Hi there! Founder of Retool (
https://retool.com) here (and long-time HN reader). Agreed that Honeycode is adjacent to us. I think an interesting way of viewing the space [1] is who the product is for. There are lots of drag and drop app-builders (e.g. mendix, outsystems, bubble, msft powerapps, amazon honeycode, etc.), but they're all built for non-technical people. Their goal is to make programming more accessible to all. (Which I think is a very noble and very interesting goal!)
Our bet, however, is that code is here to stay, since code is actually a pretty efficient way of getting a computer to do something [2]. With that said, though, building specific types of apps (in our case, internal front-end apps today) is surprisingly difficult (have you tried recently!? you have to use react, redux, install 10+ npm modules, etc... just to make a front-end that has a table + POSTs back to your internal API!).
And so that's why we're building Retool for engineers, which has resulted in a few interesting decisions:
* we are not a system of record, since engineers don't like to move data around. We'll connect to your data, no matter where it is (e.g. postgres, a custom API, salesforce, etc.).
* we rely on the user knowing how to write code. I think this is interesting because low-code is good for getting to 50%, 60%, etc. But as you try to get closer and closer to 100%, it becomes harder and harder, since full customizability within a GUI (without code) is just hard (cf 2.). Retool lets you get to 60 - 70% of what you want very quickly, but then relies on you finishing the last ~30% with code, if you really want to. (We provide APIs, let you import custom React components, let you write JS anywhere [3] within {{ }}.
this also has led us to embracing git syncing (serializing retool apps as yaml files and syncing them to git repos: https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing ), being on-prem by default (https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions), etc.
(If anybody is interested in working on this, please email me at david AT retool DOT com. I think there's really a small chance we can really change how business apps are built.)
1. Funnily enough, when we started Retool, there was no low-code / no-code space. If you look at our original Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966), you'll see that nobody mentions "no code", "low code", or anything siilar. It's certainly been fun to watch a "trend" pick up around us, haha.
2. For example, imagine a switch statement. Very simple and concise in most languages, but incredibly hard to implement in a GUI. (A graph with nodes and edges, perhaps?)
3. We secure it by running all JS in a sandboxed iframe.