Retool, the leading development platform for business software, is launching the GA of Retool Workflows, a building block-based automation tool engineered to help developers accelerate their business processes.
The automation landscape is filled with low- and no-code products that promise efficiency in conjunction with ease of use. However, many of these solutions end up unable to scale or brittle to maintain, according to Retool. In the same vein, many developer-first tools may offer agility, but neglect to incorporate maintenance and governance components.
Retool Workflows was developed to address these obstacles that developers face, centralizing thousands of automations within a single pane of glass, accompanied by Retool’s tracking and management practices.
“No-and low-code automation tools often do more harm than good,” said Jamie Cuffe, product lead at Retool. “Automating your business can unlock a world of possibilities, but building isolated, one-off automations is not the answer. Teams eventually struggle to maintain and scale their creations without developer assistance. Retool Workflows directly addresses both challenges. We help developers minimize development and maintenance time, so they can build more automations right from the start. And we provide a central hub for automations that can be securely monitored, maintained, and scaled over time.”
Retool Workflows features a code-first, building block concept evoked through a visual canvas. Developers can visualize their logic with a series of blocks (or, interconnected queries), further contextualized with unique, custom business logic writable into each block.
The solution allows developers to query from any data source or API, including numerous pre-built connectors for popular tools—such as OpenAI. Developers benefit from using programming languages already familiar to them, as Retool Workflows natively supports JavaScript, SQL, and Python. Retool Workflow also allows developers to import any library in any IDE.
Logs are explorable at both the workflow and block level for rapid debussing. Developers can access historical data for the input and output of each stage, enabling them to find the exact point at which an error has occurred.
Retool Workflows is integrable with Slack or email, sending notifications of failure or exception to your desired location. The solution also offers custom error-handling, where developers can set automatic retries with custom time intervals, backoff, and pipe logs to external monitoring tools.
Security comes out-of-the-box for Retool Workflows, offering full audit logs, source control, dev and prod environments, per user and per workflows permissions, and more. For even more enhanced security, the solution can be self-hosted within your own VPC, keeping data inside your own network.
“We needed an efficient way to translate product data in our warehouse into timely, insightful reporting in Slack,” said Joel McLean, director of product growth at REMAX. “With Retool Workflows, my team can easily configure our resources in one place and focus only on writing the logic unique to our business.”
To learn more about Retool Workflows, please visit https://retool.com/.