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Retool Workflows — Visual workflow automation, now with code
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
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@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?
This looks POWERFUL. Well done, team. I'll play with it to get a feel for how it can add to our workflows at Weekend Fund.
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.
@florin_biro Awesome thanks! Happy to chat more / help out with the live stream - feel free to email me at jamie@retool.com
Can be a powerful tool for devs.
@binay_singh2 Do You want to check this out?
@binay_singh2 @gauravgoyal_gg Appreciate the support - hopefully way less boilerplate for devs!
Thanks @gauravgoyal_gg ! @binay_singh2 happy to chat if we can help get you up and running
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
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!
Thanks @virenmohindra ! Would love to learn more about your scraping use case?
@cuffejamie This is an amazing feature — I've been looking for something like this for quite a while! Excellent work
Where's the best place to report bugs / get support? Do you have a Discord or Slack?
I like how this is empowering devs to take on a newer, flexible zapier like product. Congrats on the launch!
Thanks @amol_walvekar - we'd love to hear how you use it - it should provide a lot more flexibility!
This is a game changer 🚀 Have been playing with workflows beta for a while and I've moved most of my heavy automations from make/zapier to Retool. Great work team!
@cuffejamie Congrats!!
Do you think that automation can help improve the process of working with visuals?
I've been using Retool workflows since the private beta! If you're comfortable with SQL/REST APIs, I'd totally recommend this over Zapier or IFTTT due to its extensibility.
I work at a 30-person startup and we use this for everything from reporting on our telemetry to automatic labeling in our project management. We can spin quick schedule-based or webhook-based automation instead of maintaining our own infrastructure/webhooks/cron/serverless functions.
@bpmct Thanks so much for all your helpful feedback throughout the beta. You helped make Workflows the product it is today!
Congrats on the launch @cuffejamie and the Retool team! Thanks for offering a discount for startups, we just got approved and are excited to give you guys a try. Especially now that you have Workflows, maybe we can move off of Zapier and get everything into Retool (:
@celiineee Awesome - definitely let us know if there's anything we can help with as you get spun up. Would also love to hear any feedback as you tackle more complex use cases beyond Zapier.
Congrats on the launch, we have been using Retool Workflows for some time and it is amazing what you can do with it. It really expands the possibilities where other automation platforms just didn't cut it for our needs. We need robust but flexible workflows. Retool gives us this ability and consolidates our apps and workflows in one platform! Excited for more to come here!
@zchaitman Thanks so much for all your helpful feedback throughout the beta. You all helped make Workflows the product it is now!
Congratulations!! on the launch. This looks great. It will really cut the time of development.
@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!
Thanks @vladnicula - we definitely took some inspiration from Unreal Engine Blueprints!
@vladnicula The design lead on this project @kkga_ and I are big fans of Unreal Engine. Lots of great primitives with a different application
This has truly changed how we do certain things at LeadGenius. As someone who has followed Retool this is a great add and powerful in the right hands!
@stefan_cvrkotic Thanks so much for all your helpful feedback throughout the early beta. You helped make Workflows the product it is today!
Been using these workflows for a while now in the private beta and starting to migrate most/all of our existing Zapier integrations into it. Much more flexible and extensible than the pre-canned Zaps are but only if you're comfortable with SQL queries and some basic javascript. Ideal companion to our existing Retool internal apps, congrats on the launch
Thanks @olha_kurinna - we'd love to hear your feedback once you've given it a try!
My teammates and I are big fans of Retool Workflows! We've been able to fully automate lots of manual processes since getting Beta access to the Workflows feature a few months ago. Much like the normal Retool App Building interface, you can easily introduce advanced logic by writing custom JS code, but you can also easily implement simple workflows w/o needing much coding expertise.
Congrats Retool team! We've built several Retool Apps as a minimalist MDM solution to compliment Snowflake. Now we're using Retool Workflows to jump-start several projects that would have otherwise landed in our data engineering backlog. Workflows initially appealed to us as a quick way to build data-driven Slack alerts from Snowflake queries. Once we saw how easy it is to create Workflows, we built out a few other API integrations in Retool.
Picking the right tools is imperative and I'm happy to say that ReTool workflows has delivered a huge ROI for us, as a start-up picking the right tools, with excellent cost-benefit ratio is imperative and ReTool has absolutely knocked it out the park with the workflows pricing.
The tool is excellent and having automated our most critical workflows we are continuing to discover new ways to evolve our tech stack and automate many repetitive tasks, securely and safely as workflows through the ReTool platform.
Keep up the great work ReTool
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