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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 te

by polote 6y ago

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 know how to code, but for developer that should be the thing to avoid at all cost. I have seen a company that instead of improving their coding environment they started progressively doing everything on Retool, what is going to happen the day Retool is down ? or increase their price ? or they bring a breaking change ? or ? Don't get me wrong, I think the product is amazing, but it requires huge discipline, and this is never a good idea to depend on the discipline of people

drako999 6y ago
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 https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
- ayewo 6y ago
  Interesting project. 1. How soon will you announce pricing? 2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching Retool?
  - arey_abhishek 6y ago
    thanks! 1. We'll announce pricing in 6-9 months, our project opened for beta 2 months ago 2. We are about 6 months away from feature parity, maybe even quicker if we can attract more contributors :)
    - joshribakoff 6y ago
      I took a look as a potential contributor and noticed from spot checking it seems like bug fixes are getting merged without tests, which deters me from contributing to a project personally. Looks really cool, though!
      - arey_abhishek 6y ago
        Josh, thats a fair point. We merged a few fixes recently to quickly get rid of some bugs. We need to get stricter with our automated testing processes.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Ahhh so that's what Retool is. Your page does a much better job of explaining what these things are. And it looks like an interesting project - good luck!
- lumberjack24 6y ago
  Uh man let the guys at Retool relish their moment of glory for a second.
dvdhsu 6y ago
Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think Retool does a few things differently, which help: 1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository, and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing 2. On the flexibility side — you can import your own React components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want: https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components. 3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem: https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time. And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always downgrade / refuse to upgrade.
- dragonfax 6y ago
  The git thing is only for on-prem.
  - joshribakoff 6y ago
    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
    - haxton 6y ago
      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
aidos 6y ago
I’ve found the same in our use of it. It’s really hard to audit the code to understand what’s going on and I find myself clicking around trying to get some sense of how things fit together. The interface itself is pretty slow, which I find frustrating. We’ve also had it explode on us a couple of times in production (on prem) and even reprovisioning it from scratch was a real struggle. Things may have improved now (I try not to touch it these days) and I wish the team all the best with it. No doubt there are people out there for whom it will work well. But for me personally, I’ll be moving the things we’ve built using it into something else when time permits.
- alextapper 6y ago
  Sorry about these frustrations! Sending you an email to see how we can help :)
aliakhtar 6y ago
I disagree, you can definitely improve the stuff you built in retool. As a dev it's saved me a lot of time from having to build non user-facing dashboards, etc that would otherwise take up a lot of time. Instead I was able to spend that time on the core features.
sparsely 6y ago
100% Agree about any non trivial retool immediately becoming a mountain of tech debt. We use retool extensively and have put a lot of effort into making a workflow that is vaguely manageable, but it's still pretty bad. And once you start using custom components it's even worse. It's also an incredible resource hog. Still, it lets you churn out working UIs and mini apps really fast so it's very hard to stop using it once you've started!
kfk 6y ago
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.

by polote 6y ago

drako999 6y ago

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 https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

ayewo 6y ago
Interesting project. 1. How soon will you announce pricing? 2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching Retool?
- arey_abhishek 6y ago
  thanks! 1. We'll announce pricing in 6-9 months, our project opened for beta 2 months ago 2. We are about 6 months away from feature parity, maybe even quicker if we can attract more contributors :)
  - joshribakoff 6y ago
    I took a look as a potential contributor and noticed from spot checking it seems like bug fixes are getting merged without tests, which deters me from contributing to a project personally. Looks really cool, though!
    - arey_abhishek 6y ago
      Josh, thats a fair point. We merged a few fixes recently to quickly get rid of some bugs. We need to get stricter with our automated testing processes.
IshKebab 6y ago
Ahhh so that's what Retool is. Your page does a much better job of explaining what these things are. And it looks like an interesting project - good luck!
lumberjack24 6y ago
Uh man let the guys at Retool relish their moment of glory for a second.

dvdhsu 6y ago

Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think Retool does a few things differently, which help: 1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository, and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing 2. On the flexibility side — you can import your own React components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want: https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components. 3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem: https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time. And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always downgrade / refuse to upgrade.

dragonfax 6y ago
The git thing is only for on-prem.
- joshribakoff 6y ago
  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
  - haxton 6y ago
    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

aidos 6y ago

I’ve found the same in our use of it. It’s really hard to audit the code to understand what’s going on and I find myself clicking around trying to get some sense of how things fit together. The interface itself is pretty slow, which I find frustrating. We’ve also had it explode on us a couple of times in production (on prem) and even reprovisioning it from scratch was a real struggle. Things may have improved now (I try not to touch it these days) and I wish the team all the best with it. No doubt there are people out there for whom it will work well. But for me personally, I’ll be moving the things we’ve built using it into something else when time permits.

alextapper 6y ago
Sorry about these frustrations! Sending you an email to see how we can help :)

aliakhtar 6y ago

I disagree, you can definitely improve the stuff you built in retool. As a dev it's saved me a lot of time from having to build non user-facing dashboards, etc that would otherwise take up a lot of time. Instead I was able to spend that time on the core features.

sparsely 6y ago

100% Agree about any non trivial retool immediately becoming a mountain of tech debt. We use retool extensively and have put a lot of effort into making a workflow that is vaguely manageable, but it's still pretty bad. And once you start using custom components it's even worse. It's also an incredible resource hog. Still, it lets you churn out working UIs and mini apps really fast so it's very hard to stop using it once you've started!

kfk 6y ago

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.