Since 2020, Retool has surveyed engineers and developers for the State of Internal Tools report to find out how companies large and small leverage custom internal tools. This year, we asked over 2,000 respondents (mostly developers) 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.
Some highlights from this year’s report:
- 33% of respondents’ time was spent building internal tools
- Operations teams are increasingly relying on internal tools; 55.4% of respondents indicate they’re building internal tools for Ops teams — up 15% from 2021.
Databases and internal APIs dwarf third party APIs as data sources for internal tools; more than half of respondents use Postgres for their database.
- The top 5 third party APIs being used in internal tools are:
- Slack (41.8%)
- GitHub (41.7%)
- Stripe (33.2%)
- Salesforce (20.3%)
- Twilio/SendGrid (18.9%)
- Other observations in the report:
- The correlation between company size and prevalence of SQL and Python usage
- The surprisingly (and worryingly) lax approach many teams have to security in internal tools
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