5 Retool Alternatives to Supercharge Your Internal Tooling in 2024

Whether you are evaluating Retool for the first time or are a current Retool customer dissatisfied with functionality, performance, or price, this list is for you.

‍

We have extensively researched the internal tools development space and ranked the 5 best alternatives to Retool in 2024 based on product functionality, generative AI capabilities, extensibility with code, enterprise-readiness, pricing, maintenance costs, security, and customer support.

‍

This list includes both proprietary and open-source alternatives to Retool, so you can comprehensively evaluate which Retool alternative best meets your specific business requirements.

5 Best Retool Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

With the market for internal tooling platforms constantly evolving, top vendors have continuously improved their application builders as well as introduced new features around automated workflows, AI, extensibility, and more.

‍

The top 5 alternatives to Retool in 2024 are:

1. Superblocks: Best enterprise-grade solution to build any internal app or automated workflow
2. Appsmith: Good for smaller organizations with a strong preference for fully open-source offerings
3. UI Bakery: Suitable for smaller teams with less complex requirements
4. DronaHQ: Viable for organizations on a limited budget
5. Budibase: Appropriate for companies looking for a no-code, open-source solution

Table of Contents

• What is Retool?
• The 5 best Retool alternatives in 2024
• Feature breakdown by low-code vendor‍
• Top open-source alternatives to Retool
• Why look for alternatives to Retool? (in-depth)

What is Retool?

Retool is a development platform for building custom internal software. Founded in 2017, Retool is well established in the internal tooling market.

‍

Retool's platform enables teams to build web apps, automated workflows, and mobile apps, embed Retool apps in tools built outside of Retool, and store data in a managed Postgres database.

‍

Retool’s strengths include:

• Component library: Retool offers a vast library of pre-built UI components which can be used to build web and mobile apps
• Integration library: Retool offers an extensive library of integrations with databases and APIs, allowing businesses to connect to their data sources
• Frontend JavaScript: Developers can use JavaScript in app frontends to customize component behavior and manipulate data
• AI apps: Retool provides native AI functionality to connect to external AI models like ChatGPT from apps and workflows, as well as a managed vector database to store unstructured text for use in AI
• AI assistant: Retool offers pair programming with an AI assistant for JavaScript, SQL, and GraphQL
• Granular permissions (RBAC): Retool supports role-based access controls, enabling granular access to tools
• Version control: Retool supports version control via Git syncing and supports creating and previewing different versions
• Enterprise features: Retool offers a number of enterprise features such as SSO, audit logging, and an enterprise support team
• Self-hosting: Retool can be self-hosted via a legacy full on-premise deployment

To learn more, check out this Retool deep dive.

Limitations of Retool

Despite the company’s early entry to the internal tooling market, Retool has a number of shortcomings which should be well understood by prospects and customers. These limitations, as of January 2024, include:

• Limited extensibility with code: Retool's limited extensibility in code - including lack of language support beyond JavaScript in applications as well as limited support for writing custom components - poses potential roadblocks for developers.
• Lackluster performance: Retool apps often suffer from poor performance due to browser-based code execution, single-step queries, and the lack of global edge caching.
• High cost of ownership when self-hosting: Retool's legacy on-premise deployment is resource-intensive and complex, impeding businesses from accessing new features and security fixes and increasing total cost of ownership for enterprises with stringent data security requirements.
• No streaming support: Retool does not support event-driven architectures like Kafka, Confluent, or Kinesis, preventing businesses from building real-time streaming apps. As a result, operations teams cannot benefit from real-time insights and CTOs cannot use Retool to maximize ROI on streaming technologies.
• Limited observability: Monitoring and observability of Retool Apps is limited to sending audit logs to Datadog, preventing developers from usig Splunk, New Relic, or other popular observability platforms to detect errors and view logs.
• Slow feature rollouts for on-premise: There are often significant delays before new features are made available in self-hosted Retool versions, hindering businesses wanting to leverage new technologies in their internal tooling with their preferred deployment model.
• Closed-source code: Retool's codebase is entirely closed source, preventing code audits by security teams and does not allow for extensibility.
• Flowchart-based Workflows UX: Retool employs a flowchart canvas for its Workflow UI, which quickly becomes unwieldy as logical complexity increases, making the logic challenging to understand, iterate on, and debug.
• Security breach in August 2023: Retool had a significant data breach in August 2023, with many customers’ accounts being compromised, resulting in leakage of sensitive data and reported losses of up to $15MM for a single customer.
  

