Retool now supports the creation and assignment of user tasks in Workflows.
What’s a User Task?
User tasks are blocks in a workflow that require user input in order to proceed, and can be assigned at the group level. When triggered, a user task will pause a workflow mid-run to await a specific user action, such as submitting an approval form in a Retool app. Once the action has been taken, the workflow continues to execute, and can leverage the user task’s output in downstream logic. Watch the demo for a quick example!
User Tasks in Action
Before user tasks, doing approval processes in Retool required a ton from builders.
You would need to set up a new database to manage tasks’ state, create multiple apps to expose tasks to users, find a way to reference a permissions scheme, and string together multiple workflows to assign and notify users of tasks assigned to them.
Instead, user tasks in Workflows provide a built-in state machine to let builders create, assign, monitor, and update processes in flight.
Here’s what we’ve seen people build with user tasks so far:
Establishing IT approval flows to provision and audit user access to critical systems
Assigning urgent customer escalations to operational staff
Introducing human approval steps in AI-driven automations
Monitoring and completing multi-step compliance processes with internal stakeholders and external vendors
And now your use case!
Getting Started
User tasks will be available via a private beta starting the week of July 29th on cloud and in the Q3 stable release for self-hosted customers. Sign up here to get private beta access!
What’s everyone’s first project?! Comment below with ideas and questions!
We have so many user tasks we’re almost ashamed… and definitely overwhelmed by the complexity of managing our own custom task system. This is an awesome unexpected feature.
Quick note that the video above doesn’t play (for me at least), but the loom page is fine.
Thanks for your comment, @matei! Super excited to get this feature in your hands this week. Thanks for the callout as well -- replaced the Loom link, hopefully works okay for people now!
This looks really cool! We were literally just about to start building our own task system within Retool for some approval processes and escalations, so this is immediately useful. Would love to test it out as soon we can!
Love it when the timing works out like that @Ike2! Will be sending some onboarding information out this week to those who have signed up for the beta above, so definitely do if you haven't already!
Hi there @caffeine -- In the self-hosted context, the underlying data is stored in the externalized self-hosted Postgres database that underlies all Retool deployments. In the cloud context, the data is stored in a Retool-hosted Postgres database. If you have any specific data tenancy requirements for the state machine given your hosting style, would love to hear them!
Hi Vlad! In private beta, we aren't limiting access to user tasks based on plan at all. Definitely sign up if you haven't already!
Right now we are still in a stage of better understanding how our customers would like to leverage user tasks, and don't have strict guidance to offer on what, if anything, will be gated when we reach the GA stage. That being said, I feel confident that all plans will be able to access user tasks with some feature limits in place for non-ENT plans, so would encourage you to try it out!
Would love to try it out! I signed up for the private beta last week using the link under the demo video, but let me know if there's anything that I need to do. Thank you!
Let me know if you have any early feedback, eager to hear what you think!