Retool Reviews: 4.6/5 — Highly Rated

Super easy & intuitive platform for creating meaningful internal apps. Providing QA & product team with a lot of value with little effort. Great support team & community.

I've submitted a request a few months ago and after the initial response I haven't heard much. I don't get updates on newest releases and added features nor knows where to look for them.

Providing QA & product team with a lot of value with little effort.

Dev cycle speed is fantastic - we can have our users submit a feature request / UX issue on our admin tools and have the change deployed in a few minutes. Saves a ton of time vs. running our own builds.

UX is still a tiny bit clunky - the submit-query-requery cycle can be a bit sluggish, but overall totally fine and I'm confident it will improve as they mature.

Fully runs our internal admin & analytics tools. We query our DBs directly and it's super fast and easy to build.

Retool offers a straightforward platform to build pages, where users can easily drag and drop customizable frontend components and with some coding, wire them all together to form your final product. Retool is built for internal tools and dashboards, but it is not limited to only doing that. The thing I liked best about Retool is the flexibility of the platform and the level of technical support you would get as a user. The platform offers many pre-existing connectors to external resources, such as Salesforce, Mongo, Stripe, and many more. It will take you a while to getting the setup right, but once it's set properly, you can easily build a tool in days. The technical support team is what I wanted to highlight at Retool. The team consists of custom-oriented engineers that focus on meeting your needs. They listen to your questions and provide suitable solutions for most of them. For the ones that cannot be resolved immediately, the escalation chain up to their engineering team is also very transparent, where you can expect their team to respond with a very detailed explanation of the root cause and what they have done to fix it - in a very timely manner!

The biggest downside of Retool right now is the lack of transparency of what features they are actively developing. So in short, a product roadmap would be ideal.

Productivity problems are being solved using Retool. The benefits of Retool are the ease of use and the ability to allow developers to work on what matters most and not worry about frontend dependencies.

that connection to the different query like MongoDB, rest API and etc. it lets us pull and set data .also if we didn't implement the API. fast and easy

cannot set the brand color, in the components. missing video and image gallery that was saving time to implement a support feature.

a quick admin tool to update DB of our app. upload files to S3 and get CDN URL. support tool to view our customer's outputs.

Retool is a great resource to build quick internal tools that help us in all aspects of managing the operations (for customer success teams) as well as for quick validation and prototyping (for developers). We use Retool extensively at Airbase and have built tools of all levels of sophistication. It does make life easy!

The documentation can be improved to provide more clarity

We are building various internal tools for different set of teams including sales, customer success, engineering and product. The tools help us in managing internal operations as well as testing/validating ideas for developers.

The UI is very simple and modern to use.. even though I'm not a front-end developer I was able to develop internal apps very easily. The support team is also responsive and there's a great community on the forum.

We'll need more components on the UI or more examples on how to develop custom components. More flexibility with the tables would be good too.. but I understand that there's a trade-off there and each use-case is unique.

We're using Retool for internal operations, data entry, customer relationship management. CMS.

Ease of use of the product. Very quick to pick up and get running.

Not much to dislike here. Lots of flexibility.

Integration and Prototyping

speed, it's super fast to build internal dashboard/tools with retool

Features and interactions pattern are limited

Build internal tools fast and cheap

Easy to use , support for multiple data sources , easy to deploy and maintain

Pricing can be a bit aggressive may be features reduced for startups

We are developing a match making app , using retool for internal back office flow and reporting engine kind of our admin tool.

Really simple to link together multiple API requests together so you can then build an 'app' to achieve a task that before took 10 different requests

Retool is great, but can be slightly difficult to use at times for setup. The UI is not very attractive but gets the job done

We needed to activate API access for our customers via creation of an accounts, attributing specific rights to that account and a number of other items. This previously took 30 minutes at least, and was very manual. With retool, we have linked all the requests together so you input the information you need and then it does the rest for you. Now the whole task takes less than 3 minutes! This has allowed us to better serve customers and save time to be used strategically on other tasks

We have used Retool to build our admin panel and it has been really great. The amount of premade features, and specially their usefulness, is what has saved us a lot of time by just simply dragging and dropping. This is really adding value to us as time is one of the key factors when launching.

To be honest, we haven't used every feature in Retool because our project does not require using them. Either way, I'll be updating, if possible, this review.

When you launch a startup, it is all about getting the best out of your capital and time. Out project needed to have a strong admin panel and with Retool we were able to do this fast and easy. That was saving us a few headaches.

Retool is really good for building Admin Tools both for people with a programming background and also teams with no familiarity with programming. This is a perfect choice I choose when servicing clients who need flexible Admin.

There are some most-frequently-used components that missing which I need to create manually using React. However, this is not a deal-breaker because the programming interface used in Retool is very popular and available everywhere. In our case, we built a custom component that can upload audio dynamically based on the type of audio available. For example, if I have 5 types of voice overs, I need to upload 5 videos at a time.

We serve clients in various areas from the Workout app, e-commerce price tracking, and many others.

Retool is a efficient tool to build internal tools. It's database integration and data visualization widgets allow me to build tools for my team fast, so they can perform their work better.

There is really nothing that I dislike about retool. A neo4j integration would be great.

How do I give team members database access without giving them to much control without building a whole dedicated application? Just use retool.

It's a simple, easy to use platform that allows me to do configurations that our developers used to need to do. I can deliver results much fast to customers.

I would like to be able to undo a content copy.

Time Saving for customer success and developers.

