Briefly — Retool is a visual programming language, built specifically for building internal front-ends. The idea is that we can let you use a visual programming interface to get you 70% of the way there very quickly, and then let you customize the rest with code. This lets you build apps much faster, but also retains the customizability and flexibility of code.
We support writing JS anywhere between {{ }} [1], importing custom React components [2] , hosting on-prem [3] (can be setup in 5 minutes: https://docs.retool.com/docs/running-retool-locally), etc. And then once your applications are built in Retool, we manage the authentication (via SSO if you want), authorization (syncing with your groups in Okta via SCIM), and audit logs (can be stored in your own database, so you can build apps on top of it.)
One interesting differentiator is that we don't store any data, and are happy to connect to any back-ends you already use (including both databases and rest / graphql / grpc endpoints).
Here’s a 4 minute demo video: https://d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net/videos/intro-to-retool...
HN is what got us this far, so if anybody has any comments / suggestions, please feel free to let me know! We aim to be surprisingly responsive to HN feedback, since we’ve found it highly predictive of what developers in general want. Feel free to email me at david AT retool.com
edit: fixed video. Thanks!
1. https://docs.retool.com/docs/javascript-overview 2. https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components 3. https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions
The absence of "low-code" (the phrase) throughout the site--except for a couple of blog posts--makes me think it was a conscious decision. Sort of how Slack remarkably avoids the word "chat" anywhere on their site. Is that the case, and why?
This is great news. You've really come a long way from a Show HN and now raising a Series B lead by Sequoia Capital. Congratulations to you and Retool. I look forward to see Retool growing with more customers and features in the near future.
Well done!
Visual Basic represented the high-water mark for developer productivity[1] when it came to small/medium apps. And that's not just Forms apps. You could build a TCP server on it. You could build embeddable COM components, embed a Web Browser, do Distributed Transactions, make a System tray app, connect to any database that you choose, Web Apps, etc. It had a great interop story with COM/C++ code (which allowed you to do embed stuff like, say Telephony, with just a few lines of code).
There's truly a market for a reincarnation of VB. I don't think Retool would be that, because the capabilities will never align. VB is much "lower level" relatively, and that was its strength.
[1]: As long as you stuck to Windows, which was the case in the 90s.
Got a question for the best way to (ab?)use the fact that retool already talks to the db. Say I've got a database that's off in some cloud and i've hooked it up to retool.
What's the best way to use retool as a psql connection, because i'm too lazy to configure and setup and start psql to do that (say, because I'd have to start up a google cloud sql proxy and make sure that's pointing at the right db, and make sure to use a nonstandard port if i've got a dev container up at the time and and and and...)?
Right now I've just got a personal dash that i edit that has an empty table and a query that i can preview, but i feel like there's gotta be a better way that doesn't involve biting the bullet and spending the time to make the bash commands for psql (or pgadmin) just work.
We have a product in beta that (I think) does what you're looking for: the Query Library (https://docs.retool.com/docs/query-library). This lets you run queries, save them, and share them across your company. LMK if that's what you're looking for?
(In the future, we will be adding more permissions, etc. to it. We are actively developing this right now and would love to get some feedback from you on it if you'd be open to it? I will have our engineer email you!)
One of the challenges of highly regulated verticals is that we have to produce a lot of paperwork for regulators. This paperwork is documents in a particular format (from templates we create) but is populated by data from various databases (and other sources like JIRA, google docs, etc.).
If we could program custom logic that pulls data from our various sources to create an exportable document (PDF) based on the data all over our organization, we could replace two dozen document management people with one script ... and have it be more accurate to boot.
I’m interested in understanding what it is you need exactly.
I’m working on something that may have overlap.
let me know how I can get in touch!
We were actually looking for a similar tool, considered some famous SaaS and decided we should go for our in-house backoffice because of niche requirements.
I am really interested in understanding the full potential for future projects. :)
Thanks!
My co-founder and I have led several product and engineering teams at tech companies - and have experienced first hand the struggles of building and maintaining internal tools. We believe that empowering product teams, operations teams, IT teams, etc. to build and update some of their own tools would speed the business up, and free engineers to focus on bigger things.
Set up is lighting fast and you can customize and update your tools whenever you want.
We also provide developer tools as well. You can read/write via API, manipulate data with javascript, and more. We’re making some big investments in this area.
Retool is really aimed at engineers who are building custom internal applications. For example, if you're Coinbase and looking to build a complex approval workflow for withdrawals above $100MM (with a custom UI depending on which Okta groups you're in, with custom approvals required depending on the KYC status of the customer, etc.), it's very very hard to do with either internal or forest (since the customizability and flexibility are much lower with both of them).
So: forest and internal are good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later. Retool takes longer to get started, but allows you to customize substantially more.
In the mid-term (i.e. 1 - 6 months' time) we want to make starting in Retool much easier. We will probably allow users to quickly generate admin panels (similar to internal or forest) with a few clicks on top of common datasources.
Congrats on the funding!
I am wondering whether retool can fit this use case? I have some bunch of data which I would like to sell, and would like to give a dataviz tool to a 3rd party customer to play with my data.
