Retool Reviews: 4.6/5 — Highly Rated

I wrote my API endpoints and I was able to quickly integrate with them and get a functional UI. This reduced development time by a lot and as a backend developer it made sure I could give something that was functional very quickly.

The documentation wasn't that great. Some examples in docs of how the raw javascript interacted with retool components would have been nice. The GCP integration is buggy, but I believe this is a known issue since there was a bug ticket.

It helps a developer get a product over the line without knowing much about front-end things and styling. I was about to complete my entire app in 3 days along with the tweaked javascripts.

Enables me, a relatively nontechnical person (who just knows some SQL and JS), to build prototypes and flows that I would have formerly needed eng support for

Nothing I dislike. It's amazing! Really great

Helps me build internal tools without having to pull in eng resources

I really like that retool's foundation is SQL + javascript, makes it complex enough to use but easy enough to google ways to make it work.

I think some of the javascript portions of the tool could be 'block coded' / off the shelf vs. having to be coded by users (or let users submit their own blocks).

Retool is bridging the gap between something like Zapier and trying to build our own internal tool from scratch.

- Incredible customization, we can build most workflows without much trouble! - Customer support is wonderful, always around to help answer our questions

- The UI is sometimes buggy and swapping between editor & viewer modes is confusing. - Keeping multiple dashboards in sync when changing our underlying design takes some manual work.

- Customer service workflows that involve reading and writing to our databases - Giving everyone on the team the ability to self serve

App and module features. It allows me to create administrative templates in a matter of minutes. It is really useful to create the backoffice of my company

I would like to be able to organize the modules within subfolders, but at this moment it is not possible.

Quickly create interfaces to manage content

Flexibility to create whatever application our team needs. We have created apps for our finance, tech, product, and marketing teams without the need to involve our Engineering teams. It has many popular connectors and easy to use components.

As of right now, there is not much I dislike about Retool. I think they can have a slightly better experience in the drag and drop builder, but overall everything works great.

We can move way faster than before. This is extremely important for a start-up that needs to grow quickly. It was also allowed us to keep dedicated Engineering bandwidth on our product, while the rest of the team can focus on building apps and processes in Retool.

More people can now develop LOB software

There is nothing to dislike, so much to like

Allowing executives and staff to see how our users are experiencing the app. We've benefited from faster development time and increased velocity.

I used retool for an internal tool, and it let me build a dashboard on top of Postgres for others to use on the team, and it was great to build in.

Learning curve was a bit steep initially, but I was able to figure it out quite fast as it's based on JS + SQL

Retool is making it easy for me to build internal tools without having to waste hours on authentication/access control + UI design. It lets me put more time into the actual product rather than on internal tooling.

It makes it super easy to put together operational and internal tools without needing to use engineers. It saves us a lot of time and engineering resources since Product Managers can build those tools themselves.

If you don't take extreme cart, it can be pretty difficult to keep track of all the variables you're using. It should also be simpler to trigger mutations by passing them variables.

We use Retool to build our internal tooling and it provides us a low-code platform to connect with our internal API's to build experiences for our operations users. Using retool we can build these things much more quickly and iterate on them without needing to divert engineering resources.

The CEO was first reluctant when I first showed it to him, but when I started building tools in 10x the speed that I would have to implement it from scratch, he was converted.

Please please please add mulitple tag support for tables. They would look so much better than the current JSON viewer. Typescript support. This would be a serious gamechanger for me.

Retool removes the burden of having to build UI components simply to display analytics or to look at a database. I can pile up multiple database connections without facing any issues.

I enjoy that Retool, as far as I can tell, is a javascript GUI overflowing with connectors. I haven't coded in javascript in 20 years yet still found it incredibly intuitive to sketch out my first application from start to finish within about a day, integrating feedback just as quickly. I was able to rapidly integrate back-end views I had created to support this without having to fiddle with connection strings or anything like that. I enjoy the fact that just about any input can be controlled by passing javascript statements, and that once you understand this the sky is the limit. I do not have enough experience with similar tools for comparison to identify deficiencies. I have also been using this tool for ~ two weeks, so asses my feedback in that context. Most of my experience is in analytics, working primarily in SAS, R, Python, and various implementations of SQL.

