What is Retool and what is it used for?
Retool is a platform for building internal tools: applications connected to a company's databases and APIs, assembled from visual components and JavaScript logic.
Instead of coding admin panels from scratch, a team lays out screens with tables, forms and buttons and wires each one to a data source. That fits operations, support and finance teams, who need to look up and change records without opening the database directly.
The platform also includes workflows, used for scheduled jobs, alerts and ETL, and AI agents that query databases and call APIs. You can build native mobile apps and publish them for iOS, Android or as a PWA.
Retool runs in the vendor's cloud or self-hosted on the customer's own infrastructure, inside a VPC. Permissions are set per user, which limits who can see and change each app and each connected data source.
Not everything is in every plan. Single sign-on (SSO) and Git source control, for example, appear only on Enterprise, according to the vendor's pricing page.






