October 24, 2024
We make a little assessment on the best low-code platform for internal tools
It's no secret that we use Retool a lot. In fact, we’ve already written a dedicated post about it here.
While Retool brings numerous benefits, its pricing model doesn’t always align with every company’s needs. It seems like their plans are designed for two very specific kinds of users: mid-large enterprises and solo developers or very small teams. If you fall somewhere in between, as many small-to-mid-sized businesses do, you might struggle to justify the Business plan.
For a small company that occasionally uses Retool apps — meaning it's not their core business — the Business plan can be prohibitively expensive, potentially a deal-breaker. Meanwhile, the free/team plan, which lacks critical features like permission control (who can edit and who can't), simply isn’t a viable option. This is a common pain point we've heard from clients, and it's hard not to agree.
This is why we're starting to explore alternatives, particularly for businesses that fall between the solo dev and enterprise categories. To be clear, Retool remains an excellent tool in its class, but it’s important to evaluate the best fit for every use case.
We conducted a small test by creating the same app on three platforms:
The goal was to test the most common capabilities of these platforms:
Additionally, we evaluated:
The app itself was simple:
After testing, we concluded that AppSmith is our preferred alternative, even though Superblocks comes close to Retool in some respects.
AppSmith might look a bit bare-bones compared to Retool, but it’s more than capable of handling most of the apps we’ve built on Retool. Plus, Superblocks’s free plan feels unnecessarily aggressive. Constant reminders that the trial has expired, alongside an onboarding flow that seems focused on data harvesting, were a big turnoff for us.
Another thing that worked in AppSmith's favor is its custom component implementation, which feels much closer to Retool’s legacy version. In contrast, Superblocks requires a full local development environment for custom components, which seems like overkill for smaller projects.
Lastly, a bonus point for AppSmith is that it’s open source, so there's always the option for an on-premises setup if needed.
While we continue to love and use Retool, it’s important to acknowledge that alternatives like AppSmith can offer a great fit for specific use cases, especially for smaller businesses that need flexibility at a more accessible price point.
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