Retool Software

[Alexandrin Chaples]

Comingfrom engineering background, low-code platform is a great solution for me, and Retool stands out among the rest. When I saw this post and @srikrishnas answer, coupled with my experience so far. I couldn't help but wonder:

As an analogy, regardless how well a hand screwdriver is engineered, if you need to fasten 1000 screws, it's the wrong tool. If you only need to undo a couple screws, an electric screwdriver is likely the wrong tool as well.

In my specific use case. I'm hoping to build a somewhat hybrid of CRM & task management, because our current SaaS are scattered and doesn't integrate very well, plus some procedural we have are simply not supported in any SaaS we know of.

Building a crm myself, 70 tables on my end. My crm is split into many apps, using multi-app linkage. Also following the best practice to separate out complexity using modules, to make it easier to maintain.

Even after following the best practices, I'm noticing performance degradation when combining apps with many components / modules within tabbed containers. Slower clicks, slower navigations. The performance debug tab shows that even with few query runs, more components and modules balloons the HTML Elements & Dependency Graph Nodes.

I've limited all query runs to the minimum / manual and I'm still finding these issues. I tried to spin up a self-hosted instance near the server and the issues still persist but only slightly better.

It's taken sometime to learn and build out as I do not have any engineering background but have quickly picked up POSTGRES, HTML, CSS, JS and we've just moved our entire team of 21 over to using it and processes are way more efficient now

What are Retools limits?

So far, I've not found many. I've seen people trying to recreate Slack for example and then complaining but obviously that's not the intended use of Retool. Connecting API's of all our service providers has been wonderful from a Retool perspective.

We still use our old self-built back office for a few tasks where speed is critical, as our back office is Prisma on POSTGRES and it runs like lightning - I think there's lots for me to optimise with Retool and the queries I've built to improve the speed but I don't think I'll be able to achieve what our customer BO achieves, but that's fine with us

Our current DB's (we have two connected to Retool) have a total of 212 tables between them. I've built 37 apps so far (29 completed, 8 in progress) and we have plans for a further 7 for the remining insights we feel we need to be operating optimally. (However, our marketing team keep requesting new apps/insights so I imagine there's going to be quite a few more when we've finished haha!)

I never tried the Retool Cloud version so I can't really give a fair comparison between the two, however, the issues I experience are are a result of not having all our tables indexed right now in order not to slow down the indexing process (balancing act).

We've also stuck to WebApp Desktop views so far as it's the primary end-users method of access, haven't bothered with mobile WebApp or PWA's yet other than our main company dashboard so that everyone can get quick insights on the go about the key KPI's.

Maybe you could look into optimising queuing of queries and scripts based on visibility if it's mobile app based? I imagine you have data that is initially out of sight, or perhaps in a different tab in a containers, I'd make sure those only run following the succession of a query/script that impacts a component that is in view as soon as you open the app. Furthermore, if the slowness is derived from front end activity, maybe using a script to identify if the component is in the visible window to determine if it should be hidden or not? That could potentially help with page loading times, though might add clunky-ness when navigating the page.

On retool mobile, it loads all pages and all their dependency graph (cloud be using wring lingo) on start. I had to use a lot optional chaining so console doesn't get flooded, and I don't think there's any method to change that currently.

Development time is an interesting one, it's really slow at first as you learn the declarative method, then it gets really fast for a while and then it slows down as you try to work out how to make it do the more complex things you want.

Things have improved in the last year as Retool have fixed requests. The linting is reasonable, cyclic dependencies finally appear in the console (thanks to me I think =), the new Table is good, the postgreSQL backend is OK (although they haven't done anything to the UI in a year).

Overall I think you should definitely spend a few weeks implementing something as a test. Just use the cloud to begin with. Don't worry that all the documentation videos involve making an app in 6 minutes. Those cases are trivial and for marketing purposes. Don't get discouraged.

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