Retool Reviews: 4.6/5 — Highly Rated

In every company I worked for there has been a constant need for the following: internal tooling, admin panels, freelancer portals, ops panels, the list goes on... These tools are often built quick & dirty and little to less attention is given to reusability. Tech stack for those (non-sexy) tools is often a personal taste of the developer who is tasked to build them which makes it even harder to maintain them. Retool brings a law & order to this space, with its a great selection of data sources and reusable components, building sensible tools is a breeze.

Features targeting power users can be improved.

We build our internal tooling around DS workflows admin panels.

- Quickly building frontends using existing data - Supports JS almost everywhere - Makes fun to build apps - Quick iterations possible

- sometimes still feels a bit buggy - mobile layout not that good - visual drag and drop a bit laggy - editor frontend could be a bit more customisable, e.g. popout the left/bottom/right panels - documentation could be a bit better

- Frontends for internal tools, connecting to existing database or APIs - Previously only tech savvy users could do that by either working directly with the database (tables) or with REST APIs - Now every business user can use frontend tools to accomplish certain tasks, freeing up time of the techies --> without making the math, I'm sure we are saving money using Retool!

How quick it is to connect to a db and perform CRUD operations

Loading times with more complex applications

Replacing old web front ends, with a more modern feel

Almost no-code data integration and UI creation help quickly get to work rather than getting sucked into creating internal tools.

Integration with JSON format databases like MongoDB could be better to help provide easier nested lookup based on document id references. Other than that, it provides comprehensive integration capabilities and robust UI layouts to use.

Managing users on our platform, managing user's internal properties like free credits, access restrictions, and even publishing and managing content on CMS has become user friendly with Retool.

The agility to create new solutions via a varierty of tools to different problems.

The fact that it only allows me to save one password, when for safety pourpuses our programs use different ones.

The agility to have an almost inmediate response to give to our customers.

Ease of setting up Resources. Automatic table creation and being able to configure columns. Automatic refresh when variables change. Option to add a mobile layout.

Pricing model for pro is too expensive to allow all devs, customer support, and a few other departments access that I would like. Couldn't see a way to locally cache data between page reloads. Some APIs like Stripe don't seem to be maintained and are out of date. I'd like a nicer way to handle referencing elements of undefined objects. Kind of a problem with javascript in general and I like that the whole app doesn't crash. I'd also like a way to add logging. In our public app, I've seen a few weird things from the data but it's hard to tell exactly what went wrong.

quickly developing internal tools for customer service and a CMS to maintain app content. I wrote a refer a friend public app that allows existing users to send a coupon to up to 3 friends. We were able to build and launch this really quickly compared to the time it would have taken to get it built into all of our client apps.

I really enjoy retool being the "one stop shop" for seeing our NPS scores, CSAT responses, and a lot of other important things. It has been a huge time saver for me and honestly, I don't think I even use it up to its full capability. It is also very easy to read.

I feel like the search functionality could be improved. It works, but sometimes when I search by an email address and not by organization it won't clear out the organization even though I've clicked on the "x" several times.

I stated this some above but instead of having to go to three or four different software to find the information I need (for a customer email following an NPS, for instance) it is all in one place and takes a fraction of the time.

- Flexible UI - Many integrations - Fast turnaround for customer support

- Can get slow depending on the complexity of the pages and integrations - Management of integrations and interfaces could get cumbersome especially before reusable components, templates, and other tools were added

- Admin interface for customer support and ops - Dashboards for analytics - Flexible to fit lots of different use cases - Fast iteration

There are a lot of connectors to sources and I feel it hits a sweet spot between giving some developer flexibility and providing leverage with UI-based features. It really nails those scenarios which are a few weeks to develop and test when coded by hand vs a day or two using Retool.

It's still a young platform so there are occasionally some kinks. Nothing major and they resolve things quickly. The platform is very Javascript-centric so if you think like that, you're at home but if you come from another background, a little mental adjustment is needed.