Read more about each of these shortcomings below to better understand why many companies are considering alternatives to Retool.

The 5 Best Retool Alternatives in 2024

Of the many alternatives to Retool in 2024, Superblocks is the superior option, besting competitors with its robust feature set, generative AI capabilities, extensibility with code, self-hosted agent architecture, and optimization for enterprise security and scale for mission critical applications. Appsmith, UI Bakery, DronaHQ and Internal.io are also strong alternatives to Retool, especially within the SMB segment, each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses, as covered in detail in this article.

‍

For a feature-by-feature comparison of each vendor, see the matrix included below.

1. Superblocks

Superblocks is an enterprise ready low-code without limits platform for building custom internal applications, automated workflows, and scheduled jobs. Developers can extend Superblocks infinitely with code, build faster with an AI Copilot, self-host without the overhead, and deliver performant apps at scale, all while adopting affordably across their organization.

Conclusion: Superblocks is the #1 alternative to Retool and the only vendor offering a fully-featured low-code internal tooling platform without limits. Some notable benefits of Superblocks compared to Retool include:

• Greater Extensibility with Code: Retool apps support client-side JS only, while Superblocks supports React, JS, Node, & Python. Retool Custom Components rely on one HTML file, with web-based imports limited to an iframe, while Superblocks provides full extensibility with React.
• Scalable Architecture & Better Performance: Application front-ends in Superblocks are multi-threaded for smooth UI rendering, while back-end queries scale elastically with on-demand cloud compute. Retool JS queries are executed in the browser, and thus limited by browser CPU & memory, causing major latency for large apps.
• Drastically Less Overhead When Self-Hosting: Superblocks offers a lightweight, stateless On-Premise Agent, which is simple to deploy and provides access to new App Builder features instantly from the cloud. Self-hosted Retool is a legacy on-premise deployment, requiring dedicated infrastructure and heavy DevOps upgrades with downtime to access any bug fix or new feature.
• Support for Real-Time Streaming Apps: Superblocks integrates natively with streaming platforms like Kafka, Kinesis, Confluent, OpenAI, making it easy to build apps for real-time fraud alerting, live gameplay dashboards, best-in-class AI chatbots, and more. Retool lacks native support for streaming, preventing organizations from harnessing real-time insights.
• Production Monitoring & Observability: Superblocks integrates with observability providers like Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, and more, providing visibility into metrics, traces, and logs from internal tools within your preferred provider. Retool's observability is limited to sending audit logs to Datadog.
• Best-in-class customer support: Superblocks provides exceptional support across tiers, as evidenced by its position as the #1 support rating amongst low-code platforms on G2, compared to Retool's lower support rating.

2. Appsmith

The second place Retool alternative is Appsmith, an India-based open source internal tooling platform. Appsmith provides feature parity with much of the Retool application builder, though it notably does not support automated workflows or scheduled jobs. Appsmith has a growing developer community on Github and provides both a cloud and fully on-premise deployment that can be air-gapped.

Conclusion: Appsmith is a good alternative to Retool for building internal applications, especially if a business strongly prefers a fully open-source vendor. However, Appsmith does not offer support for automated workflows or scheduled jobs; without workflows or multi-step backend application APIs, Appsmith does not provide fast query performance when working with large data sets or complex business logic, making it unsuitable for mission-critical business applications in the enterprise.

3. UI Bakery

UI Bakery lands in third place, offering a less expensive alternative to Retool intended primarily for small and midsize businesses. UI Bakery includes an application builder as well as support for workflows and scheduled jobs. UI Bakery supports multi-step application APIs, enabling businesses to build out complex business logic. The UI Bakery team is based in Lithuania and is comprised of ~12 employees.