Retool is great for rapidly building new apps for internal users and iterating through them. It is very flexible and customizable. This makes it very powerful. However, it suffers the same risk in the development space as Excel has in the financial space: it seems subject to the whims of the user and could easily lend itself to nightmare code and nightmare maintenance. In the right hands, it is perfect for its intended use case but may draw lesser-experienced users into building infrastructure off of it instead of relying on the engineering teams where that work is more appropriate.

Rapid development and iteration for approvals and denials in our process flow. We can test ideas in real-time, identifying flaws before trying to engage engineers.

Lots of connections. Lots of widgets. Extremely easy to use and still with code and customizable

Very expensive for on prem installs with sso. which is too bad.

We created our entire admin panel with retool. reduce time and cost for creating a from-scratch admin panel

There are a bunch of resources to get started and the customer support team is very responsive.

It's pricey for early-stage startups, but they do offer a startup package for free.

building internal tools to allow account managers to create and update content.

Easy to use and using SQL to execute CRUD operation make it very easy.

Pricing for some useful option is not very cheap, but it deserve his price.

I create small application in a very fast time for my customers

Ottimo tool per creare veloci e facili applicazioni senza avere particolari conoscenza di sviluppo software. Utile per poter integrare altre applicazione tramite API

Se si vogliono realizzare applicazioni complesse con una sequenza di operazioni diventa un pò meno semplice e necessita di un'analisi di progetto più approfondita

Utilizzo di tool web tramite chiamte API. Inserimento massivo di record da parte di utenti "base" e collegamento a tabelle di altri database. Il tutto con risparmio di tempo e risorse.

I get suggestions on what to type for code. This helped me overcome the learning curve and made it easier to build things quickly. I have not used a competitor so I don't know how Retool would compare, but just in general good documentation that covers as many situations as possible is always the best.

I wish there were more Javascript query examples. Unless if that example is the real only way to be able to use Retool with JS. I felt pretty confused on how to manipulate different aspects of my table with Javascript and still don't really know how to do much more than the example given.

As mentioned above the only problem is not knowing how to fully use the JS Queries. I want to run an API call on about 9000 rows of data, and the API takes a while. The only way I have it set up is that I have to wait till the whole query is done before I can repopulate my table with the results- which just feels very hacky. I think there is a better way to do it, but trying to find it was hard. The benefits I realize are how powerful the UI is. I love the fact that I can easily build out these widgets and the biggest benefit of Retool is the ability to just manipulate the data easily in a safe read-only ara. I know that's one of the core product offerings, but it's just nice.

Sales and Ops Support has been the differentiator when compared to other competitor products.

The pricing is a little confusing and I am a bit worried that I build something amazing but then it becomes to expensive to maintain with a big user base

Bringing all my data in one place and then representing it in a way that allows my staff to improve their delivery

easy interface and the different components offering high flexibility while building

sometimes its complicated to understand how certain UX could be implemented through the available components a guide with the most common approaches is nice to have

building in house tools to facilitate data services and products and honestly your software is a life saver when it comes to fast launch of a specific service.

Love the flexibility to create lots of different apps. The integrations with all the different third parties is really helpful. In other tools I had to map out the APIs for third parties. In Retool, the API already existed with hundreds of endpoints and the variables already mapped out so it made integration really easy and quick.

Having a development background, it would be better to have more tools orientated to development of the javascript code

Quickly made small apps to solve simple business problems where they don't need full database access, but do need to update a few rows with some data, so we can restrict a db user to that and give them a functional user interfere to make it really simple and quick for them

Its usability, very easy to drag and drop some UI elements and integrate with APIs or databases. Very easy to use for new developers or for those with less coding experience.

