We’re excited to share some major updates to Retool's free plan: developers and teams of up to 5 can now build unlimited Retool apps—all without paying a single dollar.

Today, Retool is excited to announce a new library of 90+ UI components—all tailored and optimized for internal tools and business apps.

One of the more confusing aspects of the useEffect() hook is the dependency array. To understand it fully, we look at Effects in React in general, and offer a few case studies to really grasp the matter.

This year, we asked over 2,000 developers in companies big and small to weigh in on how much time they spend on internal tools, how they build them (and for whom), and how they measure their impact.

We selected four high quality admin dashboard templates for those of you building apps in Vue. We’ve chosen them based on three primary criteria: price, customizability, and ease of use.

In this post, we build an advanced file picker in React, complete with drag and drop support. Code sandbox included!

In this tutorial, we use Vue's new composition API to build a checkbox and a checkbox group. You'll learn how to use the brand-new API to expose props and emit events, as well as how to structure Vue components using the SFC concept.

We've redesigned the left panel of the app editor to help you navigate to anything in your app from one place. The new left panel now includes tabs for Explorer and State. ExplorerThe

In this article, you’ll learn how to build a slider in React with `react-slider`, a popular little component / library that Zillow open sourced back in 2021. We’ll cover how to customize the various components of the slider (dimensions, values, colors, etc.).

This guide aims to share everything you need to know about Vue components, and includes in-depth examples of class components, dynamic components, single file components, functional components, and table components.

Running git init is one of the first steps we take when starting a software development project. Version Control Systems (VCS) like git enable us to maintain history of a codebase, experiment freely

If you are building an app on top of MongoDB and want some help navigating your selectOnes, understanding projections, figuring out the difference(s) between insertMany and bulkWrite, and deciphering other methods they didn’t teach you in SQL class, this tutorial is for you.

If this is your first (or maybe second) time building CRUD endpoints, here are some non-intuitive best practices to follow around URL naming, which HTTP methods to use, and how to handle versioning.

Date and time formatting varies globally, which can confuse users. Date and time pickers (DTPs) solve this problem by providing a simple UI component with intuitive pop-up or drop-down calendar elements. Here's how to create a React time picker in a simple demo app.

Last fall, we migrated our 4TB Postgres database from version 9.6 to version 13 with minimal downtime. In this post, we’ll tell the story and share tips to help you with a similar upgrade.

While building the Source Control feature in Retool, we hit a few gotchas working with the GitHub API, in particular with Git trees and API limits. We share those lessons in this post.

Get an overview of the best React component libraries looking at several factors like popularity, use cases, documentation, resources, support, and more.

In this post, you’ll learn some common data filtering techniques in JavaScript and their application in React. We’ll run through `filter()`, `map()`, and good old `for` loops, covering their strengths and limitations, and when to use a specific method over another.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the key factors you’ll need to consider if you’re planning on creating and maintaining an effective component library, from choosing the right component library development tools and best practices like testing and documentation.

You can now use Retool to not only view query results about your Snowflake resources, but also to take action on them—all from one easy-to-use UI.

Learn how to create a simple navbar in React, using Bootstrap and Tailwind.

Why the CloserIQ engineering team chose Retool for internal tools and how the WISE team manages a thriving virtual community.

Lazy loading is an optimization technique where the loading of an item is delayed until it’s absolutely required. It works well for common UX components and patterns like dialogs, warnings, and notifications. Learn how to build and use lazily-loaded components in React.

Learn more about the React component lifecycle and the different methods within each phase (for class-based components), focusing particularly on methods and hooks.

Here is our roundup of React native component libraries—both general and special purpose ones—with most important characteristics and helpful links.

React-markdown is a React component that safely renders Markdown into HTML. It lets you create rich content without having to worry about all the formatting and code placement. In this blog post, we explore how react-markdown works and why you should start using it.

For this tutorial we are going to set up a Supabase user database and build an admin panel that allows us to create, read, update and delete the entries. We’ll display the data in a table, and use a panel on the right-hand side to tab between create and update forms, all in less than 20 minutes.

The importance of names, the surprising benefits of restricting your product, and other lessons from an engineer who built Stripe's "Big Red Button"

This article will look at the terminology of event-driven architecture and reactive programming, and the problems they are trying to solve.

