[dirtybird04]

I've used Retool and absolutely love it. It's a godsend for folks like me who want to create quick internal tools without delving into frontend frameworks and code. It's very drag-and-drop, intuitive, and easy to use. I describe it as MS Access on steroids.

This thing looks nothing like Retool. As other people have mentioned here, Refine "just scaffolds your codebase, gives you a good start, and has some cool hooks". So the whole "Open-Source Retool Alternative" angle seems very confusing and off-base to me. They look like very different tools built for very different audiences, imho.

Seems like you're trying to piggyback on the Retool wave. Why not just be honest (and a bit creative, perhaps) with your marketing? My $0.02

[dang]

Please make your substantive points without impugning people's honesty. That's against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comment would be fine without that last paragraph.

[munjal116]

I agree with Retool alternative tagline here. Doesn’t make sense to me as well.

I am researching viability of no-code tools like Retool as a business and was wondering if you were developer preferring Retool over coding to save time and resources for internal tools vs a non-developer trying to take care of the business without bothering the development teams.

[dvdhsu]

I've always been confused (and rather peeved) at people who refer to Retool as a low-code / no-code tool. The vast majority of our users are software engineers, and that has always been our focus. In fact, we purposely try and filter out non-engineers from signing up. They have lower conversion rates, require more support (they oftentimes ask us to teach them how to write JS), and have lower NPS.

Our target audience is the developer who doesn't believe that building a simple form (that submits a POST request) should involve: 1) installing 30 dependencies, 2) learning a new framework, 3) spending hours researching the best table library, and 4) mucking around with redux trying to figure out how to get a spinny indicator on a button.

The state of web development today is _insane_, and we want developers focusing on being productive, instead of everything listed above. (Fortunately for us, most developers agree and think that web development has gotten too complicated, especially for simple internal forms.) Developers who want to ship is our market, not "non-developers" who don't know how to code.

Perhaps we should write a blog post about this one day, hmm...

(David, founder @ Retool here.)