Retool Announces General Availability of Retool for External Apps

The global leader in developer tools for internal business applications now offers a long-awaited platform for building external-facing apps, already being implemented at hundreds of companies.

SAN FRANCISCO--()--Retool, the leading developer-focused software development platform, today announced the general availability of Retool for External Apps, the easiest way to build rich interactive portals and business applications for customers, vendors, and partners in hours (instead of months). Retool is used by thousands of companies from Fortune 10s to growth-stage startups including Airbnb, Amazon, Brex, Doordash, NBC, Mercedes, Rippling, and Plaid. With its roots in enabling businesses to build custom applications that power a company’s internal operations, Retool is now extending its expertise to help businesses create customized software applications for users outside of their corporate firewall.

“Shipping software to external users means builders have to consider a higher level of customer experience in the areas of design, onboarding, and security. Security considerations become paramount with login, password reset flows, and granular permissions,” said Antony Bello, Senior Product Manager, Retool. “Retool for External Apps puts design flexibility and customization at the forefront so that customers can easily build white labeled apps for external users without sacrificing security or user experience.”

Efficient Application Building at Scale

Retool for External Apps offers several key features designed to meet the demands of modern businesses:

  • Embed Retool apps anywhere: Embed Retool apps into your existing applications and easily pass data between Retool and your web app using Retool’s React and brand-new JavaScript SDKs.
  • White labeled portals: Build portals that your external users actually want to use, complete with your own branding, granular permissions and built-in user management.
  • Custom product pages: You can now replace Retool’s out of the box login, reset password, claim invite, 403, and 404 pages with your own customized Retool pages to customize the user experience end-to-end.
  • Custom invite and onboarding flows: Use Retool Workflows to send fully customized emails from your email provider and domain of choice.

Building good software to enhance competitive advantage

Following traditional development practices, it is time consuming and often cost-prohibitive for businesses to develop good (usable, reliable, and performant) software applications that may not fit into their product roadmap, even if said applications are essential to running the business. Companies make do with poor fitting, off the shelf applications, spreadsheets, or nothing at all. Retool for External Apps is the means to expedite shipping customer-facing software and opening up new revenue opportunities for businesses.

  • Greenly utilizes Retool for External Apps to quickly build their customer onboarding experience across a myriad of different industries, and accelerated their time-to-deployment by 3x for customer-facing apps.
  • OrangeTheory leverages Retool for External Apps to empower its more than 1,600 studio managers globally by replacing their legacy in-house CRM and providing tools to drive studio performance, while reducing ship time from 3 weeks to mere hours.
  • Proga Digital helped their clients deploy applications to thousands of contractors in the field by building a contractor portal with Retool for External Apps to manage assigned open opportunities, upload documents, and more.

“If you're starting from a legacy application and you want to be able to iterate on the front end experience of using the application, I would suggest that you try this,” said Matthieu Vegreville, COO and Co-founder of Greenly. “Typically, we divided the time it took to push a front-end experience by three after switching to Retool. That reduced the time between having an idea and trialing that idea, which is key for faster learnings from customers.”

Businesses interested in utilizing Retool for External Apps to build customized customer-facing applications at scale can visit retool.com/solutions/external-apps.

About Retool

Retool is the leading development platform for building business software. Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, and Brex use custom-built Retool apps to solve their biggest business challenges. To learn more, visit retool.com.

Contacts

press@retool.com

Contacts

press@retool.com