See why moving from separate tools to a central workflow for customer information was critical to scaling our customer success operations.

Many startups today fundraise with the goal of getting the most money at the highest valuation possible. But at Retool, we decided to take the opposite strategy.

In this article, we'll compare a few of the popular Laravel admin panel packages, so you can get a better idea of which one is right for your project.

Learn how to build a prototype application using Retool with SQL Server for your data store, and how to perform CRUD operations against it.

Getting strong types and better type inference in TypeScript doesn’t necessarily require advanced types and `as` usages everywhere. Here are some simple type construction patterns, code writing habits, and compiler options to improve your application’s type inference without increasing complexity.

William Fahy, a full-time paramedic, noticed that a lot of people struggled to remember and find nearby defibrillators when they needed one most. So he built a Retool app to fix the problem across Ireland.

In this article, you’ll learn what admin portals are, why you need them, and, most importantly, what aspects make a good admin portal.

Rohit, Pepper Content's Head of Product, replaced a homegrown operations portal with Retool to support the growth of creators.

In this post, we'll walk you through building an email manager that accomplishes sending a bunch of easily customizable emails—fast.

This is the story about how different teams at LBB moved their workflows to Retool to give engineering more time to focus on growing the business and improving the product experience—not redundant tasks.

As a DynamoDB user, you’ve likely encountered the need for a quick and easy way to modify the data. This guide will teach you how to build GUI with CRUD functionality for your DynamoDB instance in about 15 minutes.

Tim, VP of Product and Customer Ops, needed to replace slow, messy spreadsheets with a real-time insights dashboard. He used Retool to make it happen.

How an operations analyst built an app so internal teams could connect car hosts with safe, convenient, and affordable parking spots faster and more reliably.

Importing a CSV file into your Firestore database is one of the most common and fundamental ways of getting information into a database. In this post, you'll learn to do it, as well as learn concepts which can help you get all sorts of other data into your Firestore instance.

Our customer Wendy Zhang made a very cool coding font app/gamified experience that helps you find your true love amongst coding fonts. What's also cool is that it's a consumer-facing app built entirely on Retool! Check out what it does, and how Wendy built it.

How the engineering team at Tripplo replaced 3 separate internal apps—a PHP admin panel, a custom React app, and spreadsheets—with Retool, thus saving 5 hours of eng time a week, and improving collaboration with business teams and agents.

How did software that most developers at startups have never used get this big? Understanding Oracle starts with understanding the history of relational databases, and digging into their business and competitive practices.

This article breaks down the leading MySQL tools and their benefits and potential drawbacks. We look at features, platform compatibility, use cases, and MySQL support.

This post will show you how to create an admin panel with GraphQL endpoints using Retool—in less than 10 minutes. With our pre-built components, we'll both build an admin panel UI with less code, and explain how your CRUD queries work with the UI.

Today, we’re excited to roll out 35+ UI components rebuilt and redesigned from the ground up, amounting to one of the most comprehensive and configurable input libraries available.

Build an admin panel to manage Firestore documents in under 10 minutes: build out the UI, create CRUD queries, and link the queries to the UI.

Gonzalo created a payment gateway to integrate more than 20 payment providers, sending the orders to MongoDB—but he still faced one problem: “I wasn’t able to show visualization of revenue to our team.” For that, he turned to Retool.

If you’ve ever had to wrangle a maze of marketing, sales, and BI tools—just to end up plugging it all into a spreadsheet—this article is for you. We’ll go over the three core dashboards and explain why we treat our analytics as a product rather than a static dashboard.

Focus on building your core product, not custom internal tools. Early-stage startups now get a free year of Retool.

Solera Health chose to build custom apps in Retool instead of using React. Learn how those CRUD apps reduced friction and sped up workflows for customer support agents.

Here is how to build a simple yet powerful admin panel for your MongoDB instance. We’ll demonstrate how to query data, build tables and components, and use inline JavaScript to customize them.

This post walks through the best GUIs available for querying your Postgres data, as well as remotely accessing and navigating database servers.

This is the story how Paula built a new service dashboard in Retool to help the customer service team prepare for the launch of their new product, WeWin.