The only complaint I feel is the role management. No options to restrict access to panels based on roles within the internal team. Also, there is no way to group certain panels by functionality or team.

Creating panels for internal teams. It's so easy to use that even people with no coding experience are able to spin up tools for their own with minimal inputs from devs. Also easy to maintain with its version management system

The various integrations, how easy it is to build new tools. The development is straightforward, and integration into Databases and other tools becomes very simple and can be done without the significant support of Software Engineers.

The number of modules and queries become pretty hard to handle very quickly. It's missing features to help organize different elements of an application. Sutruuringing of modules and questions could be done better.

Spending Engineering Resources on building internal management and Admin tools is a complex trade-off. Everyone knows it benefits internal processes in the long run, but it is harder to justify compared to customer requests and customer-facing features. So having a tool that significantly reduces the time required to build internal management and admin tools is a must-have. Retool is filling that perfectly.

It's very intuitive and simply works perfectly right out of the box.

I like it all. It would be nice to see a summary of things that don't match up or don't exist (from misspellings).

Interacting with Snowflake database data without having the end users needing to know SQL.

Extremely Intuitive Great UI Good Range of data sources

Access Controls are on the more expensive plan.

Automation of manual business processes. Creation of internal tools for non-technical staff

Retool is an insanely fast tool for rapidly prototyping new applications and deploying into production environments. 95+% of the components required are available and immediately work out of the box with minimal onboarding. The development interface is very intuitive. As a developer I found myself rarely needing to refer to docs. Any startup quickly building applications or large organization re-thinking back-office utilities should consider Retool. I rarely write reviews; this is one of those cases where I have been so impressed by a product that I am going out my way to share.

Performance could be improved. It's not a blocker, but there is additional query overhead that requires tuning. Applications are not as snappy as a fully custom solution, especially for repetitive tasks that require data loading, e.g. quickly flagging results in a table with a checkbox. For our usage, this is an easy trade-off for the speed of application development and low maintenance requirements.

We were able to replace custom administrative tooling (React + Blueprint and Spring Boot) in a matter of days and quickly augment with new features. Development speed is easily 10x vs custom build.

The past part of ReTool is how easy it is to gather data from multiple sources and build a highquality internal tool that anyone at our company can use.

I dislike the front-end of the application. At times it can be a little slow trying to build out the front-end.

We've solved a lot of problems at our Company using Retool. Some of them including managing our Quotes with customers, managing internal analytics, and vehicle management.

The amount of flexibility it offers to users.

The lack of video tutorials out there. The documentation is solid but more tutorials in video format would be greatly appreciated.

We are solving the issue of having little engineering resources available to us to create an internal app. With Retool, non-engineers can create apps that allow us to interact with, add to, and update data in our backend.

The number of integrations ready to be used to create a back-office panel. Salesofrce, AWS S3 and DynamodDb were the most useful for our use case. We have tried a few of other services and they were not so easy to use.

We would like some more flexibility in the elements personalization, but it's hopeful something that will come soon

We managed to fastly and easily create a complete back-office for our platform.

The user interface is really friendly. There's a learning curve but it's not too steep.

It would be nice to have more integrations to other data sources

We have a backup sql database where we need to get reports from. Retool easily integrates with it and I can create useful tools

Setting up the UI is ridiculously easy. You can configure your sources and hook them up with the UI elements with little to no effort. What's especially useful is that you can see the preview of the data as you map it.

I only dislike that I didn't start using Retool earlier!

Retool provides enough flexibility for me to design anything the business demands. The major benefit is that I don't need an engineer to make changes. Everyone can create their own experience that fits just them. You only expose the data.

I like the ability to do Rest queries in tables with data pulled from various sources. It comes very handily to create operational dashboards

Retool is breaking things often when they release. The tool is critical for our operations, and this results in complaints, but their support is very responsive

Retool helps have a very customized back office for both our core product and experiments. The engineering cost of an app is nothing; with a few minutes, we can build a great pull and play tool and share it internally.