Retool

Retool

Platform for building custom internal applications

Overview

Retool is a platform that helps businesses build internal apps quickly. It connects to databases and APIs (like Postgres, REST, GraphQL, Firebase, and Google Sheets) and lets users assemble tools with drag-and-drop building blocks, adding SQL queries, POST requests, and data transformers without much coding. The software handles data fetching and UI, so developers can focus on the unique parts of their tools. Compared with competitors, Retool emphasizes internal tools, supports many data sources, and offers on-premises options, Git syncing, collaboration features, and enterprise plans. Its goal is to let organizations create, deploy, and scale custom internal applications with less time and effort, boosting productivity and reducing the load on development teams.

YC Company

About Retool

Simplify's Rating
Why Retool is rated
B-
Rated B on Competitive Edge
Rated B on Growth Potential
Rated C on Differentiation

Industries

Data & Analytics

Enterprise Software

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Series C

Total Funding

$165.3M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2017

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Retool launched external apps GA, expanding beyond internal tools into customer portals.
  • June 2026 Databricks partnership and one million databases strengthen enterprise distribution.
  • Retool serves over 10,000 organizations, giving it deep installed-base expansion leverage.

What critics are saying

  • Lovable, Replit, and Claude Code commoditize app building by 2026.
  • Nokod Security exposes Retool governance gaps; security buyers now police citizen development.
  • If enterprise teams adopt direct AI coding, Retool becomes optional middleware within two years.

What makes Retool unique

  • Retool governed AI runtime unifies codegen, permissions, and audit trails.
  • Retool embeds external apps and React deployments into one enterprise control plane.
  • Retool runs on Databricks Lakebase and Agent Bricks, linking data to action.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Funding

Total Funding

$165.3M

Meets

Industry Average

Funded Over

7 Rounds

Notable Investors:
Series C funding is usually for startups that are doing well and are looking for more money to fuel major growth, such as acquiring other companies, expanding into global markets, or launching new product lines. Investors typically include larger venture capital firms and private equity.
Series C Funding Comparison
Below Average

Industry standards

$50M
$45M
Retool
$50M
Medium
$62M
SeatGeek
$100M
Oura

Benefits

Competitive healthcare, dental and vision benefits.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner at our San Francisco and New York offices.

$1,200 annual stipend for anything learning-related (books, conferences, classes, etc.).

$1,000 work-from-home-setup stipend.

Take the time you need to recharge!

Family planning support and paid parental leave.

Enrollment and matching up to an effective rate of 4%.

Mental health and wellness benefits

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

↓ -2%

1 year growth

↓ -1%

2 year growth

↑ 2%
TechNewsDaily
Sep 22nd, 2026
The economics of Budibase low-code platform adoption in 2026.

The economics of Budibase low-code platform adoption in 2026. Budibase offers an action-based pricing model that contrasts with per-user fees from Retool and Appsmith. The Business plan provides 250,000 monthly actions for $299, making it a viable alternative for teams prioritizing automation volume and privacy-first AI. The economic shift from per-user to action-based pricing. Budibase provides a cost structure for internal tools that switches the focus from per-user fees to an action-based model. While Retool charges between $10 and $50 per user, Budibase Cloud plans like Premium at $49 per month rely on monthly action limits. An action includes automation node executions, AI agent tool calls, or database row updates. If a team exceeds its 20,000 action limit on the Premium plan, automations stop firing until the next month resets. You should consider how many users will consume your apps because every end user beyond the included count costs $5 per month on annual billing. Budibase Pro costs $19 per month and includes one creator seat and 5,000 actions. The Budibase Business plan provides 250,000 monthly actions and 50,000 AI credits for $299 per month, but adding five additional creators and twenty extra end users raises the total cost to $619 per month. Budibase also scales via add-on fees for additional creators at $50 per month. Enterprises must evaluate Purpose Fit, Cost Fit, Ops Fit, User Fit, Use-Case Fit, and Organisation Fit. For evolving applications, low-code platforms allow enhancement via code, whereas no-code suits prototypes. Enterprises often choose template-driven platforms for internal applications to reduce development time, which can drop three to seven times compared to traditional methods. Do companies realize how fast actions disappear when running high-volume workflows? Technical requirements and comparison to alternatives. Budibase suits non-technical teams that need rapid CRUD applications and visual automations. It includes a built-in database, which removes the need to provision external infrastructure like Postgres or MySQL. Appsmith and Retool require you to manage your own external data sources. Budibase simplifies deployment through Docker or Kubernetes. The platform scales through add-on fees for additional creators at $50 per month. The interface uses a hierarchical component tree for UI design rather than a freeform canvas. While the platform helps non-developers, the learning curve remains higher than pure no-code tools like Zite. Zite provides flat monthly rates for unlimited users on every plan, whereas Budibase scales based on usage. Budibase is the closest open-source match to Appsmith for teams that want to ship internal tools with predictable automation volumes. Appsmith targets developers who want Git-based version control and deep customization. Retool is better for startups needing production-grade tools with complex AI workflows. Budibase uses a visual flow-chart interface for automations with 20+ triggers and actions, including branching for complex workflows. This contrasts with Appsmith, which requires custom JavaScript scripts to handle automation. For mobile-first apps for field teams, Glide remains a more specialized choice. The Buyer persona focuses on cost, the Enterprise Architect worries about lock-in, and the Platform-User wants purpose fit. AI integration and privacy-first workflows. Budibase focuses on privacy-first AI through specialized agents and support for models like Mistral, Qwen, and Llama. These agents follow role-based access controls to ensure no human sees data they cannot access. This differs from Superblocks, which allows users to export applications as editable React code to avoid vendor lock-in. Budibase provides AI agents with instructions, tools, and knowledge sources. The platform supports model providers including OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, and Mistral. In December 2025, Budibase released the Agents Alpha with agent nodes for automations. In February 2026, Budibase released the Agents Beta, which added evals, logs, and testing features. In Q2 2026, the platform introduced agent testing and analysis tools to allow visibility into agent actions and decisions. The platform also supports Chat features that surface dynamic forms, tables, and charts. Budibase emphasizes a future where humans remain in the loop to make critical decisions. Budibase remains the best choice for technical teams running high-volume automations who want self-hosting included on the open-source plan.

