Retool

Raised as a usability problem by 19 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with Retool, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 19 complaints

Building charts requires dragging boxes and typing JavaScript snippets, which is tedious2026-07-30
Making table edits save requires jumping through hoops with handlers and queries2024-12-11
The UI is abysmal and the data model is inscrutable to users2024-07-03
Wiring UI to backend means writing SQL per table, button and screen, which seems unmanageable at scale2024-03-02
Product is feature rich but clunky with a steep learning curve2023-09-12
Simple tasks like adding a for-loop require learning a proprietary UI, causing cognitive overload2023-09-08
Can't add new fields, and CSV import forces mapping to nonexistent fields with unclear errors2023-03-31
List flickers blank for a moment when tapping update2023-01-20
Video exits fullscreen on rotation and can't re-enter fullscreen2023-01-19
Pages take 1-2 seconds to load because API calls run serially, making it unusable2022-07-29
Page views take over a second from Australia, making the tool unusable2022-07-28
Forced into a wrong branching model because git support is poorly designed2022-02-14
Felt slow and clunky to use, and didn't meet needs2021-04-12
Non-trivial apps become hard to manage and slow to interact with2020-10-21
Writing logic in the tiny web code editor box is clunky2020-10-20
Hard to audit code and understand how things fit together; interface is slow2020-10-20
Users logging in with Google get silently added to the company account, raising the price2020-05-07
Demo is busy and overwhelming; chat widget overlaps the sidebar and blocks functionality2017-06-09
Pressing Delete on a selected header does nothing; no obvious way to remove elements2017-06-09