What is a retool used for?

After reviewing over 850+ low-code, AI, and no-code platforms, we narrowed it down to a few front-end platforms, with Retool emerging as our favorite for building internal business applications. Here's why:

How does Retool work?

Library of Components: Retool offers a library of over 100 out-of-the-box components, such as inputs, select boxes, tables, and containers. More importantly, what we appreciate is the developer-friendliness, offering extensive customization options, powerful autocomplete features, and events that can be triggered. The developer's experience with these components is notably appreciable.

Run in SaaS or BYOC: Retool can be easily executed and scaled in your own cloud infrastructure, perfect for larger enterprises. Alternatively, you can use their SaaS offering and avoid any hassle.

Developer Friendly: We particularly value the ability to write your own code on top of the component features, integrate your own React components, and the ease of writing REST, GraphQL, or SQL queries.

Enterprise-Grade Features: Retool is also well-suited for large enterprise projects, providing SSO, audit trace logs, fine-grained permissions, compliance, and an efficient enterprise sales team that can respond to RFPs and work with your procurement department.

Not Only Front-End: Retool also offers a way to build mobile apps and workflows, which is highly beneficial when building complex internal business applications for large companies. Finally, Retool lets you build simple forms on top of complex apps. You can easily collect documents, information, or data from and integrate them into your global workflow/database or application.

Integrated with Many Back-Ends: Retool offers native integrations with major back-ends like Snowflake, S3, various databases, Twilio, and dozens of others.

What problem does Retool solve?

On top of solving the problem of building front-end for internal business applications fast, let's see two examples of famous companies leveraging Retool for very concrete business problems.

Checkout.com’s global payments platform is Europe’s most valuable fintech

Checkout created a Performance Hub to automate manual requests from different teams.

Customer Success teams are able to access portfolio tracking to follow specific accounts, verify current account balances, get a global overview of the portfolio, view authorizations, and acceptance rates.

Product teams have access to deeper, more complex areas of payments, to fine tune their proof of concepts to improve failed payment rates and rapidly iterate.

Plaid is a world-leading data network and payments platform

Problem: Support reps had to jump across 5+ systems— Jira, Zendesk, databases, APIs, and Slack—to help customers, resulting in slow resolution times.

But integrating data and measuring user activity in one React app required too many engineers to build and maintain.

Solution: Support reps help customers from 1 Retool app, which centralizes key information and actions from 5+ systems.

Results : Support reps saw an 80% improvement in avg time to resolution while engineers freed up more time to solve the biggest problems.

> 20x faster building in Retool vs existing React/Redux codebase
> 40 apps created to solve CS and other use cases

Why is Retool so popular?

‍Retool is popular because it balances the speed of low-code platforms with the customization depth that developers need. It appeals to technical users with its support for JavaScript and SQL, allowing for complex application development. Retool differentiates itself from other low-/no-code platforms by not sacrificing programmability for ease of use, with features like autocomplete, data-samples visualization or AI copilot. Features like API and database integrations, customizable UI components, and robust data visualization tools enable developers to build comprehensive internal tools quickly. This makes Retool a preferred choice for businesses looking to develop powerful applications efficiently.