Let's Talk!

It's not a secret that we use Retool a lot.

We wrote also a dedicated post here.

No matter the benefits of the platform, its pricing model is not a good fit for everybody.

It's been clearly optimized for mid-large company (enterprise plan), or for solo or very very small teams (free plan).

In between there's a whole world of small to mid companies, that the Team plan really don't address.

For a small company that can use some Retool apps occasionally (read: not core business), the Enterprise plan might be proibitive and definitely a deal breaker.

The option to use the free/team plan where you even cannot decide who can edit and who can't, is not an option.

We already had clients lamenting this model, and we agree with them.

For this reason we're exploring alternative for such specific cases, resting assuring that Retool still is the best platform in the category.

The test

We conducted a very small test, by creating the same app across the three platforms.

We wanted to test specifically:

• common capability of such platforms:

  • Connect to datasources
  • Visual building UI
  • Writing logic in javascript
  • Deploy and share with few clicks

• possibility to define editor and viewer permissions at reasonable price

• quality of developer experience

• solidity of the company

• solidity of the community

The application is dead simple:

• fetch a data source from a REST API
• make a data transformation of that resource before use it
• feed a table with the transformed dataset
• add a rich text editor component to visualize the selected row from the Table

Both AppSmith and SuperBlocks have a similar investment capacity, thus, they have similar resources to improve.

The best alternative is

We ended up that AppSmith is what we prefer, even though SuperBlocks is the closer to Retool.

Appsmith looks a bit bare-bones but it's good enough for pretty all the application we already did in Retool.

Also, we don't like the agressiveness of SuperBlocks if you're on a free plan, they continuously tell the trial has expired (so what's that free plan, uh?) as well we the (non-requested) onboarding flow for new invited user looks a way to harvesting some bit of data.

Finally, we prefer the custom component implementation in Appsmith, similar to the legacy version of Retool, while SuperBlocks force you to set a full local development enviroment. Again, since we're evaluating an alternative fo small businesses, we really don't need a spaceship for creating custom component, in case we need to.

Bonus point: AppSmith is open source, thus the possibility for an independent on-prem is always there.

We help ambitious companies ride the change