Are you aware of any customer of you with such an use case?
(Theoretically, the end users could get all the data by inspecting the network requests. But there's really no way around that given that you're exposing the app and its data publicly. I suppose you could get around it by adding a password to the public app. LMK if you need help with that!)
I worked with Retool when they were in the YC W17 batch. They were previously working on a p2p finance app for the UK, and I remember sitting in the conference room when they told me they were pivoting to Retool.
The Retool idea made immediate sense to me because at my prior startup we used django-admin to crank out internal pages and it was amazing. So it seemed clear to me that having something along those lines that was available in every programming environment would be useful, but it was harder for me to wrap my head around competing with free. This sort of reminds me of Algolia competing with Apache Solr - as it turns out can be a great business if you build a great product and really understand your customers. Also I did not appreciate the power of having a drag-and-drop interface, all of the integrations etc.
David and the whole Retool team have done a truly brilliant job executing since then, excellent work.
To give a perspective on how much of an outlier this team is, my recollection is they got to ~1M ARR very quickly and with just the 2 cofounders and one employee. That is rare.
Overall I'd say it's helpful but has a ways to go before being a useful replacement for most internal app use cases. It's certainly promising though and hopefully this round of investment helps round off some of these rough spots in the product.
Anyhow — thank you for the feedback! I will send you an email in a few hours too. If you'd be willing to hop on the phone to dive into some of this in more detail, it'd be really appreciated. (I'll probably run a few potential solutions by you and see which ones you like.)
There is https://easydb.io which is nice and works OK with Retool but is NoSQL.. an equivalent for a relational DB would be great.
Disclaimer: I work at Supabase
I discovered Retool fairly recently during a bout of frustration-with-our-designers-and-engineers-spending-too-much-time-on-internal tools.
We were fighting very very elementary bugs mostly because the people implementing our internal tools were just not thrilled about that work (vs. the customer-facing stuff) and there's just a natural progression of common bugs when you're building things from the ground up.
We are just about to launch our first full conversion from an internal tool to a Retool-powered one, and I'm super excited. We were able to get the project to 0 backend engineers, 1 frontend engineer (who gets some help w/ SQL queries), and 1 designer who works directly in Retool (which, to be fair, isn't as powerful as Figma, but that's actually a good thing!).
And for the product guy (me), I can go in and tweak things without filing a ticket and waiting for a test-review-deploy cycle. So the whole thing is just quicker and better for this use case. Now our team can focus 100% effort (or, at least 99%) on the customer-facing stuff, which is where we're adding the most value anyway.
Suffice to say I'm very pleased so far.
Internal tools at many orgs languish as not being sexy - I’ve always found them cool and an opportunity for building some good operation secret sauce.
You want to do a quick form to manage an app ? Let's build it on Retool, you will lose control of everything, you can't improve the form, you don't run the form, you can't apply the usual code review, ...
Visual coding is great for people who don't know how to code, but for developer that should be the thing to avoid at all cost. I have seen a company that instead of improving their coding environment they started progressively doing everything on Retool, what is going to happen the day Retool is down ? or increase their price ? or they bring a breaking change ? or ?
Don't get me wrong, I think the product is amazing, but it requires huge discipline, and this is never a good idea to depend on the discipline of people
1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository, and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing
2. On the flexibility side — you can import your own React components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want: https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components.
3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem: https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time. And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always downgrade / refuse to upgrade.
We’ve also had it explode on us a couple of times in production (on prem) and even reprovisioning it from scratch was a real struggle.
Things may have improved now (I try not to touch it these days) and I wish the team all the best with it. No doubt there are people out there for whom it will work well. But for me personally, I’ll be moving the things we’ve built using it into something else when time permits.
Still, it lets you churn out working UIs and mini apps really fast so it's very hard to stop using it once you've started!
1. How soon will you announce pricing?
2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching Retool?
- Real-Time Sys/App Dashboards (e.g. Graphite) => Datadog
- Collaborative Source Control (e.g. trac, hgweb) => GitHub
- Team Chat & Bots (e.g. IRC, ZNC, Hubot) => Slack
- App Error Tracking (e.g. Raven/Sentry project) => Sentry
In this case, the category is:
- Internal Admin Interface (e.g. Django Admin) => Retool
Like all of the above categories, this category is obvious in retrospect.
Every SaaS product/company I have ever worked on or advised has leveraged a Django admin interface. Or, the team wished it had one once they went into production with real users, if the technology choice _wasn't_ Python/Django.
If you have never personally experienced a the Django admin interface, you can read about it and see screenshots in this tutorial: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Server-side/D...
Essentially, it gives you a web-based interface, hooking into your existing user/group authentication model, for inspecting (and even altering!) live production data by introspecting your "Django Models". That is, your Python classes which represent your production SQL tables lead to (controlled!) admin interfaces that can edit those tables.
You can extend that admin interface using simple declarative configuration, such that you can build functional, SQL-aware tables and forms without writing a lick of UI code.
