It's really great for exactly that use case, creating lots of internal dashboards from scratch. Part of how it makes it really easy is that you don't go through all the normal dev practices, and will normally connect directly to your datastores as well as any api endpoints your service provides. This creates a huge amount of deeply hidden coupling.

You'll also inevitably need to go beyond the functionality that retool offers, at which point their development experience really breaks down, and you'll have to either come up with some bespoke workflow to integrate complex custom components, or migrate away.

Despite all this I really like it as a tool, it just needs to be approached with care.

One thing they did that looks nice is their git syncing: https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing

The tool spreads "code" around in a lot of different ways, like mustache templates, transformers, and orchestrations. So it would be hard to keep track of all that without the git integration. I didn't look at it deep enough to see what dealing with, for example, a change in the source data schema would look like.

It always boils down to the same thing: people think that it's a technology problem. But it's a people problem.

Software development (at scale) is not difficult because you tell a computer what to do (that part is quite simple), but because you and many others need to communicate your thoughts both to a computer _and_ humans (sometimes even themselves) over a potentially long period of time. And as if that were not bad enough, it all has to be coordinated.

These two things - sharing thoughts and doing coordination work - are what eat your resources. When doing "normal" development, you use a programming language and most likely an IDE and a VCS such as git(hub). All of these usually exist for quite some time are used by _a lot_ of people and are well understood, polished and mature. (well, of course some more than others)

But every no-code tool (or low-code) such as Retool has to recreate _all these_ by itself. This is really as bad as you having to learn a brand new programming language, an IDE and (partly) a VCS. Will they be as good as the tools that millions of people already use? Probably not.

And just to clarify the programming language part: yes Retool is sort of a programming language. Even though you can embed SQL. (You can do this in other languages too). Clicking instead of mostly typing doesn't change this fact.

Of course, all of that doesn't matter if you build something quickly and throw it away in a few month. In that case, Retool might actually pay off. But these cases are not the "hard" ones anyways and are usually not a big problem in most companies.