What are you using for internal tooling platforms?

Question

Hoping to get some feedback/ideas from the community. Working at an early stage enterprise startup. The product is primarily a web app (rails/react). We're getting ready to launch to our beta customers, and have a growing list of internal tooling sort of needs.We're evaluating platforms like Retool to get us up and running quickly, as we don't really want to have to build a whole custom tooling app.What are you using? What do you like, or not, about it?

darlingHaboo · Accepted Answer

I'm running a software development firm, and we're using UI Bakery for almost all of our internal apps. We have already automated multiple operations, finance, and accounting processes.
Low-code development makes these tasks much easier because, in most cases, our CTO can do app development and tweaks very easily. He knows all the details of the business and the technology we use, and deployment is just a single click away. This not only speeds up development but also accelerates iterations.
Previously, we had some self-written Django apps but ended up with unmaintainable code that no developer wanted to support. With Django, we had to create user stories, pass them to developers, and later verify that they were developed correctly. Additionally, the deployment also required additional work.

PaulHoule · Answer

Where I work we use a combination of lightly customized tools out of the box (Jira, Jenkins, ...) as well as full custom applications such as the editor that our data team uses to maintain our database which is a React app like our customer-facing app.
I also have a number of personal tools such as a Python program that (most of the time) can automatically merge changes to the maven and npm projects I work on, apply liquibase changes to the database and build and test everything plus keep track of branches and stuff so I can sync up most mornings and not have to think about and not make silly mistakes with git and pull requests.
I've worked at places where it took 20 seconds for JIRA to load the page for creating a new ticket but I'm 100% delighted with our JIRA installation. I might have complained about tooling before I built my "maintenance droid" but now I won't. I know the data team and marketing people like our editor (e.g. they use it to manage customer subscriptions)
With control over our internal systems it's easy for us to innovate. For instance we are developing generative AI tools that work together with our data team to speed up OCRing data on paper and getting it up to our standards. You can use all kind of API integrations with prebuilt tools, for instance I use ticket numbers all the time when I discuss my work in Slack and it's not hard to write a program that looks at a year of standup messages in Slack and what is in JIRA to write the beginnings of my performance review.
What I'm not getting about retool is this: it looks like a "low code" or "no code" platform that is intended for internal tools, what stops you from using the same tool for both internal and customer facing applications?

kinj28 · Answer

Cofounder of DronaHQ here. A retool alternative.
Some other alternatives:
- open source - tooljet/appsmith
1) Platforms compete on degree of complexity of apps you can build on them - you would be able to sfdc level crm/ service cloud/ marketing cloud on Dronahq
2) key point to evaluate would be use cases you can build faster on one vs another ( for instance you would be able to make dashboards way faster on DronaHQ)
One way or the other- you would be able to most of your use cases on either platform but you must watch for scaling on pricing/licensing / performance/ etc at scale.
Hope this helps