University of Białystok
Aug 15th, 2026
Retool now available for external applications, announces General Availability.

Retool now available for external applications, announces General Availability. August 15, 2026 Retool announces general availability of Retool for External Apps: build customized customer-facing applications in hours. Are you tired of waiting months for custom software applications to be built for your customers, vendors, or partners? Look no further than Retool for External Apps, the latest offering from the leading developer-focused software development platform, Retool. With Retool for External Apps, businesses can now build rich interactive portals and business applications in a matter of hours, rather than months. This means faster time-to-market and the ability to quickly iterate on customer-facing software applications to stay ahead of the competition. One of the key features of Retool for External Apps is the ability to embed Retool apps anywhere, allowing for seamless integration with existing applications. This, coupled with white-labeled portals, custom product pages, and custom invite and onboarding flows, provides businesses with the flexibility and customization needed to create a top-notch user experience for external users. But don't just take its word for it. Companies like Greenly, OrangeTheory, and Proga Digital have already seen the benefits of using Retool for External Apps. Greenly was able to accelerate their time-to-deployment by 3x for customer-facing apps, while OrangeTheory reduced ship time from 3 weeks to mere hours. Proga Digital helped their clients deploy applications to thousands of contractors in the field with the help of Retool for External Apps. So, if you're looking to enhance your competitive advantage by quickly building customized customer-facing applications at scale, look no further than Retool for External Apps. Visit retool.com/solutions/external-apps to learn more and get started today.

Business Wire
Jun 17th, 2026
Retool launches first platform to govern AI-coded apps as 93% of C-suite fear vibe coding risks

Retool, a governed platform for AI development used by over 10,000 organisations, has launched the first platform enabling teams to build with any AI coding tool whilst automatically enforcing enterprise governance. The company also released a survey of 300 C-suite executives examining governance and generative AI in enterprises. The platform allows developers to build applications using various AI tools including Lovable, Replit, or Claude Code, then deploy directly to production with security, permissions and audit trails enforced automatically. This addresses growing concerns about "vibe-coded" applications reaching production without proper governance. Retool's survey found 93% of CTOs, CISOs and CIOs are concerned about vibe-coded tools in production, with 38% calling it a top operational risk. Only 8% described their organisation's governance as strong, whilst 59% couldn't confirm whether they'd experienced AI-caused production incidents.

Retool
Jun 17th, 2026
Getting started in Retool's new app builder.