Conclusion: UI Bakery is suitable for smaller businesses looking for a lower-cost alternative to Retool. UI Bakery’s Workflow & Scheduled Jobs offerings are available to both Cloud and On-Premise customers. While UI Bakery’s lack of US-based support and small team may make it less appealing for enterprises than Retool, UI Bakery does offer some of the same capabilities, and thus may be sufficient for less complex use cases, at a lower price tag.

‍

4. DronaHQ

DronaHQ comes in fourth place, as another India-based player in the internal tooling space, offering a narrower feature set at a lower cost. DronaHQ provides an application builder with a wide variety of built-in components, as well as a Workflow & Scheduled Job builder. DronaHQ’s pricing model does not distinguish between developers and end-users, charging a flat rate for all users.

Conclusion: DronaHQ is another alternative internal tooling platform which provides an application builder as well as support for automated workflows and scheduled jobs. DronaHQ has some notable feature gaps compared to Retool, and is generally less user-friendly. DronaHQ’s pricing model does not distinguish between developers and end-users; however, their per-user cost is relatively low compared to Retool, so for organizations with more developers than end-users, DronaHQ may be a cost effective option.

5. Budibase

Budibase, a UK-based company established in 2019, enters the list as the final alternative. This open-source, no-code platform is designed for internal tooling, providing automated workflows and a diverse component library. It enables users to swiftly deploy tools with considerable out-of-the-box functionality.

Conclusion: Budibase positions itself as a viable Retool alternative, particularly for organizations that prefer no-code to low-code and favor open-source platforms. However, Budibase may be less suitable for the enterprise, as it lacks critical features such as Git-based version control as well as an AI Copilot for development.

Top open-source alternatives to Retool

Retool's entire codebase is proprietary and closed source, preventing security teams from auditing the codebase for vulnerabilities and non-Retool developers from contributing to the codebase.

‍

Appsmith and Budibase, which are both covered in detail above, are worth strong consideration as open-source alternatives to Retool. While both vendors require commercial licenses for many key features, their entire codebases are available on Github as open-source projects.

‍

Superblocks is also a viable alternative to Retool for teams with a strong preference for open-source software. The Superblocks On-Premise Agent, used for querying data sources and executing backend business logic, is completely open source.

Why Look for Alternatives to Retool?

‍

1. Limited extensibility with code

While Retool promotes itself as developer-friendly, it lacks essential features needed for comprehensive code extensibility, exposing developers to potential roadblocks when functionality is not supported. Key limitations include:

• JavaScript Only Application Queries: Application queries in Retool are JavaScript only; other common languages such as Python are not supported.
• Limited Support for Custom Components: Retool’s Custom Components offering is limited, as discussed in more detail below.

Retool’s Custom Components offering allows developers to bring custom UI components to Retool Applications. However, in practice, this offering comes with significant limitations:

• Styles Limited to Iframe: Styles are limited to the iframe, making it impossible to build custom modals, slideouts, and popovers.
• Separate Sandbox Per Component: Each Retool custom component is a separate sandbox, limiting developers ability to write shared code, such as sharing state across components (ex: Redux); each component's state must be independently managed, resulting in degraded performance and scalability, and complicating application-wide consistency.
• Poor Developer Experience: Retool’s Custom Components are authored within a single HTML within the browser, preventing developers from bundling multiple files. Developers can write React code by inserting a script tag, but the development experience is hacky and ignores best practices.
• Dependencies Must Be Bundled for Use on the Web: Third-party libraries must be bundled for use on the web to be available for use in Retool Custom Components, impeding access to the NPM ecosystem and local packages. Reusing existing libraries is cumbersome, necessitating maintenance of packages on a CDN, with an undesirable alternative of copying existing code directly into each Retool component HTML file.
• Performance Impact of Importing Packages on the Web: Libraries imported via script tags cannot use module bundlers like Webpack or Rollup, eliminating advantages like tree shaking, code splitting, and transpilation. This approach forces Retool to load entire libraries, negatively impacting performance.
• Unable to Extend Built-in Components: Developers cannot easily extend built-in components, which means any custom component must be built entirely from scratch.
  ‍

2. Lackluster performance

Businesses leveraging Retool often complain about poor performance within Retool apps. Retool’s performance issues can be attributed to a few notable architectural shortcomings:

• Browser-Based Code Execution: All Retool application queries written in Javascript are executed in the browser. This architecture restricts processing capacity to the browser's CPU and memory, unlike traditional server-based applications that can manage query loads and scale as needed.
• Single-Step Queries: Application queries in Retool run as single steps, which means that data from each query must be returned to the browser for any subsequent processing; this architecture results in excess network requests and data traffic.
• Lack of Global Edge Caching: Retool does not utilize global edge caching. As a result, each time a user accesses an application, the tool definitions must be fetched from Retool's servers (or a business's own servers if deploying Retool on-premise), increasing loading times and negatively impacting application performance.

