Appsmith vs Retool: what their users struggle with

Not a verdict and not a star rating: the problems users of Appsmith and Retool describe in public, side by side, each one linked to its source (as of 2026-10-30).

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	Appsmith	Retool
Recent reports compared	12	18
Recurring themes	0	6
Public source threads	61	26
Pain points	8	12
Feature requests	3	2
Workarounds	0	0
Switching reasons	1	4
Reports rated “Causes churn”	0	1

Every count in this table is of open reports in the recent window (Appsmith since 2023-10, Retool since 2023-10); older and fixed reports are not counted. The counts measure how much public discussion exists for each product, not which is better: a popular tool collects more reports.

Problems mostly raised about Appsmith

Workflows are paywalled so user cannot evaluate them before paying · Pricing & plans · Annoyance
Restore can misidentify the most recent backup · Reliability & bugs · Annoyance
Cloud MCP sessions fail across replicas · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
REST queries fail when response headers exceed 8 KB · Integrations · Blocks work
Oracle queries strip semicolons inside string literals · Integrations · Blocks work

Problems mostly raised about Retool

Pricing undermines SaaS free-tier margins · Pricing & plans · Annoyance
Building and editing tools takes too much manual work · UI & usability · Annoyance
Per-user pricing is costly for teams · Pricing & plans · Annoyance
Slow, ineffective support makes issues harder to resolve · Support · Annoyance
App overhead makes quick dashboard checks cumbersome · Performance · Annoyance

Go further

Open Appsmith and Retool in the compare tool to filter by area and severity, Appsmith alternatives, Retool alternatives, or the state of low-code and internal tools.

How the data is built. A theme is a group of reports about the same problem; unique means not matched to a theme on the other product.