Retool Reviews & Product Details

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.