While spreadsheet software has evolved over the years—first VisiCalc, then Lotus, Excel and now Google Sheets—the core abstractions have remained the same.They’re flexible, intuitive, and accessible. But these abstractions

As Segment prepared to launch their second product, Personas, a PM realized that their customer support team needed a new level of visibility into product data.

This is the story of how SaltPay was able to bring together critical user data and support workflows into one Retool app to replace a disjointed and slow customer support process.

Drafting, reviewing, tracking, signing, and storing business documents is essential—and can be painful, especially if you are still in the pen and paper era. Revv, a complete document management system, specializes in

This tutorial walks how to build a subscription management center using Retool, Stripe, and Sync Inc.

Low code and no code have equal amounts of hype and skepticism. On the one hand, it’s clear low code has market traction: in April 2021, a provider of low code automation

This post will walk through the best MongoDB GUIs available for reading from and writing to your MongoDB clusters.

An inside look at why and how we built a custom app for account managers to generate user license keys, manage trials, map account data with Salesforce, and manage feature flags.

We're breaking down the strengths and drawbacks of the top React map libraries, as well as highlight the types of projects each library excels at so you can determine what's best for you.

How we decided to build both a cloud and on-prem option for Retool, the challenges, and why it's becoming more common to offer both.

We’re excited to announce that you can deploy our Free and Startup plan on your own infra, behind your own VPN, and in your own VPC.

We’ve researched and compared React autocomplete libraries to suss out the best React autocomplete library, and then created this simple guide to aggregate all the top options in one place.

The debate between on-premise vs cloud is nothing new. We've collected deeper context and frameworks to make evaluating your options easier.

We researched and tried a handful of popular React-Native date picker libraries. In this post, we’ll walk you through our favorites and the reasoning behind each selection.

There are a few off the shelf options for building admin interfaces: 1. Database GUI Clients 2. Frontend admin libraries 3. Backend admin frameworks 4. 3rd-party admin tools They’re all good at specific things. Let’s see how you can decide between them:

When you ship tens of thousands of boxes of produce a week, issues happen. This is the story of how the PM team helped customer service deliver better user experiences using Retool.

This is the story of how a co-founder and CRO built internal tools that helped every team bring insights and action into the same place.

A guest post from Nacho Iacovino, developer advocate at Clerk, who recently chatted with us about the findings from our 2021 State of Internal Tools report and where he thinks internal tool development is going.

The Retool community is the best place to get help, share what you're building, and level up your Retool skills.

As a small team tackling a complex issue, Sentropy needs to move fast and help every teammate operate at their best. Here's a look at how they built internal tools using Retool to unblock critical GTM functions.

With the right internal tools, high-growth startups move faster and more efficiently, enabling them to outpace the competition and succeed in tough markets. Here's how five category-leading startups—Avo, LeadGenius, Doordash, Neo4j, and Descript–used internal tools to accelerate growth.

This is the story of how Plaid empowered customer support to adapt (and re-adapt) workflows at a huge inflection point in their growth, and how a small engineering team played a critical role in making it happen.

We researched, identified, and evaluated, checkbox components to help you make the right choice to solve common use cases.

We’ve recently shipped two updates that help make Markdown a first-class citizen in Retool: a completely redesigned Text component and a new App Documentation feature.

Internal tools, with the right strategy, can help you save on a huge amount of engineering resources. With resources saved, you can reallocate engineers to customer-facing features. To learn more, we turned to three financial services companies to see how they use internal tools.

In this post, we’ve compiled three popular React form libraries—Formik, react-hook-form, and react-final-form—and actionable guidance to choose the right React form library for your next project.

Our experts reveal that, especially with low-code platforms, your internal tool development should be context-dependent and should, at different times, include built and bought components.

This is a behind-the-scenes look at how we built the process to offer startup credits and then automated it all with Retool.

This is the story of how a VP of Innovation used Retool to help her team work the way they want, and connect disparate systems beneath the surface.

This tutorial is going to walk through how to build a Retool app that uses the SendGrid API to send emails to your customers – in just under an hour (yes, one hour).

This tutorial walks through how to build a basic file uploader and viewer app in under an hour using Retool and the DigitalOcean Spaces API.

