Ask HN: Anybody used Retool for production, user-facing app?

I spent a lot of time looking at options in this space for a similar need 1-2 years ago. I really wanted to use Retool but Retool’s pricing and lock in at the time just wasn’t appealing. A few other options I looked at were:

* Plasmic (open source)

* Jet Admin (proprietary)

* Budibase (open source)

* Appsmith (open source)

And a few others. Most had limitations around our need of multi tenancy/team oriented backend, or were too oriented towards internal tools, and I was worried about data lock in with the proprietary ones.

Ultimately I chose to go with Rails with Bullet Train. But this was right before LLMs became kind of the norm to hack stuff together. If I were to choose today, I’d probably pick Plasmic with some LLM hacked together TypeScript backend for a good balance between low effort dev velocity and future proofing, maybe with a BaaS like Supabase+Auth0. All the LLMs seem to be trained on a TypeScript-shaped shallow stack, and static typing gives a bit more protection against LLMs chasing the dragon.

What were your thoughts on Budibase?

I use Budibase for a few projects. I chose it after deciding I couldn't accept Retool's pricing and that I wanted something open source. I have only a few minor complaints:

- The SQL Server plugin is a little halfbaked. It doesn't work properly with failover clustering and I had to punch in the IP address for a specific primary node, which then breaks when the cluster fails over to a different primary node. The "port" field is broken and you have to leave it blank or you get a type conversion error in their connection code. Going through a REST API seems to be the more well-trodden path.

- Google login in the open source edition is clunky, and there's no good way to tell users to use it. There's a separate pair of login/password textboxes on the same page that draws the user's attention; we have to teach users to click on the Google login button which then opens in a new window. In our case we don't even need authentication, but there's no way to remove it and offer a login-free experience.

- You can't really hide that you're running in Budibase. Despite my best efforts, my users call all my apps "Budibase" instead of the actual name that I gave to them. And nobody knows how to pronounce "Budibase"--native speakers tend to come up with "bootybase" instead of "buddybase."

The development experience is delightful. I really like it. I wish I could design all my full-code UIs in Budibase rather than having it attached to a low-code platform.