someone from operations or marketing can design their own tools, the IT only has to connect the tools between databases or frontends.

The editing feature has not the best performance. Multiselection doesn't work or takes a long time. Another point is that there are not many options to upload pictures. Currently only via URL, a storage for pictures would be very nice.

We created a tool for our operations department. They can now edit customers much faster than in one of these "one-for-all" business softwares. We are much faster end we can automate a lot of easy tasks. Its much moreclear for the user and very individually. Another tool that we created is an access point for our databases. We have a well designed tool to edit everything, before that we used Excel. There will be a lot more tools to come that will help us to improve our processes and save a lot of money.

1. I like the ability to quickly drop a few components and link my APIs to get the desired result. I was so excited when I made my first app and shared it with my team, and it got used extensively. 2. Utilizing data from one component to another is a delight. 3. How easy it is for someone with basic tech knowledge to integrate the Database and APIs and start building the apps.

I feel there's room to improve the UX of components interaction. The resizing and adjustment are not smooth sometimes.

1. It helps me make something that is not part of our product, but it's an ad-hoc requirement for my team, and we don't want to spend tech bandwidth in building that. 2. Retool helps quickly build the MVP, and then based on usage, we include it in our product roadmap. 3. A lot of scripts which were used by solution engineer has been put on retool for general team memeber to access and use, that automated a lot of things internally.

It's easy, to show data, and build small tools for customer team. I create a tooling for fix any problem fast.

The UI, I have a big disThe user interface, I have a large screen even so I have to be hiding panels or changing sizes. In edit mode, the panel to create the queries is very small and you have to be scrolling a lot.play

Build tooling for support. And data visualitation or explore.

The simplicity, interface & integration with various services

There seem to be some issues around the UI, like a sidebar opens up on clicking variables with details of all variables used, but there is no option to close it. Have to refresh the whole page. Also, some times placing the component works weirdly, like we can't resize after specific size, or can fit many components in a single view

We are generating reports, having some quick utils. Beneficial in creating quick reports without a new project for reports. Can make quick tools without much efforts on the UI side

I love any platform that make our systems more visible & accessible to the non-coders on the team. Once you get the hang of Retool, it's extremely fast to create new dashboards or tweak existing ones. I spun up a simple feature flag dashboard in less than a day. Love how it's a very live-first editor experience- once you hook up a working query, you immediately see the live data show up in autocompletion. Also it's definitely a plus that it works with our existing databases and services (in our case AWS), so our team stays in control of our data.

The editor is powerful but it's definitely a little tricky to learn at first, there's little things to remember like whether to use ".data" or ".value".

We're building a really lightweight CMS / PIM system for our ecommerce storefront.

The ease of use and the possibility to automate recurring manual tasks. Building retool apps went faster than expected and the feedback received by internal users has been overwhelmingly positive. I certainly recommend it for those looking for more speed in the process. Also, from the time we started exploring the retool possibility to actually building the apps and putting them to production... it all happened within a month. That's how dynamic retool is and that's what retool can do to speed up any query process you might be struggling with. I would say it's a 10 out of 10 for what it proposes itself to do.

Overall very happy. Maybe the interface could be friendlier to non-technical people, but I also understand it's complex type of work being done there :)

Recurring tasks that previously required extensive queries and reviews. Things are going faster now. Let's say that previously a given task would take 5 to 6 hours to complete. Now, with the help of Retool, it's possible to mostly complete that task within 5 or 6 minutes.

As a new user, I could quickly learn how to use it and successfully implement a dashboard.

Documentation needs to present some more use cases

Analytics Dashboard

The ease of using the tool. It's easy and so useful.

Requires a very basic coding background.

Tools for teams to use internally.

I had no issues getting connected to our RDS instance via SSH tunneling via a bastion server. I love how easy it is to change datasources from development to production once you're ready to publish. The editor is responsive and intuitive.

It would be useful to hide the Edit button altogether for users who have "view only" permissions.

We're building tools for our support staff to use for admin tasks that are quicker to build in Retool than incorporating into our own apps. Plus, my non-technical co-founder can build them with just a little SQL help from me.

I love that I can spend a few minutes in Retool as a non-engineer and still generate so much value for my team. It's easy to create entire dashboards and workflows, and you can make such impactful changes very easily.

The Retool UX isn't perfect, and the application is still missing some functionality that would be super helpful. Thankfully, it provides so much easy to use, useful functionality that it's not a real problem.

We've built an entire internal dashboard for our operations team to use. It plugs in with our database, so they can easily make changes to the underlying values, view certain cuts of data they want, or trigger events like API calls to other applications from within the dashboard. Retool saves a lot of time for our engineering team because now there's a whole application in Retool that does not have to be maintained by the engineering team.

The best feature is without a doubt the extensive library of UI components. Literally anything we'd ever need is there, to use in our apps. Also there's no limit to the apps you can connect to. You can easily use the API connector to use any REST api with any kind of authentication and it just works! You can even do advanced paging if you want. If you can write Javascript, there are simply no limits. Even async/await works in the script editor, which is amazing.

Sometimes, when creating a small error in one of the script queries, the app bugs and crashes. The support team is immediately notified though, and stuff like that is fixed quick. Also, combining multiple queries does get a bit unorganized or chaotic, if you go too far. But I guess that 's something you can solve by implementing an advanced query naming strategy and drawing out the app structure with all queries ahead of building in Retool.

There are a lot of automation flows and dashboarding solutions where you just want to take that data, show the data and allow the user to do all kinds of stuff with it. We're developers; we are used to building front-ends. But nothing matches the speed of combining components to a full-fledged app as Retool. We managed to rebuild our internal invoicing app (loading timelogs into invoicing software to create invoices) in 4 times the original development time.

- Integrations! I was able to connect will all the databases we are using. Even the one provided by AWS (Dynamodb). - Drag and dropping UI elements also make the developing tools faster. - Awesome support.

The free version has only editor mode so I have to move to a paid plan to get preview mode. But hey, I am nitpicking here.

We had to execute some queries upon customer request, Like making profile verified, etc. So we had to develop internal tools. This is where retool comes in handy. It hardly took 20 minutes to implement these tools

Retool allowed us to save a lot of development time. An "admin area" was on our roadmap and, after Retool, it was simply removed, because we were able to create every report that we need – and some basic actions like update or delete – directly from it's drag-and-drop interface.

Retool will be extremely limited if don't have coding skills. And, for MongoDB users, queries often get pretty complex, so you often get confused and it creates a "please don't touch this input code" culture.

We generate reports (with charts) directly from Retool, connection our MongoDB database to it. This would be way more difficult with "habitual coding" and use development time that is already difficult to get as a small company.