Today we announced that we’re expanding beyond internal tools so you can build nearly any software for your business with Retool, including dashboards, workflows, and features for your customers, partners, vendors, and more.
With this launch, we’re adding two new products to help you:
Ship a secure, custom portal: Build and host portals for your customers, partners, and vendors fully on Retool with Retool Portals which manages signup, authentication, and permissions out of the box.
Augment existing software: Quickly add data and CRUD functionality to an existing app or portal with Retool Embed.
Both Retool Portals and Retool Embed are now available across Business and Enterprise plans.
To learn more about how Embed and Portals are changing the way you can build with Retool, check out the blog post. You can also read the docs to embed your first Retool app or build an end-to-end portal on Retool.
I agree - i am not really sure what is different? Don't fully understand how a portal is different than a normal app that i would share with users?
How does licensing work? Does this mean i could send a link to 100 people and they could all sign up and use the app at no cost? I'm sure that's not the case...but just looking for some clarification here on what the difference/benefits are.
From what I've learned, every user that has a login handled by Retool's authentication is considered a "End user" and will thus be billed accordantly on your plan.
They did provide some more detail at Developer Day (@PatrickMast's link.)
But it does seem that as of now (unless I missed something), that there really isn't anything different other than the new Branding stuff which gives the end users a different view on things for sure.
There are plans to make user management easier - users could self enroll and you would have an approval pipeline so 1000 accounts don't suddenly show up on your bill.
We'll see what else they have in store going forward.
Thanks for the questions, and hope I can shed some more light here. In relation to Public Apps, where you can share (or embed) a link to an unauthenticated app to anyone, Portals lets you take the existing Retool feature set (components, login, auth, permissions, branding) and make it more accessible for external use cases.
There are a few core changes that we made to let you build these portals on Retool Cloud:
Every org now gets their own login at subdomain.retool.com/auth/login (previously, the only entry point was through login.retool.com)
And finally, we revamped our Branding settings to let you brand your email invitations and key surfaces on Retool
We're making more investments into this area to support authenticated access to Retool, for any type of user. Would love to hear your feedback on what we can be improving for these use cases!
Hello! We are currently evaluating Retool Cloud, and it looks awesome!
A quick question - do we need to do something on our side to enable email customization?
UPDATE: Just found the email customization manu. If anyone else is looking for it - it's in the upper right corner of the branding "preview page".
And another question is about customizing the login screen. Is it possible to disable/hide the option for signing in with Google? As far as I can tell, we dont have the Google SSO enabled and yet the SIgn In with Google button is always present on the sign-in page.
Our use-case is a portal for a small number of external users and we dont want them to get confused.
Hey Alex! If you don't set Google SSO, we use Retool's Google OAuth Client instead, and don't have an option to remove it entirely. Are you able to set it with your Google OAuth Client, if you have it?
First off, I'd like to say that it's fantastic to see the recent feature update. I've gone through the accompanying blog post and the documentation, but I'm having a bit of difficulty figuring out how to set it up for my specific use case.
Here's what I'm aiming for:
Workspace Setup for Role: I want to configure a Retool workspace specifically for a role named 'agent'.
Company Assignment for Each Agent: Each agent would be associated with a 'company', which in our context, is a B2B entity within Retool.
Expected Workflow: Ideally, a company would have multiple agents. When these agents utilize the Retool app, their specific company ID should drive their interactions and the components they interact with.
The challenge: When a user signs in, I imagine we'd need to initiate a database query to fetch the user's associated 'company'. This company ID is assigned externally, in another application, which presumably the company admin has access to.
End Goal: Our vision is to develop a portal where users can sign in, get associated with a company (akin to a franchisee), and then operate the Retool dashboard from the perspective of that company. I'm leaning towards setting up a dedicated company database and manually assigning users to their respective companies.
Has anyone implemented something similar or have insights on the best way to approach this? I'd greatly appreciate any guidance or best practices!