Getting started in Retool's new app builder. There's more software being built inside companies today than at any point in history - and the average quality is lower than ever before. LLMs have made it possible for anyone to generate a working app on localhost in minutes. But localhost isn't production. Most of these apps have no authentication, no data access controls, no audit trail, and no path to deployment that IT has blessed. The result is shadow IT, but faster, and at 100x the scale. How do you let people keep building with these tools - without creating ungoverned software at enterprise scale? Retool, Inc. has the answer. Today, Retool, Inc. is launching the new Retool: a platform where you can build software wherever you want: Claude Code, Codex, Replit, Lovable, or Retool's own editor - and ship it through a single, governed runtime that enforces authentication, permissions, and data governance automatically. The new Retool platform: * Run anything. Deploy any React app on Retool - whether it started as a prototype in Replit, a Lovable project, or a Claude Code session. On import, Retool maps the app's data connections to resources your team has already configured and secured. No rewrite required. * Governed by default. Every app on Retool inherits centralized authentication, role-based access controls, and data access policies - none of it lives in the app code. Every interaction with your data is auditable. Deploy on Retool Cloud, in your VPC, or fully on-prem. The governance layer is identical everywhere. * Built to operate. Most AI-generated apps get built and forgotten. Retool handles what comes after: versioning, release management, environment promotion, access changes, and monitoring. One place to manage every app, for its entire lifecycle. In the early 2020s, low-code and no-code platforms bet that the secret to building software faster was moving away from code. Retool, Inc. made that bet, too. And for a long time, it was the right one. Customers built and shipped real internal tools faster than they could have written everything from scratch. But AI changed the economics of building. Generating code - written by models that get better every month - is now the fastest way to build custom software, and it's accessible to a far wider group of people than low-code tooling ever was. When Retool, Inc. started Retool, its proprietary abstractions made building fast. But they also meant LLMs couldn't work in its platform fluently, engineers couldn't bring their own tools and workflows, and apps built elsewhere couldn't run on Retool's platform or inherit its centralized governance. When the best way to build changed, Retool, Inc. changed, too. Retool's new app builder is the fastest, most natural way to build internal software - without giving up the control, visibility, and trust teams need once an app connects to real business data. The new builder is optimized for prompt-first workflows, but it's also built on a new architecture: apps in Retool are now written in React on the frontend and TypeScript on the backend. That means the agent is building with the same languages and patterns modern software teams already use. The result is higher-quality app generation, more expressive and customizable UIs, real backend logic, and code your team can inspect, review, and improve. Nothing is trapped in a proprietary format that only exists inside Retool. Retool, Inc. has also opened up far more input styles than before. Drag in screenshots, PDFs, design files, or spreadsheets, and the agent works from the same references your team already uses. Builders can pull in every place where work has already happened and hand it to Retool to pick up the torch and carry the project forward. You can prompt against the whole app, or click into any individual part of the preview to scope a prompt to exactly that component. And when you want to get closer to what's actually been built, two modes sit alongside the prompt interface. The Code tab lets you inspect or directly edit the underlying React. Click on any element in the app preview and you're taken to the exact line that needs to change in the code tree, without hunting through hundreds of lines of AI-generated code. As AI-generated apps have become more common, it's gotten harder to know what an app is actually doing with your data - and this is where most builders leave you with the least visibility. Retool isn't just generating your frontend; Retool, Inc. is generating the backend, too. So instead of asking you to read query logic buried in a large codebase, Retool, Inc. kept this layer legible by design. In the new Data tab, every piece of logic interacting with your data sources is created as a function you can open and understand. For more complex functions with conditional logic, there's also a visual data graph: a diagram that maps the relationships between inputs and data sources, showing you how user actions and app logic translate into operations against your data. The surface area for how apps come into Retool has expanded significantly. Now, teams can deploy existing React apps directly on Retool's platform - everything from prototypes vibe-coded in Replit, Lovable, and v0 to a project from a local repo. On import, Retool maps the app's data connections back to resources your team has already defined and secured. Those resources already carry the right data access rules. The app also gets Retool's app-level permissions, so teams can control who can view, use, and manage it through the same role-based access controls they use everywhere else in Retool. Instead of asking - or expecting - every team to figure out hosting, authentication, permissions, secrets, auditability, and data access from scratch, Retool becomes a center of excellence you can apply programmatically to every app you deploy. A few weeks ago, Retool, Inc. launched Retool's MCP server so admins could manage their Retool environments programmatically - querying resources, inviting users, auditing access - from Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex. Now, Retool, Inc. is adding app building to that set of tools. You can build and edit Retool apps directly from the agent you're already working in, and the project context you have there comes with you instead of getting rebuilt on the other side. And, because Retool can host any existing React code, you can keep building in your favorite CodeGen tools and point them towards Retool when you're ready to ship. If you're going to let people build from anywhere (which Retool, Inc. think you should!), governance can't be something each app implements on its own. It has to be a single layer that sits below all of them. Every interaction with enterprise data goes through Retool's governance layer. Data access, permissions, approved resources, environments, and deployment rules are configured by the customer and enforced consistently, regardless of how the app was built. The security doesn't live in the AI-generated layer. It lives underneath it. Having permissions and security live inside an individual app works when there are a handful of apps and a handful of builders. But it breaks down when software is being created across teams, tools, and skill levels. When every team has its own path to production, technical leaders lose visibility. Retool creates a single governance checkpoint. This matters for the long tail of software maintenance, too. Most of a piece of software's life isn't the initial build - it's updates, access changes, debugging, monitoring, deprecating, and keeping the app aligned with how the business changes. Retool handles all of that in one place. The more people building software, the more critical it becomes to ensure every app is secure before it reaches production. With Retool, your team has ultimate flexibility in how you build - but you don't have to figure out deployment alone. Retool, Inc. has partnered with leading consultancies, system integrators, and agencies who had early access to the new app builder and completed hands-on enablement to help you ship with confidence: Artefact, BitHippie, BoldTech, GxP, Lingaro, Nymbl, Sabai System, SingleWave, Sixth Generation, StackDrop, Stradia Partners, TechRebels, and Paramint. Today's launch is about the best way to build and ship vibe-coded apps. But this is the beginning of what's next. As Retool, Inc. has come to expect, AI-assisted development is already quickly moving forward. Retool, Inc. is seeing agents that act on data, trigger workflows, and call systems without a human in the loop at every step. The governance problem only gets more urgent as AI gets more autonomous. The resources, permissions, and approved pathways you define in Retool now become the harness that makes more autonomous software safe to run. Retool, Inc. is excited to share more soon. The new app builder is available now for Retool Cloud customers. Self-hosted customers can access it in the Retool 4.x stable release. Try it today. New Enterprise plan customers who sign by September 30, 2026 get AI credits worth up to $10,000 annually. Check out its latest report, The State of AI Governance in 2026 for insights from 300+ technical executives facing today's AI governance challenges. light Reader

