Pricing and user types

Both Appsmith and Retool offer free plans. Retool’s free plan includes unlimited web and mobile apps with up to 5 users, a UI builder, basic integrations, and custom components. Appsmith’s free plan offers additional features such as public app embeds, unlimited workflow runs (Retool caps workflow runs at 500 per month), and versioning with Git (up to 3 repositories). Retool, on the other hand, includes 5GB of data storage.

The paid plans differ in how they handle user types. Appsmith uses a unified pricing model where all users—both editors and end-users—are charged the same rate per user. Retool, however, distinguishes between three types of users: editors (who develop the apps), internal end-users (who use the apps internally), and external users (who are outside of the organization). This tiered pricing provides greater flexibility but can cause some confusion, as the distinction between external and internal users is not always clearly defined.

Permission management

Both Retool and Appsmith feature robust permission management systems that allow for detailed control over applications, pages, workflows, data sources, environments, and queries. While there are differences in how these permissions are configured and named (e.g., "Permission Groups" in Retool versus "Roles" in Appsmith), the core functionality remains the same: app owners can create groups of users with edit, delete, create, and read permissions for various resources within the app.

Both platforms also support multi-tenancy, enabling per-row permission management based on user attributes to ensure secure and customized access control.

Custom components

Appsmith provides a built-in Custom Widget feature that allows you to write your own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code directly within the Appsmith app. It also supports the import of third-party libraries, giving developers flexibility in creating custom solutions.

Retool also supports the import of third-party libraries but does not include a built-in custom component editor. Instead, it allows you to code your own components in React and then import them into your Retool app, providing a different approach to customization.

Themes

Appsmith has a built-in Theme Editor with a bunch of pre-made theme templates. It lets you tweak the colors of UI components, typography, borders, and shadows.

Retool also has a Themes Editor that’s available in all plans. You can adjust the color scheme, typography, and borders for UI components. If you’re on the Business or Enterprise plan, you get extra features like global parameters, custom CSS, and even the option to manage themes through the Retool API. All in all, both tools give you a pretty basic set of controls for managing themes, but it’s enough for prototypes and internal tools.

Branding

Both Appsmith and Retool let you create branded apps. In Retool, you can customize things like the header and background color, menu bar, favicon, and more on the Business and Enterprise plans. But unless you’re on the Enterprise plan, there will still be a floating Retool logo in the bottom left corner of the app, which might be a dealbreaker for some client-facing apps.

Retool also allows you to add custom branding at multiple user journey touchpoints, like email invitations, the login screen, and the app itself. Appsmith, on the other hand, covers only the login page and the app.

Integrations

Aside from the sheer number of available integrations (Retool offers more and even supports some niche ones like CouchDB, while Appsmith focuses more on cloud-native databases like NeonDB, Fauna, and Supabase), the tools are pretty similar in functionality. Both can integrate with most relational databases like MySQL, NoSQL tools, external APIs such as Gmail, and also let you connect to custom APIs using REST and GraphQL.

One key difference is that Retool provides a built-in SQL database with an editor that lets you do spreadsheet-like editing, CSV imports, filtering, and search. It’s handy for quick prototyping or lightweight projects. Appsmith, on the other hand, doesn’t have a built-in database.

External API

Retool provides an external API that allows third-party services to interact with Retool apps. It supports all standard methods, including GET, POST, DELETE, and PATCH, and offers a wide range of endpoints for managing users, user attributes, permissions, workflow runs, and more. Appsmith, on the other hand, does not offer an external API for third-party integrations.

Deployment

Both Retool and Appsmith offer self-hosted and cloud deployment options. For both tools, the self-hosted option allows deployment in your virtual private cloud (VPC) or behind your virtual private network (VPN), which is essential for companies in industries like healthcare and fintech to ensure compliance with regulations. Standard deployment options include Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and other services using Docker containers.

Releases & version control

Appsmith, like Retool, provides basic release control functionality, including support for multiple environments, custom branches, multiple save-points, and history. Both Retool and Appsmith also allow you to connect your apps with Git repositories such as GitHub, GitLab, and AWS CodeCommit, enabling a seamless experience for developers.

Security and Data Privacy

Both Retool and Appsmith provide a high level of security and data privacy, offering self-hosted options, encryption, role-based controls, multi-factor authentication, OAuth and SAML support, and IP whitelisting. Both platforms are also SOC 2 certified and compliant with GDPR and HIPAA.

However, it’s worth noting that anything other than self-hosted deployment can introduce risks, as demonstrated by an incident where Retool was targeted in a phishing attack.

Jet Admin - no-code-first internal and external app builder

Jet Admin strikes a sweet spot between functional flexibility and ease of use, catering to tech-savvy non-developers, citizen developers, and developers (yes, you anywhere in the app). It allows for building pixel-perfect, on-brand apps with external clients, such as client and vendor portals, category management apps, etc., with direct Figma export and a pixel-perfect in-app drag-and-drop builder.

Unlike Retool and Appsmith, Jet Admin has a separate “Client Portals” pricing that scales much better with a large number of users compared to Retool.

As for the building experience, Jet Admin provides a lot of out-of-the-box functions that you don’t need to code: variable referencing, formulas, conditional logic, complex filtering, and auto-generated CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) are done through a point-and-click interface with the option to extend it with JavaScript.