Retool's no-code solution has been very easy to use, we are able to prototype web UI tools for CRUD DB applications and calling internal + external services in under 15 minutes, compared to the 2-8 hours it would take to manually program

We still need better solutions for peer reviewing, testing, and staging individual Retool applications to ensure they are not broken when someone is making changes

We use it for internal workflow and processes, such as setting state for our ETL pipelines, and navigating workflows for resolving customer support tickets

Very seamless and intuitive to use. Drag and drop is super intuitive, and connecting supported databases is seamless. Also very satisfied with the prebuilt components.

Not enough database integrations was one problem. We wanted to spin up elastic search, but ended up going with another DB instead because of lack of support.

All kinds of internal tools, from managing databases to summarizing and visualizing internal documentation

The simple UI and easily configurable fields are something I like the most in the app.

There is nothing that I dislike about Retool, it just helps me get what I want without any hassle.

Out of the box functionalities are done using retool which happens outside our product.

Super simple to use vars to create dynamic reports in super quick time

Page flow when hiding elements didn’t always work as expected.

Reporting on billing events in severless database.

clear documentation, quick & easy to build apps, really amazing and responsive customer service

it gets tricky when working with more complicated queries that require data parsing

Internal tooling

My favorite thing is the ability to build complex systems from the ground up with a tool that allows for all the flexibility required. We're a super technical organization and Retool was sophisticated enough for us optimize our operational flow with very limited technical skills, we currently have only a few hours a month dedicated to maintaining it.

The things people get wrong sometimes, is that you still need to be a little technical and know some code to built with retool. It's not a no-code solution entirely. For us this worked great, but good for non-technical companies to know as they look for options

We optimized our entire operational flow, which is quite complex. Retool helps us from the start to customer communication, and is involved throughout the customer journey.

Retool has replaced all of our custom built back-office apps and tooling for our product operations, and wholesale freed up engineering to focus entirely on customer facing product. It has enabled us to really invest without compromise for both customers and our ops.

The UI can feel a bit awkward at times. However, it's made large strides already, and the interface and documentation has improved a great deal.

Retool replaced our back of house dashboards and tooling for engineers, product, and customer success. Previously our team had to author these applications, which is necessary, but low value compared to the effort. Retool fixed the balance of those decisions.

The best thing is the UX that has been developed. I am sure it won't be easy but you nailed it and make it user-friendly. I won't surprise to see an IPO of retool in future. - The nice part is stripe-like third-party integrations. This tool has the potential to automate any work flow with additional automation capability.

I have nothing that I dislike about the retool.

- Customer support tools - Internal engineering infra to patch production records. - To build a small merchant app experience using inbuilt stripe integration. - To improve the customer onboarding experience and ease the complexity by building such a custom tool app.

Configuring all of my data sources, APIs, and having control of everything in one place. I can then view real time metrics, get interactive reports of all sorts of data, give control to support teams to equip them with everything they need from errors that users faced to internal dashboards that allow them to unblock users, and create all the admin tooling I could need for all of my services, fast and with great UI.

The learning curve is slightly on the higher side with the documentation lacking in detail and accessibility at the time I was learning to use retool. It's been getting better lately though, and wherever it failed me, their support team was always quick to answer all my questions!

*ALL* the admin tooling and dashboards and reporting I can need as an engineer. It lets me enable data analysts, other engineers in my team, support teams, business teams. I can't imagine the effort it would've taken to build all of that. And every single one of my retool apps took literally hours to spin up. Once you learn it, there's no stopping the amount of accessibility it provides into all of your systems.

Ability to create good-looking pages easy and connect it to any database or REST api.

A cost and inability to set permissions for Production and Staging for the same page (app).

We need an admin panel for our organization, and we do not want to have a separate staff for it.

Retool has changed our back office process completely. In the hands of our developers we were able to put together a full back-office suite for our business in just a few days. We’re pulling data from multiple APIs, Google Sheets, and automating communications with Twilio. Retool has taken the hard part out of something every business needs - an easy admin interface for managing your customer’s data.

There’s very little Retool doesn’t have - their support is very responsive, and if you need to connect to a custom resource there are multiple options for deep integration.

Retool even helps our developers while building database queries - by working in Retool while building a schema, we end up with an easy to use low level database interface for every model.

This might sounds weird that no-code tool for engineer? But it is true. We as engineers, facing a lot of routing and boring tasks requires some code, everyone has it's own kudos to accomplish those tasks, but Retool is a new all-in-one tool to create those tools for engineer, teammate, etc. I would like to recommend to all of my teammates to use Retool

So far didn't see anything dislike about Retool.

1. some routing jobs/tasks relied on engineer's work. 2. simple UI freed engineer from normal CRUD operations 3. really fast to build an internal tool to operate on the production database, saving tons of time for engineers.

I really enjoy the interface and how easy it is to use. The design and layout are very intuitive. The support that I've gotten when I got stuck has also been amazing.

The pricing is per-user, this makes it hard to be used for a large org 1000+ users with tools where a user may only use it once a year.

We were able to easily build internal admin apps with a drag and drop UI. We were able to get non-developers involved with the building process and everything is hosted in the cloud with authentication.

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We have a great overview on the events we're running in our app. Also the difrent tabs you can make and the analyses are really good

Sometimes when there is to many data in the tabels there occures a bug.

The backend of our app is running in Retool we can see all our users and events we're running.

They have a vision that goes beyond just building internal apps, and that proves to be very useful. You also want to be able to quickly pull together some marketing or sales tool, or want to collaborate with partners. That's where most no-code tools fail and retool does not. Next to that, the functionality covered by ready-made scripts or no code features is larger than most tools offer.

Their starting point that 1 tool = 1 page can be circumvented, but it's better if that design concept would be a bit more flexible.

To build a finished tool without help of developers and in fast iterations.