Here’s a look at how a software engineer built the internal tools to help get Remitly for Developers to market faster and allowed customer success to support users as they navigate the new product line.

In this guide, we’ll take you through the reasoning behind our favorite map libraries by comparing react-native-maps to the other top libraries.

There are a number of React Native notification libraries to choose from, and this post will spotlight one of the leading options: react-native-push-notification.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Modules, a new way for Retool customers to reuse groups of components and queries between applications.

An inside look at how an analytics manager tackled revenue forecasting with Retool—and gave BWH Hotel Group Scandinavia a competitive advantage they didn’t expect.

We talked to Ken about what internal tools look like at a database company, measuring build times, and when to build vs. buy.

We talked to Sole about how her team at Auth0 approaches building internal tools, their stack, and differences with how they think about customer facing builds.

We’re excited to announce our new chart component is generally available for all customers. Now you can bring custom and interactive visualizations to every Retool app.

We talked to Curtis about how On Deck approaches internal tools, from scaling cohort operations to building quick MVPs in low-code tools.

Developers spend 34% of their time building internal, employee-facing apps. Why? We surveyed 650 developers and builders to find out.

We talked to Soroush about how his team at Vow works on internal tools, from microscopes to lab notebooks and admin panels.

This is the story of how 2 Retool apps automated away the messy parts of our SDR workflow and helped our entire sales team be more customer-centric.

Our team at Retool has navigated and fixed major issues related to migrations in Postgres. This post will highlight key lessons learned and what you can do to avoid making the same mistakes.

We talked to Andrew Homeyer about how his teams at Halp build and maintain their internal tools.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to use Retool with Cord. Cord lets you add comments, annotations, and guides directly in your favorite apps.

Commonbond’s goal is to provide a better loan experience for customers. But loan disbursement is one of the processes that can involve a heavy lift on the backend. See how one engineer made it happen.

The operations team at Commonbond struggled to get prioritized on the engineering roadmap. So they took matters into their own hands, and created a new career path for their team.

Ramp is a fast-growing financial company. Here’s an inside look at how the financial operations and product teams changed how they work using Retool.

“After Retool,” Solvi said, “anyone in the company could start managing these things without having to request changes from the engineering team.” What used to take the non-technical teams hours to complete can now be accomplished in a matter of seconds using their Retool-built tool.

With this year’s record voter turnout, Pizza to the Polls had an even greater impact than in 2016 and they did it with the power of Retool. They raised over $1.4 million to send 66,089 pizzas to 3,267 polling places in 48 states—blowing their 2016 and 2018 numbers out of the water.

Brex has a killer philosophy of internal tools. Find out how Retool, on top of this strong foundation, has helped Engineering Manager Derek Stavis scale 10x in three years.

Many companies in the fintech industry struggle with data management because of the complex stack of tools needed to manage operations. Retool can help. Here's how Ramp used Retool to make operations 20% more efficient.

The decision to invest in internal tools is all about striking the right balance. In most cases, that balance lies between the engineering overhead to develop (and maintain) internal tools and the workforce productivity those tools deliver once they’re up and running.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how education works. Learn how Retool helped Noble Schools adapt to distance learning.

The story behind how Mike Brophy (VP of Global Renewals at Neo4J) reduced churn by built a custom internal tool to manage renewals outside of Salesforce.

The story behind how Andrew Mason (CEO and Founder of Descript) lifted the load off engineering teams building internal tools by moving to Retool.

Since Retool launched two years ago on HN, tens of thousands of companies have come to rely on Retool. It's how Allbirds measures the efficacy of their marketing campaigns; how Brex builds applications

The story behind how Adam Louie (Senior Director of Business Operations at LeadGenius) built 3 internal applications that ended up saving LeadGenius $1M.

This post walks through how to use Firestore's Node.js SDK to do basic CRUD with your Firebase data.

Forms are one of the most common elements of any internal app, but building them from scratch sucks. Here's a quick guide to building beautiful, functional forms with the react-hook-form library.

How to work with the Firebase Realtime Database's REST API to create, read, update, and delete data.

react-datepicker is a library for building (surprise) date picker components in React. This guide will walk through the basics, as well as more advanced features like clear buttons and using state.

