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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

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Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#91

Post by kfk »

polote wrote: post #11

Honestly I have seen Retool being used, and see developers love it. But the one thing I hate about Retool is that anything that a developer does on Retool is tech debt. 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 kn…

It becomes technical debt if you are focusing on the app, but if you are focusing on the data Retool has very little impact on your debt. You should still be processing and managing data with sql or python version controlled on git. What Retool does is commoditizing front end for building internal enterprise tools and letting you spend the resources and time on the data. The real value add of internal tools is data, UIs can change but the data doesn't. Unfortunately many digital IT projects put high focus on the frontend and they go badly because too little effort is put on the data, I think Retool solves that giving a standard cheap way of building decent looking frontends.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#92

Post by luminati »

kiwicopple wrote: post #63
bfstein wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with the request for a lightweight DB out of box.. 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.

Supabase[1] provides full Postgres databases which take ~2 mins to spin up. You can connect Retool with the DB connection details in the settings [1] https://supabase.io Disclaimer: I work at Supabase

s/disclaimer/disclosure

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#93

Post by joshribakoff »

haxton wrote: post #39
joshribakoff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still can put git or something basic diffing logic in their SaaS backend and surface some simple GUI, I have done this before just by selecting the last entry, diffing it, and inserting a newer entry that subsumed the old database entry

Hi! I'm an engineer here at Retool. I actually did build just this (a basic diffing logic tool) not long ago. It's currently behind a beta flag, but I opened a PR up this morning to get this to ship to production. If you're a Retool user you can find it under the Beta section in your org settings. And yes, this is available on our cloud offering

Nice. Yeah you guys have tried to recruit me more than once or twice ;) one thing I would strongly suggest as you roll it out is setting a retention policy and throttling/squashing diffs as you can have users that make lots of edits and it can take up a lot of data and become hard to follow the logs for the end users! Great work coming up with this pragmatic solution, best of luck with the rollout, and congrats to the team!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#94

Post by joshAg »

dvdhsu wrote: post #79
joshAg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really like your product! It's made it super easy to create internal dashboards and admins actions that we can safely trust nonengineers to use without making an entire website for them. 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, be…

Hi there! Thanks for the comments, and thank you for using Retool! 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 n…

That's pretty close, and would definitely be super useful to us beyond just my personal use case. Saving would be absolutely awesome because right now I "save" queries by doing this [1] in the query editor and saving a giant comment block. Then when i want to run something i edit and uncomment the single query i need.

I just tried playing around with it, and it looks awesome, but I can't fully commit to it yet, because it doesn't have a way to select staging vs prod like my dash does.

I'd be happy to give feedback! My personal email is in my hn profile, but if you'd prefer i can email you from my work account.

[1]:

  -- select 
  -- select
  -- select
  -- update

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#95

Post by arisa_a »

pbreit wrote: post #77
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all! David, founder of Retool here. We’ve come a long way since we our very first Show HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 ) and subsequent launch ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966 )! 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 v…

How do you compare to https://internal.io ?

Full disclosure: I’m co-founder and CEO of Internal. The biggest difference between Internal and Retool is that Internal is designed for everyone (engineers and non-engineers) whereas Retool is designed for engineers. Both are legitimate approaches - just depends on what you’re looking for.

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#96

Post by seyz »

dvdhsu wrote: post #80
pbreit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you compare to https://internal.io ?

internal.io is pretty similar to https://www.forestadmin.com/ , or even djangoadmin. If you're looking for a quick, non-customizable CRUD interface on top of your database, both of them are pretty good solutions. 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…

Hey David, I'm the founder and CEO of Forest Admin (https://www.forestadmin.com). Thanks for mentioning us! First of all, I wanted to congratulate you for this fund raising. I'm a big fan of what you're building. For Retool, Internal, Forest Admin or any others... I think it's great to create this new SaaS product category and to design this new market all together! That's exciting!

From my point of view, Retool helps you build any internal tools using a frontend builder where you can build your UI from scratch or from templates after connecting any type of data sources.

With Forest Admin, we decided to focus on the administration panel of any webapps. From the ground up, we've designed our solution accordingly by providing a fullstack framework using an on-premise backend/API (open-source) connected to the application's database(s) and an off-the-self SaaS frontend (learn more about architecture here: https://medium.com/forest-admin/a-deep-dive-into-forest-admi...).

The reason behind having such an architecture is to let our users to keep full control of their data and to be able to access the code locally to extend the API without any restriction. That's why I don't agree when you say "Forest Admin is good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later". Our mission is to do the exact the opposite.

To be fully convinced, I think examples are always better than words. We spent time with some of our customers to demonstrate how Forest Admin can be adapted to handle complex workflows: https://www.forestadmin.com/customers. To react on your example about the KYC stuff, approval workflows, etc. This is something that some of our Fintech/Banking system customers are doing with Forest Admin.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#97

Post by [deleted] »

arey_abhishek wrote: post #86
troquerre wrote: post #82

Are there any open source alternatives to retool? We’re uncomfortable using a third party tool for our internal operational workflows without more visibility into the source

We felt the same way about Retool and that's why we built Appsmith. https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith 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 in…

[deleted]

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#98

Post by lumberjack24 »

drako999 wrote: post #15
polote wrote: post #11

Honestly I have seen Retool being used, and see developers love it. But the one thing I hate about Retool is that anything that a developer does on Retool is tech debt. 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 kn…

That's exactly why we built appsmith. A company's core tech stack should be built on open source technology so you're never held hostage by proprietary software. https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Uh man let the guys at Retool relish their moment of glory for a second.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#99

Post by chenster »

gilliali wrote: post #69
DataGrid_Retool wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention support for complex UIs, but Retool only ships with a basic table, and no built-in support for Data Grids. Something to consider when it comes to building richer page experiences. I would presume you intend to add more standard components as Retool continues to mature.

Current Retool customer here. We had this concern as well and we're supporting it with a custom component. Retool has been immensely helpful in planning, developing and supporting us in the engagement. Due to Retool, we've essentially overhauled 60+ 10MB Excel sheets that we had to generate,distribute consolidate for a business planning function into a single app that supports by-user profile settings with 2 guys tha…

Just curious, are you using Excel as the 'end-back' with Retool being the front-end UI?
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