2023 Internal Tooling IDE
Buyers' Guide

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.
• Deeper AI Functionality: The Superblocks Copilot supports generating, editing, and explaining SQL, Python, JavaScript, HTML, and JSON, and integrating with REST APIs. Retool’s AI is restricted to SQL generation, limiting its usefulness for developers.
• 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, which means large overhead and heavy DevOps upgrades to access any bug fix or new feature.
• Production Monitoring & Observability: Superblocks integrates with observability providers like Datadog, Splunk and New Relic, providing visibility into metrics, traces, and logs from internal tools within your preferred provider. Retool does not have observability, leaving you blind when errors arise.
• Fairer, More Flexible Pricing: The Superblocks pricing model scales across organizations with a dedicated rate for light users, and the On-Premise Agent is available to all customers at no additional cost. Retool charges a flat rate for all end-users, as well as high platform fees and imposed user minimums when self-hosting.

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.

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 ~10 employees.

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

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.

Internal.io

Rounding out the list in fifth place is Internal.io, a San Francisco-based Retool alternative focused primarily on non-developers. Internal.io offers an application builder as well as support for scheduled jobs, and allows users to build multi-step APIs via their Pipelines feature; however, these Pipelines cannot be invoked over HTTP, preventing them from being used as webhooks or REST APIs. Internal’s pricing model is per-user, with a single flat rate for all users.

Conclusion: Internal.io provides similar functionality to Retool within their application builder and scheduled job offerings. Internal.io’s pricing model is less flexible than Retool’s, as it does not distinguish between builders and viewers of internal tools; thus, Internal.io is likely to be very expensive to roll out across organizations. Additionally, Internal’s automated workflows can only be invoked on a schedule, not over HTTP, preventing them from being used as webhook handlers or API endpoints. Internal emphasizes no-code, especially within their application builder, so it may be a suitable alternative to Retool for businesses with less development resources.

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. Poor 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. Limited Workflows & Scheduled Jobs

Programmatic workflows allow businesses to execute complex business logic on a schedule or via an HTTP request; these tools can often replace REST APIs, cron jobs, one-off scripts, and ETLs.

Retool does provide a workflow offering, though as of July 2023 the offering is in beta, and its functionality is limited. Key limitations include:

• Limited to Retool Cloud: Workflows are limited to Retool Cloud, which means they are unavailable as part of self-hosted Retool, preventing most enterprises from leveraging Retool Workflows at all.
• Fire-and-Forget Model: Although Retool Workflows can be invoked over HTTP, these workflows do not respond with HTTP statuses, and the response is not customizable. Since these endpoints are “fire-and-forget”, they are not well-suited to replace REST APIs.
• Flowchart Canvas UI: Retool employs a flowchart canvas for its Workflow UI, which can be challenging to navigate and makes understanding the program's execution sequence difficult.

4. SQL-Only Generative AI

With the rise of generative AI, developers have begun to rely on in-editor AI assistants, like Github Copilot, to write & optimize their own code, as well as author comments and explain code written by other developers. Unfortunately, Retool’s AI functionality is limited to SQL generation, limiting its usefulness for developers. As a result, developers must use an external solution like ChatGPT, which requires copying over any relevant context for the model to produce a useful result.

Developers are eager to leverage generative AI directly within their low-code platform via a context-aware copilot that supports a diverse set of languages & functional capabilities, a requirement that Retool is unable to deliver upon.

5. Burdens of Legacy On-Premise Deployments

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 with a legacy on-premise deployment that is inherently resource intensive. 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.

6. Expensive Software & Platform Fees

Simply put, Retool is very expensive. Retool does not differentiate between users who leverage tools on a daily basis and users who leverage these tools infrequently, resulting in untenable costs for large organizations looking to distribute their internal tools. Additionally, Retool’s free tier excludes crucial functionality such as staging environments and app release versions with previews.

Retool also charges additional platform fees for on-premise deployments and imposes a limit of 25 users with its Business tier; since self-hosted Retool is the only option for many businesses due to security requirements, Retool is often prohibitively expensive.

7. Slow Feature Rollout for On-Premise

Retool is often slow to roll out new features, especially to customers self-hosting Retool. For instance, Retool’s Workflows feature has been in beta for more than six months (as of July 2023), and still is not available to on-premise customers.

Once a feature is made available as part of a Retool on-premise 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. US-Cloud Only

Retool Cloud is offered with US hosting only, which means that for businesses with users or data centers outside of the US, performance is further degraded. For example, if a business has both users and data centers based in Northern Europe, the round trip for a user viewing a simple Retool Application requiring a single database query is as follows:

1. User visits page
2. Retool fetches application definition and details from US cloud, returns to user’s browser (EU -> US, US -> EU)
3. Retool issues queries to Northern Europe data centers (US -> EU)
4. Data center returns data to Retool’s US cloud (EU -> US)
5. Retool returns application to user (US -> EU)

Given the limitations previously mentioned above around Retool performance as a result of single-step queries, multiple roundtrips between the user’s browser and Retool’s US cloud must be executed frequently, degrading performance, especially for complex applications. Thus, for businesses with users and/or data centers outside of the US, performance of applications built on Retool is especially poor.

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, build faster with a more robust AI Copilot, self-host without the overhead, and deliver more performant apps at scale - all with a pricing model that scales across the organization more efficiently than Retool’s. Start building with Superblocks today!