Retool

Retool is the internal tooling platform that has solved one of the most persistent and most underappreciated problems in enterprise software development: the extraordinary cost and engineering time consumed by building the custom internal applications, admin panels, dashboards, and operational tools that every business needs but that no off-the-shelf software adequately addresses. Founded in 2017 by David Hsu, who experienced this problem firsthand as an engineer, Retool was built on the insight that the majority of internal tools share a common set of components — tables, forms, buttons, charts, date pickers — connected to a common set of data sources, and that a platform providing these components pre-built could eliminate months of repetitive development work for every organization that adopted it. Retool's low-code development environment allows engineering teams to assemble sophisticated internal applications by combining pre-built UI components with direct database queries, REST API calls, and custom JavaScript logic — creating tools that look professionally built and behave reliably in production in a fraction of the time required to build them from scratch. The platform connects natively to every major database including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Snowflake, as well as hundreds of third-party services including Stripe, Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Sheets, making it possible to build internal tools that aggregate and act on data from across an organization's entire technology stack. Retool's self-hosted deployment option allows organizations with strict data security requirements to run the platform entirely within their own infrastructure. Retool is deployed by engineering and operations teams at thousands of organizations, spanning technology companies that use it to build customer support portals and data management tools, financial institutions that use it for compliance and reporting workflows, healthcare organizations that use it for patient data management, and e-commerce businesses that use it for order management and fulfillment operations. The platform's support for custom components, Retool Workflows for backend automation, and Retool Mobile for internal mobile applications has expanded its utility far beyond simple CRUD interfaces into a comprehensive internal application development platform. For any engineering team that wants to spend more time building product and less time maintaining internal tooling, Retool is the most powerful and most developer-beloved solution in the market.