Generally building connective tissue between analytic stores like databases and operational systems like Google AdWords or social media accounts. Often team members are doing repetitive tasks which can be automated very quickly using Retool. The main benefit is speed of development but also that it doesn't require an advanced developer to use.

Retool eliminated a lot of steps in our workflow. It shortened our process and it helped us increase our productivity rate!

Its a bit slow when clicking from one tab to another.

Tracking and transitioning a case from one status to another. It helped us to not manually record everything that we did. It transformed our records from a file to a fully automated engine, to track and transition the status of each case we handle/

Easy to get started, rich set of widgets to start. Support a variety of databases. (Postgres, MySQL, TiDB, etc)

I like it in general. Not too many complaints.

Time to build the tool.

Simple and intuitive to use, anyone can build an app within Retool with no coding required!

Can get quite slow and laggy depending on what features you're using

We've been able to save thousands of dollars by using Retool to help us build vs. buying a 3rd party software for each indivudla issue

Was able to create an admin interface very fast. Developer friendly.

Didn't find a clear documentation on how to achieve certain things (filtering some data before sending it to server, the possibility to use lodash in js expressions) - resorted to google search to find that out.

Build internal company tools without code.

We had a react web-app, served from an express-js server, pulling from a mongoDB (in the cloud). With ReTool, in less than two hours I rebuilt the core functionality of the web-app, allowing us to bin off the old one and the old server. I added features that have been on my "to-do" list for ages but have not had dev time for. It's a winner. I've already got my next 5 ReTool app ideas lined up!

It's got limits on the number of users that can view/interact with your web-app, which for our use case means it's not well suited (we serve many low-value customers rather than a few high-value ones). But, as an internal tool for company use, it's great. Oh, and if you need it to be super pretty, I don't think it's for you. I'm sure it could probably be done, but its focus seems to be on utility first (which suits me fine).

1) stopping paying to manage infra that I don't need or want. Using ReTool has allowed us to replace an internal tool for managing user-access to our mobile-app. The big 'win' here is that on-going dev-time is now zero for this tool. ReTool handle it's upkeep. We built it, but don't have to worry about keeping the server up, or managing library updates, or other such things. My only future dev spend will be to add more features - which is exactly where I want my spend to be. 2) getting to *information* quicker We have weekly KPIs that are drawn from multiple data sources (analytics, stripe, our mongoDB). Previously we had to spend time in each to fetch the data we needed for those KPIs. ReTool does the manual fetching for me now, so I can spend more time responding to those KPIs

No server to manage. Easy to use with external APIs so no need to give a 3rd party website direct DB access. Great support.

Javascript is finicky and difficult to debug. Retool would benefit greatly from an integrated debug suite of tools so we don't have to debug from the browser like we're still in 1999.

We use it to develop internal tools like customer support. We can easily setup 3rd party partners with a secure Retool instance so we don't have to deal with our company firewalls, auth, etc.

It is very intuitive, you don't need too much programming knowledge to build dashboards.

Sometimes it is hard to find what you are looking for. The screen gets too crowded, I believe there should be a better way to organize things.

We use it for ticket management and to analyze ticket submissions. Also, we use different dashboards to see who is available in our app.

Open source code helps in easy coding and integration as per our requirements. We used it to enhance the KYC module internally, and it gave us miracles. Small size, fast, and reliable

The backend data storage is linked to Sheets which is a significant dependency. It grows slow when the backend is full, which slows down the entire process related to it.

We used the tool as a backend for the KYC database and the front end for KYC decision-making. Multiple dashboards run parallelly at the same time helped the business grow, and we have moved to the latest version of the same

Retool is excellent for making quick apps to manage the internals of a small business better. The best part about Retool is how it can connect to existing data sources, keeping a single source of truth for essential data. We connected directly to our website's already existing product database to give our sales team a clearer view of all of our products.

