Today, we’re excited to launch Retool for External Apps—our solution for building and managing apps for users outside your organization—into general availability.
Since we first shipped functionality to support external-facing applications, we’ve powered many success stories, from empowering fitness studio managers with more data at over 1600 OrangeTheory Fitness locations worldwide, to helping Greenly save 50 developer days per month with faster iteration on its core product.
With the launch of Retool for External Apps, Retool is now not only the best way to build custom internal tools for your business, it’s also the best way to build external tools for your customers, vendors, and partners.
Retool for External Apps is commonly used by customers in real estate to help manage relationships with tenants, financial services to simplify the customer onboarding process, and almost any industry that builds in Retool in order to extend good software outside their organization.
With Retool for External Apps, available today on the Business and Enterprise plans, you can now build fully customizable, full-stack portals to interface with users outside of your organization.
Retool has always come with built-in login, authentication, access controls, audit logs, and much more. Now, we've taken whitelabeling and customization one step further. If you’re building a portal for external users and want Retool to do the heavy lifting, you can whitelabel Retool and get on your way. And if you want a more custom approach, our custom user pages allow you to create whitelabeled Retool apps that power your sign-in, sign-up, forgot password, and user invite experiences.
To set up Retool for external use:
- Configure your branding: Upload your logo and set your theming to make your portal a seamless part of your brand.
- Customize your user journey: Retool ships with out-of-the-box login and account management for your users. If you want more flexibility, you can fully customize and brand these flows by replacing login, sign-up, reset password, and other pages with Retool apps. You now have full control over the entire user lifecycle.
- Configure permissions: Use Retool’s granular, role-based permissions model to ensure users only see the data they’re authorized to see. At the Enterprise scale, you can also map roles from your Identity Provider to Retool groups and use the Retool Permissions API to centralize governance.
- Build your apps: Use the same app development platform you use for your mission-critical internal apps to build beautiful, external-facing tools.
Whether your Retool applications are for your internal teams or external for your customers, you can embed them inside of an existing dashboard, third-party SaaS tool, or web app. Retool provides an easy-to-use Javascript SDK as well as a React library to make interacting with your parent application seamless.
If you need to authenticate users and your web app is integrated with an Identity Provider, you can configure SSO in Retool and automatically log users into your embedded apps. Retool also supports an API-based method that works with any form of login: once users log into your web app, you can generate a secure, single-use link to embed inside of your web app.
Whichever way fits with your tech stack, embedding a Retool app is one of the easiest ways to upgrade or augment external-facing software without having to rewrite it from scratch.
We’re excited to announce that building apps for external users is now possible on both the Business and Enterprise plans. If you’re a business just getting started on Retool, or are building an MVP of your product, Retool's Business plan provides volume tiers for external users as you scale:
- Up to 250 external users: $8/user
- 251-500 users: $6/user
- 501 users and beyond: Free
Have questions about Enterprise pricing? Get in touch.
User-based pricing can be prohibitive when operating at a large scale. Use cases with many users flowing through your system, like property management portals for real estate firms, or contractor portals for construction companies, are common use cases for building external apps in Retool.
You can build unlimited apps on the platform, and external users are free after 500 users. This means that as usage and adoption grows to a sizable scale, you can deliver more and more value with Retool, continue scaling, and keep your bottom line predictable.
External Apps are available today on the Business or Enterprise plans. If you’re hosting on Retool’s cloud, head over to your External Apps settings to get started.
For self-hosted customers, External Apps are available on self-hosted version 3.64 and above.
To dive deeper into how external apps work inside Retool, check out our documentation.
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