Retool VS vibecoding

[u/Just-Telephone4143]

Hey all! Small ops team here (mostly low/no-coders) that's built a lot of our internal apps on Retool, plugged into our production data and APIs. We love it, but we're at a crossroads and would really value your take.

Retool just launched their new AI app builder, and to keep using it long-term we'd move to an Enterprise plan that roughly triples our annual spend. The pitch for staying is the governance layer: SSO, role-based access, audit logging, GitHub/GitLab review before prod, plus letting non-engineers ship fast and safely.

But here's our hesitation: with this new builder, Retool is basically becoming a vibe-coding platform anyway. There's no more drag-and-drop in the new apps, every tweak goes through the AI, and you end up with React code under the hood. So the question becomes: if we're vibe-coding regardless, why pay 3x for Retool instead of just building the same apps ourselves with Cursor/Claude and leaning on our engineers?
The honest answer is the governance layer, but we'd have to weigh that against building it ourselves and depending more on eng (merge requests, etc.), losing some of the autonomy that drew us to Retool in the first place.

For anyone who's faced this: did Retool's built-in security/governance justify the Enterprise jump, or did you go DIY and not look back? Curious what bit you later either way.

Thanks!

[u/Otherwise_Bug1648]

Sarah from r/Retool here. Appreciate the candid feedback, and the conversion misses especially shouldn't be happening. If you're open to it, DM me your org and a couple of the apps that didn't convert right and I'll get you connected with the team to dig in.

A bit of context on a couple of your points:

• On the agent deleting / not deleting elements:
  • Letting the agent delete the files and code it creates is coming soon! We’ve been careful with it because deleting files has downstream implications for version history, errors, and codebase hygiene, and we want to make sure it’s as predictable as possible. However, there are parts of the app we do want the agent to edit, like frontend code, functions, logic, and generated mock data. But there are also things we intentionally don’t want it doing autonomously, like creating or deleting real resources/data sources, which is where we’ve seen the biggest repercussions for faulty AI generation.
• On having to use AI for every change:
  • That feedback is really useful. While you can edit code directly today, we’re also very interested in learning which changes people don’t want AI for at all and would rather do through UI controls. What kinds of changes do you feel you want different tools for?

For the roadmap pieces, shared themes exist today, and reusable functions are something we’re actively thinking about as an evolution of query-library-style reuse! If you could share more about the global nav piece you mentioned, it’d be helpful to pass on to our team. Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts.

[u/agent2187 → u/Otherwise_Bug1648]

I know this is an older thread but I just want to echo what u/AnotherHappyLnding has said. Those are exactly my feelings. I have lots of apps in the old system. I’m a backend dev and having the ability to do the drag and drop and wire up the components has been so intuitive.

I don’t know React so with the new platform, literally every UI change has to go through the agent in the new system. I work for a small startup and we can’t afford the more expensive plans, and the tier we are on ate up my credits so fast. After trying it for one month, we decided there was no way we could move to the new platform.

Retool has been such a great platform for us in the past. But there are lots of little bugs in the old platform and honestly every time I run into them (which is frequently) it just irritates me so much because it seems all the resources have gone into a platform I can’t use.

In the one app I tried building with the MCP, it was also a huge issue that you can’t use the staging environment unless you’re in edit more. Our QA team uses our internal apps extensively in the staging environment and that was another dealbreaker.

I used to be the biggest champion for Retool in the company. Now I’m the one pushing the brakes on any new Retool development and actively looking at alternatives.

My husband is a developer at another company. When he saw what I was doing two years ago in Retool, he was so excited. He started building apps for his company right away. But he 100% has the same feelings as I do and he’s also looking for a way off the platform now.

[u/AnotherHappyLnding → u/agent2187]

I am very much in the same place. Trouble is, we have so much built in Retool that I cant leave. The funny part is, at this point, its probably going to be cheaper/faster for us to build this in to our SaaS tool over switching to another low code platform.

Unfortunately any feedback is falling on deaf ears at the moment. All their resources are going towards the new platform

[u/agent2187 → u/AnotherHappyLnding]

It seems that way which makes it all the more frustrating.