‍

3. Self-hosting costs and overhead

Many businesses must ensure sensitive data stays within their network to meet security and compliance requirements. To satisfy these requirements, businesses must self-host Retool. Self-hosted Retool is a resource-intensive legacy on-premise deployment with infrastructure, DevOps, and downtime costs. Moreover, if a business operates across multiple data regions or uses several cloud providers, they must deploy unique Retool instances in each virtual private cloud (VPC), multiplying complexity.

‍

Furthermore, in order to access new features or security patches, Retool’s deployment model requires that businesses perform exhaustive upgrades; this requirement not only extends the period during which the platform is outdated, but also exposes businesses to avoidable security threats and hampers their agility in responding to shifting market needs.

‍

The overall complexity of deploying Retool on-premise means businesses will often need to reallocate resources from shipping internal tools to maintaining their Retool infrastructure.

4. Expensive software & platform fees

Retool's enterprise tier may only be available to self-host at a fixed platform fee with a set number of users, rather than based on usage. Additionally, some features may be only available to purchase as add-ons to the Enterprise package, driving up the average cost per user.

‍

For more information, read this deep dive on Retool's pricing.

5. No streaming support

Retool does not offer native support to integrate with event-driven streaming platforms like Kafka, Kinesis, and Confluent. Without native support for event-driven architectures, businesses cannot easily build apps on top of these core infrastructure providers. Users are thus limited to batch updates and cannot get real-time insights from apps built with Retool.

6. Lack of observability in apps

Retool recently released the ability to send audit logs to Datadog. However, Retool does not integrate with New Relic, Splunk, or any other popular observability providers. Without these integrations, developers cannot easily debug Retool apps, view logs, or receive proactive notifications when errors arise in mission-critical internal apps.

7. Slow feature rollout for self-hosted

Retool is often slow to roll out new features to customers self-hosting Retool. Features are commonly available in cloud-hosted Retool for multiple months before they are made available in a self-hosted version, as evidenced by their changelog.

‍

Once a feature is made available as part of a self-hosted Retool version, DevOps teams must undertake the arduous upgrade process of their deployment, resulting in further delays before new features and bug fixes are available to users.

8. Closed Source Code

Retool is completely closed source, which comes with significant downside. First, code cannot be audited by security teams. This opaque, potentially buggy and vulnerable code has access to production databases and, when self-hosting Retool, is running entirely inside a business’s network; thus, there are limited preventative measures a business can take to mitigate the risk of exposing a business’s VPC to vulnerabilities and unintentionally impacting production databases. Additionally, the closed source nature of Retool means that the platform is inherently less extensible; businesses must wait for Retool to implement new features, slowing pace of development compared to open-source offerings.

9. Flowchart-based Workflows UX

Developers build automations in Retool Workflows using a flowchart-style UI. While this approach is common amongst low-code workflow automation tools, it quickly becomes difficult to parse the logical flow as the number of nodes and paths expands with complexity. As a result, workflows built on Retool are difficult to maintain and debug for enterprise use cases.

10. Security breach in 2023

Retool had a significant data breach in August 2023, during which many customers’ accounts being compromised. Since businesses run mission-critical software on Retool, hackers obtained access to sensitive data, resulting in reported losses of up to $15MM for a single customer.

Superblocks - The #1 Retool Alternative

Superblocks is the #1 alternative to Retool and the only vendor offering a fully-featured low-code internal tooling platform without limits. Compared to Retool, Superblocks allows businesses to extend tools further with code, self-host without the overhead, build real-time streaming apps, and deliver more performant apps at scale - all while scaling affordably across the organization. Start building with Superblocks today!