Retool Workflows: Cron, but Better

> That’s why we don’t believe in low/no-code tools: they get you to 50% of what you want quickly, but you generally aren’t able to customize the last 50%, and have to build from scratch to get to an ideal outcome.

Agree - low-code software has tons of problems that all stem from things not being expressible in code (hard to version control, hard to do code reviews, too much vendor lock-in, etc).

It's interesting to see Retool say this in a blog post, since their core offering (the UI builder) is built as a proprietary low-code platform with an underlying domain-specific language. I co-founded a company called Airplane.dev which takes a much more code-based approach to building UIs, workflows, and other internal tools due to these pain points with existing low-code platforms.

With this launch it seems like Retool is taking some design cues from Airplane (or maybe just independently coming to the same conclusions). We've had a code-based Workflow/Cron tool for about a year now. I'm excited to play with Retool's version and see how it compares.

> Sometimes it's faster to solve a problem with a few lines of code. All Workflows blocks are code at their core, so you can always use dot notation to pull up autocomplete menus, trigger queries with /, and expand blocks to larger IDEs.

Excited to see this! I am quite fed up with pure no-code software. I love the idea of being able to write code so I can fully control what's happening.

Unfortunately even if this were 1000x better than Power Automate, my (large) company would never switch. We're just too invested in MS.

With Microsoft slowly providing utilities for everything, how do companies compete now?

Does any no/low code software do pub/sub well? I would like to have data update live but have hit kinda a roadblock for a certain use case

Just signed up

very nice