Retool Workflows 2.0: visual automation and code

Excited to see this. We have a lot of scripts that combine both code and SQL and it's been a pain to run them from the CLI, especially when things break and you need to insert random print() statements to understand what changed about the data

Hi all, product engineer who worked on this. Workflows is something we’ve spent almost two years working on and we’re all excited to announce it has gone “GA” (generally available)!

There’s _a lot_ that goes into shipping a new product to GA within an existing company that I hope to write about later, but today I’m just excited that it’s finally out there for everyone to use.

We initially created Workflows because a lot of Retool customers wanted a way to build automations – like jobs to search Twitter for topics and dump relevant Tweets into a database. We prototyped and user-tested a bunch of different UIs, and landed on letting users drag and drop code blocks on a 2D canvas, while also making each code block a self-contained REPL.

We found that it struck a nice balance between the simplicity and speed of visual programming and the power to extend and customize everything (including the built-in logic blocks) with code.

There’s a lot more that we’ve built to make it more useful and powerful for engineers (time traveling debugging, split-screens, tree-views, auto-layouts, etc) that I’d be more than happy to answer questions about!

Thanks! Workflows and Airflow are similar in that they can both be used for ETL tasks and we do see customers use Workflows as an easier to use replacement for Airflow. Airflow is specialized for heavyweight ETL so it's a better fit for that whereas if you're interested in doing non-ETL tasks like alerts and APIs in addition to ETL, Workflows would be a great choice.