Based on the demo video, Retool is even more featureful than the Django Admin (although perhaps a little less extensible, since it isn't based on an open source framework). But, for anyone thinking to themselves, "Why didn't I think of this?" -- perhaps give some thought to the root problems beneath some of the open source tools you're using today, that could perhaps be turned into a widely-applicable SaaS tomorrow.
I tried replacing the backend with just Google Firestore. Surprisingly to do this on react, it's a hell lot of code. I don't mind writing the code but it's just ridiculously complicated and hard to reason the complexity.
I thought of just bootstrap with jQuery with Firestore but then you have to do all the session management which will again devolve into a shit ton of code.
Finally decided to ditch all this and just go with Wix. Wix has definitely come a long way in terms of building websites. I can build a user registration form in minutes and have the whole site up in like less than 2 hours.
Retool offers much much more than Wix so I see a bright future. One of the shortcomings of Wix is lack of component embedding. Essentially you are limited to passing control between pages. If Retool offers component embedding, that's a huge win IMO.
Good luck folks and congratulations on the fund raise.
We are hitting the limits of its capability. Which is when applications get complicated or end up with lots of code. The javascript you write in your tool is running inside many layers of retool javascription and encapsulation.
But at this point if we decide to move such an app out of Retool, then the business logic is already written.
Curious to hear from a real customer of theirs how they are using this service?
Sort of reminds me of a handful of RegBI tools - like Periscope Data. But the marketing/positioning is "this is for internal teams". I suppose another important difference here is that you can write to the database from the interface. The API out-of-the-box is pretty neat too.
I gave it a quick spin after watching the demo. Large tables take a while to refresh. I dont know if thats just extra load on the servers after the announcement. I would imagine getting latency down, especially for queries with many columns or rows, would be important to UX.
On the latency part — yes! We are currently working on scaling our systems and latency is a bit higher than usual right now. If this is something anybody is interested in working on, please ping me! :)
Edit: Also, a huge congratulations!
This tool strikes me as confusing for non-programmers and too limited for programmers.
What is this meant to compete with, what's the use case?
Of course if you're a dev that loves building tools, this might not be good news for you if your company decides to adopt it.
Our project has similar goals like Retool, Powerapps or other low code builders for internal tools, but we are building an open ecosystem instead of a closed one.
How close is this project to Retool? We have all the major features already so you won't miss much but we don't have all the UI widgets and native integrations yet. We'll probably reach feature parity in ~6 months.
It is where non-technical folks can do everything - dig into data, merge data from CSV even, create reports. SQL is generated automatically from schema reflection. There is no engineering help needed, at least at this stage and it does multi-table JOINs by itself already.
1. We are _not_ a system of record, and do not store any data. We'll connect to your data, no matter where it is (e.g. postgres, your own API, Stripe, etc.)
2. We are primarily for building complex UIs, not for simple spreadsheets. If you're looking for a spreadsheet for your database, there are lots of other options (e.g. postico). But if you're looking to build a UI (perhaps you only want some columns to be editable, or don't want to expose the whole database as a spreadsheet), you should use Retool.
To give a concrete example of a good Airtable use case: let's say you join a new company and have a list of friends that you admire and want to try and recruit. You'd probably use an Airtable for that. Retool is probably overkill here because you'd have to setup a database to store your friends, which probably doesn't make sense.
To give a concrete example of a Retool use case: let's say you're Doordash, and you want to manage all the orders in your database (e.g. you want cancel an order because the restaurant is closed). The only safe way for your support team to do that is you build an internal front-end for it. To do that, you're either writing React (or Angular, or Vue), or using Retool. Airtable probably wouldn't work here because Doordash is not storing their orders in an Airtable.
Against Metabase: we're primarily used for applications that both read and write data. If you're looking for some charts or tables that only read, I'd recommend Metabase (or Chartio, Looker, Redash, etc.). But if you want to write data back via Metabase (i.e. the CUD in CRUD), it's impossible without building a custom React app.
I'm biased[1], but for this reason we took the approach of creating a spreadsheet from scratch for the sole purpose of creating logic for apps (both internal tools & customer facing UX).
Would be curious to get the everyone's input on our spreadsheet-driven approach -- thoughts?
[1] I'm biased, because I'm the founder of: https://mintdata.com
[2] But this example shows what I mean by the "a spreadsheet is better to define logic than JS" approach:
It's also in somewhat bad taste to appear to be making a positive contribution to the discussion of someone else's work while actually promoting your own, and you've done that twice in this thread.
(I hesitated to say something about this because Retool is a YC co and we moderate less in such cases (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) but this principle is the same everywhere and I've made similar comments in many non-YC-related threads.)
I spent 5 years in the 90s creating a WYSIWYG tool with Visual Basic 6 , and VB6 was a life saver.
I think retool is a fantastic, modern-day re-incarnation of that.
However, I think when the UX is important -- that is, a rich, pixel-perfect design combined with robust facilities to define custom app logic, a principles-first approach has to be taken.
We've taken one stab at this, to say that logic should be defined in a spreadsheet specifically tailored for the app-building purpose, and I think only time will tell if this approach is right. [1]
[1] Take with a grain of salt, I'm the founder of
