Retool, the leading development platform for business software, today announced general availability for Retool Workflows, an automation tool that helps developers speed up critical business processes. All new features give developers even more code-first control over automations and additional developer tools for monitoring and maintenance at scale.
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“No-and low-code automation tools often do more harm than good,” said Jamie Cuffe, Product Lead at Retool. “Automating your business can unlock a world of possibilities, but building isolated, one-off automations is not the answer. Teams eventually struggle to maintain and scale their creations without developer assistance. Retool Workflows directly addresses both challenges. We help developers minimize development and maintenance time, so they can build more automations right from the start. And we provide a central hub for automations that can be securely monitored, maintained, and scaled over time.”
Code-first meets visual programming
When looking across the crowded automation space, organizations often find it challenging to find tools that scale. No-and low-code tools offer simple drag and drop interactions but become time-consuming and brittle to maintain. On the other end, developer-first automation tools focus on flexibility, but overlook the maintenance and governance required at scale.
Retool Workflows combines a visual canvas for speed with code-first building blocks for power. The tool also goes beyond existing vendors by enabling developers to manage thousands of automations in one hub—using the same tracking and management practices used across all other software.
- Connect to anything. Query data from any data source or API—including dozens of pre-built connectors with popular tools like OpenAI.
- Drag, drop, and code. Visualize your logic with a series of blocks (interconnected queries). Within each block, you can focus on only writing the custom business logic unique to the process you’re automating.
- Bring your own toolkit. Use languages you work with every day. Retool Workflows has native support for JavaScript, SQL, and Python, with the ability to import any library you’d reach for in any IDE.
- Debug quickly. Explore logs at the workflow and block level. See historical data for the input and output of each step to pinpoint exactly where errors occur.
- Custom error-handling. Get notified in Slack or email for every failure or exception. Per-block error handling helps you define contingency paths at each step. Set automatic retries with custom time intervals and backoff and pipe logs to external monitoring tools like Datadog.
- Deploy and manage securely. Self-host Retool Workflows within your own VPC to keep your data in your network. With Retool Workflows, you get standard security features out of the box—full audit logs, source control, dev and prod environments, per user and per workflow permissions to control who can run and edit each automation, and more.
The future of business is automated
From urgent security alerts to AI-powered customer support, thousands of companies—including over 1000 paying customers like Airbnb, Kaplan, and American National Bank—use Retool Workflows to automate critical business processes. “We needed an efficient way to translate product data in our warehouse into timely, insightful reporting in Slack,” said Joel McLean, Director of Product Growth at REMAX. “With Retool Workflows, my team can easily configure our resources in one place and focus only on writing the logic unique to our business.”
Some of the most popular use cases for Retool Workflows include:
- Ticket routing and assignment. Stack rank issue severity, ticket age, and customer segment alongside your team’s topic knowledge, current workload, and calendar availability to create custom impact assessments. “Retool Workflows powers how we enrich and score product signups, assign support tickets, and automate growth insights,” said Eric Goldman, Co-Founder at Sequin. “We’re deeply invested in migrating homegrown scripts and Zapier automations to Retool so we can build faster in a platform with more robust tooling for monitoring and debugging.”
- New user reporting + AI-powered operations. Alert your teams of new user signups, enrich records with hard-to-find details like company ARR or job title—or categorize them with LLMs—even filter for certain company segments or users who interact with meaningful features in the product.
- Systems administration. Easily spin up admin and monitoring tasks without adding additional infra overhead. Centralize admin tasks like security alerts or lightweight ETL pipelines, and maintain visibility into long-running tasks with custom error-handling and automated retries.
- Dynamic internal API. Retool Workflows turn every script or data processing workflow into a portable, reusable API to easily leverage complex logic in any frontend—facilitating quicker handoffs between teams without having to worry about provisioning any additional infrastructure.
Available today
Retool Workflows is now generally available and includes a generous free plan to help developers start building critical automations faster. Retool Workflows is available as a cloud-hosted and self-hosted service. For more information, please visit https://retool.com/products/workflows/.
About Retool
Retool is a development platform for building business software. Visually develop apps that interface with any database or API. Switch to code nearly anywhere to customize how your apps look and work. With Retool, you ship more apps and move your business forward—all in less time.
Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, NBC, and Brex collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to solve internal workflows and build customer-facing products. To learn more, visit retool.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231005937442/en/