It's hard to find things to dislike about Retool, most problems are just minor annoyances. For example the Table component can't be displayed as an infinite scrolling table (such as AirTable or Google Sheets) and must be paginated.

Retool gives our team better tools to view our products, add internal notes, and display sales. Our sales team can easily filter products, for example, to find products released after a specific date. We also have a Retool app for displaying the sales that we have made, which includes beautiful graphs and charts to see how our business is doing. Retool has been able to save the precious time of our staff and give us a better sense of our company's status without having to chart sales figures manually.

I like the extensibility of Retool. It allowed us to build a very intuitive sales dashboard that gives insight into customer account usage, payment details, and hosts several integrations for us as well.

The tool itself can be slow oftentimes, and I've found that it can sometimes take a while to refresh or get stuck on a certain page. Overall those are not huge pains but worth noting.

Our problem was not having one consolidated place to see insights on our customers' usage and hold all of their billing information associated with their account. We were able to design the system so it hosts all this info and allows us to turn certain features on/off for our customers.

Retool makes it super easy to create internal tools, database & API interactions very easy.

At this time, there is nothing I dislike about Retool.

We use Retool as a database query tool. It's super easy to grant access with SSO.

User-friendly, easy to search multiple fields

Nothing in particular. Maybe more visibility into usage.

It is being able to have visibility into customers' usage with our products.

Multiple functionalities of the tool, ease of use, data download and sharing

The tool is slow, and refreshes take high time.

- inventory management - pricing -catalog management - demand management

How easy it is to put together interactive interfaces, as well as the straightforward implementation of custom features.

Personally, I found it hard to control the flow of data and how reactions to changes, especially queries, behave

Creating dashboards for internal use, to have data available at a glance.

Very easy to start, you can build an app in hours. Familiar to React devs.

Two people cannot work at the same app at the same time - this is understandable as there is no version control but it slows development a bit.

Building a internal data management tool. It speeds up development as there are no release cycles.

very little coding once the database is connected. Also the access to the DB can be restricted so that it's not tampered by folks not familiar with the DB

it just fits our purpose. so not much to dislike there.

we are a small team and want our tech team to focus on critical stuff.

Ease of building multiple functionalities

Limitations for the application we are building for, zooming for images etc is not ideal

Allows us to show the power of my AI and ML tools

One aspect of Retool that I particularly appreciate is the partner program. This program has enabled my company to forge valuable collaborations, accelerating our software development efforts significantly.

One area where Retool could use some improvement is in its user experience. While it caters well to developers, the overall interface might benefit from better labeling and simplification. It can be somewhat overwhelming and technical for users who are not as well-versed in development.

Retool is addressing challenges in software development by streamlining processes, facilitating collaboration, optimizing resource utilization, and ultimately enabling faster time-to-market for our applications.

Drag and drop option to build productive layouts that scale with Adhoc task requirements. Awsome low code tool to build ad-hoc/planned dashboards. Other features like action flow builders have made it fairly good to design decent level systems.

Operation speed and contextual speed could have been a bit better though it serves the use case. Building high quality/functional tool require potential knowledge of SQL, Would be great if it also explores the no-code domain.

Internal tools for ops and sales team for high impact Adhoc tasks. A great tool to manage records/transaction/workflow for low/medium scale.

It help me in every field that I have,Its very easy to use and I can easily acces everything, so easy to adapt the changes as well.overall it's agood experience

It is very slow like takes so much time to load whenever I try to open a page it takes 2,3 seconds and then that page will open, it's very disappointed and takes a lot of time

I am in quality team and I check all the answers provided by the students and tutors in one page so it's very easy for me to analyse the performance of tutors by retool over its very nice experience

We replaced an internal custom admin dashboard with Retool and it was able to fully replace the functionality and made it much easier to add new functionality.

The fact that changes to a dashboard immediately apply instead of going into a preview that you can then save is a little unexpected.

Replacing a custom internal admin website.