Retool Workflows is a fast way for developers to create cron jobs, custom alerts, and ETL tasks. Stop provisioning infrastructure and maintaining one-off scripts—focus on the code that matters.Topics: Developer Tools, APIs, SaaS
Hi, Product Hunt!
I’m Jamie from the product team at Retool, and I’m so excited to introduce Retool Workflows as we launch into public beta.
Retool Workflows is a fast, extensible way for developers to build cron jobs, scheduled notifications, and ETL tasks. With Retool Workflows, you can write custom logic to define a series of tasks that connect, transform, and update your data, wherever it lives––from local databases to 3rd-party SaaS tools.
Retool Workflows allows you to:
• Identify how you want your workflow to run—we support either a cron schedule or triggering with a webhook.
• Integrates with any database or API. Just grab a block, query your resources (APIs, databases, etc.), and immediately preview the data your workflow will use.
• Chain together blocks to form sequences of actions. Write code to transform and join data, import libraries (like MomentJS), and write complex conditionals for complete control of your workflow logic. Or,
• Use pre-built logic blocks, like Loop, Branch, and Filter, to cut down on boilerplate for common code logic.
• Deploy your workflow to begin sending notifications, transforming data, escalating incidents, assigning tasks, and more. If you can write it in JavaScript, you can run it on Workflows.
Why we built Retool Workflows
We started Retool to help developers build internal tools faster—starting with a faster way to build a custom UI for any internal process. But that’s not the only software we want to help teams build.
Our customers have often told us they can’t find a fast way to automate custom processes for their business. Things like responding to customer behavior in real time or moving data across tools still feel like a burden.
That’s because the options available today are suboptimal for developers: you either spend a ton of time spinning up an EC2 instance to run and maintain yet another cron job, or you turn to a no-code tool that gets you 80% of the way there (but leaves you unable to customize the critical last 20%).
Retool Workflows helps you embrace the flexibility of code while getting rid of the tedious parts, like provisioning infra, authenticating resources, or combing through API docs. We’ve helped early customers from over 200 businesses, like Scratchpad and RE/MAX, build business-critical automations faster and at scale—and we’d be really excited to hear what you think!
Getting started
If you want to start using Retool Workflows, you can sign up for free today at retool.com/workflows. Every Retool plan now also includes 1GB of data per month. We want all developers to use Retool Workflows, and around 90% of our early access users have been able to run their production Workflows within the 1 GB limit for free.
To learn more, check out our docs and launch blog post.
Drop us any feedback or questions below. We're excited to see what you'll build with Retool Workflows!
Jamie
@vedika_jain@rrhoover thanks a lot ryan for the support, and yeah i read @vedika_jain's post on the stack. Long time @vedika_jain would love to catch up and show you around Workflows
Thanks @rrhoover for the support! Excited to have such great feedback from the Product Hunt community today as we continue to build on this product. @vedika_jain great post by the way - would love to see if we can help with some of the limitations of Zapier with Workflows?
@igaganprajapati Thanks Gagan! We spent a lot of time thinking about feedback loops and how to get users from idea to working Workflow as fast as possible!
It was challenging convincing the engineering team to switch to Retool for our internal dashboard, and this is just another push in the right direction. We've always had a convoluted scraping set up and this should hopefully ease the transition :-)
@virenmohindra Thanks Viren - hopefully having everything live in the same ecosystem and avoiding tool sprawl will help make the case. Would love to partner with you to help build some of the scraping in Workflows!
I see myself using this. However, unsure if the demo highlights the best of practices.. It starts by selecting all from a database and then uses a separate javascript module to filter by date. It would be a lot more economical to filter by date in the Query and just return what you need in the list. Or am I failing to see the need for that extra step? 🧐
I do find the views very readable and easy for me to work with. I am currently using n8n.io and I'm wondering how you differentiate yourself and why should someone use Retoll vs n8n?
@florin_biro Great question! The goal here was to show that you can use whatever you're most comfortable with JS or SQL. But yes I prefer SQL so would mostly just add a where clause and do it in that initial query.
My understanding is that n8n is focused on being an open-source Zapier alternative that empowers business users to build automations. We build Workflows for developers and see it more as an alternative to writing cron jobs from scratch. The product really focuses on code when you need it, GUI when you don't. Would love to get your feedback on Retool vs n8n when you try it out?
@cuffejamie thanks for the explanation! I'll definitely give it a try and talk about your launch on SaaS Addicts live stream next Monday. I like what Retool is doing and have been talking about your previous launches.
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