Accenture made $43B in 2019 - you've probably heard of them, but you might not be sure what they actually do. This post will help.

If you’re building internal tools – admin panels, dashboards, CRMs, you name it – chances are you’re thinking about how to build a table component to display, edit, and manipulate data. Here's our guide to building a killer React table component.

A React component library is a collection of styled React components that you can use in your React applications to save time, add functionality, increase efficiency, and make the app look great. Here are six of our favorites for 2020.

As a not-so-technical marketer, I dread asking engineers these types of questions. It’s not that I have a deep-seated fear of working with developers or anything like that. In my experience, most people are happy to help (at least for the first few times).

This guide will walk through how to implement and work with auto-incremented fields in SQL, run through syntax for different SQL dialects, and explain how to handle more secure UUIDs.

React admin templates are templates for admin dashboards that are built in React and can be customized to fit your needs. Most templates come loaded with features for UIs, widgets, and apps, plus the ability to add custom React components.

Assembled uses Retool to build and run internal tools on top of their Postgres data.

Almost 40% of JS devs have used GraphQL to make it easier to query their APIs. This post walks through everything you'll need to get a GraphQL endpoint set up yourself.

To support the growing number of developers building APIs via GraphQL, new integrated development environments (IDEs) are popping up quite literally every month. But which one is the best for you? Below, we review the best GraphQL IDEs available.

We’re going to build a customer dashboard that lets you see orders and products in one view using the Shopify GraphQL API in Retool.

We surveyed 300 developers and builders about their internal tools: how much time they invest, which frameworks they use, and what their biggest frustrations are.

Google App Maker is shutting down next year. See what alternatives are available for low code and no code app building.

The details behind how we migrated our community from Spectrum to Discourse, and the scripts we used to do it.

This tutorial walks through how to build a fully functional admin panel in React backed by a REST API with authentication using the react-admin framework.

The realm of database locking and isolation has an almost mystic air to it. This post will hopefully make things simpler.

Jeremy Edberg has been working as an engineer in the Bay Area since 1998. He’s worked on great internal tools at eBay, as the first engineering hire at Reddit, and as the first reliability engineer at Netflix.

Sunil Sadasivan ran tech for Cory Booker's 2020 presidential campaign, and talked to us about the challenges of quickly scaling a team to match.

Chad Rosen has been working as a software engineer and engineering manager in the Bay Area since 2001. He has helped contribute to both the product and internal tools at companies like Good Technology, ClickShift, Twitter, and Wealthfront.

Most modern SQL DBs use transactional standards like ACID to ensure data integrity and keep your users from seeing wrong or stale data, and this post explores how they work.

What's SAP? And why is it worth $163B?

In this post, we’re going to build a full featured Airbnb listing review app that reads and writes to MongoDB, with minimal code, in under an hour.

This post will run through how you can effectively work with dates in SQL so you can resolve your issue quickly and get back to bed.

We're running a survey about how teams build internal tools, and we'd love to hear from you about it.

Contents: Background Live demo Versioning overview Connecting to S3 Reading files from S3 Uploading files to S3 Building our version control system Drilling down into a file Adding finishing touches Adding finishing touches

You may have read the title for this post and thought, "Why on earth does a developer need to know anything about typography?" I mean, there’s already a lot on

Customer-relationship management is the biggest, fastest growing software market in the world. $40B is spent on CRMs annually, and almost all companies have one. But for those of us that don’t directly

Spreadsheets are great for some things, but bad at others. Retool fills in those gaps. You can build apps on top of the data you have in Sheets with Retool. It lets you create polished UIs by dragging and dropping commonly-used components, and your apps can connect to almost any data source.

When it comes to building apps, Firebase takes care of pretty much anything you can think of: real-time database storage, cloud object storage, authentication, web hosting, serverless functions, analytics, monitoring, machine learning, notifications,

A lot has changed about air travel since it went mainstream in the 1930s. On-board smoking, free-flowing booze, and five-star meals have given way to baggage fees, cramped seats, and mystery meat. Through all this change, one thing has stayed the same — the software that manages it all.

At the turn of the 16th century, Johannes Kepler set out to disprove Copernicus, who believed planets orbited in perfect, concentric circles from the sun. Kepler first formulated his hypothesis: planets had elliptical