Retool
Jun 15th, 2026
Retool sessions at Data + AI Summit 2026.

Retool sessions at Data + AI Summit 2026. Last year, Retool, Inc. were honored to be named the 2025 Databricks Emerging Partner of the Year, in recognition of its shared commitment to help enterprises turn Databricks data into action. A lot has changed since then. The foundation making that possible keeps getting stronger. That's what has Retool, Inc. excited to be back at the Data + AI Summit this week, and to share what's next for its partnership. Across financial services, retail, consumer goods, healthcare, and manufacturing, the same question keeps coming up. You have the data, you have the models, so why is putting that insight to work still the hardest part? That gap between knowing and doing is where value gets lost. Closing it is exactly where Retool, Inc. is focusing its partnership, and as launch partners for Lakebase and Agent Bricks, Retool, Inc. is closer than ever. "The future of enterprise AI is grounded in trust and transparency. Retool has become a critical part of how Databricks customers put AI to work across their enterprise. By expanding our partnership to include Lakebase and Agent Bricks, we've unlocked new ways for teams to turn insight into action without sacrificing governance." - Shanku Niyogi, SVP of Product, Databricks In February, Databricks Lakebase became generally available: a fully managed Postgres database that lives inside the same platform where your analytical data already sits. Retool, Inc. is a launch partner because Retool, Inc.'d been building on it ourselves and believe this is where operational databases are headed. Separating storage from compute is the architecture that makes scale manageable and Databricks is leading the way. This foundation is already running in production across more than one million serverless Postgres databases inside Retool. Which is what made the Retool Lakebase connector possible. Now your operations teams can resolve service tickets, manage inventory, and process orders against the same data your analysts are already using - without provisioning anything. "The operational layer around AI is becoming just as important as the model layer. With the Retool Lakebase connector, our teams can respond to fleet and operations data in real time and scale without re-architecting our tools." - Agata Rother, Operations Systems and Insights Team Lead, Wayve Retool, Inc. is also a launch partner for Agent Bricks, Databricks' platform for building and governing enterprise AI agents grounded in your own data. New capabilities like Document Intelligence for unstructured data, Genie Agent Mode for multi-step reasoning, and Custom Agents give joint customers more ways to put AI to work on real business problems. The integration that has its customers most excited is its agent-to-agent connection with Genie Spaces. When Databricks surfaces a signal like a revenue anomaly, an inventory gap, or a support spike, your teams can act on it directly inside Retool without switching tools or rebuilding context. "We can now move from explanation to action without losing momentum. Agent-to-agent communication between Databricks Genie Spaces and Retool means the right people are responding to the right signals sooner, on governed enterprise data, and influencing high-stakes decisions." - Anthony Perez, VP of Innovation and Growth Programs, MiQ If you're at Summit this week, Retool, Inc. has three sessions worth catching: * The Last Mile of AI: How Reckitt Builds on Databricks A real-world look at how Reckitt is delivering consumer insights up to 60% faster * Customer Zero: How Retool Scaled to 1 Million Databases on Databricks Lakebase The architecture, governance decisions, and lessons from building on Lakebase at scale * Responding to Signals: High-Stakes Decisions with Databricks Genie See a live demo of its agent-to-agent integration with Genie Spaces The team is on the ground all week at Moscone. Stop by Booth #212 to see live demos and learn about the exciting new way Retool, Inc. is making enterprise vibe coding safe for everyone. light Reader

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