Status of multi-player editing in Retool self-hosted 2025-Q3 release

💬 Self Hosted Retool
1

1) My goal:

Our team wants to upgrade

  • from self-hosted 3.196 (2025-Q2 stable)
  • to self-hosted 3.253 (2025-Q3 stable)

We are also interested in activating multi-player editing, but only if this is robust.

2) Issue:

There's different information available regarding the status of multi-player editing:

The changelog suggests that multiplayer would be on:

Removed

  • Removed the Disable Multiplayer toggle from the app settings menu.

The helm chart indicates that multiplayer should not be used:

multiplayer:
  # Enable this to use Retool's experimental multiplayer editing feature.
  # This feature is not ready for production use; please check with the Retool team before enablement.

@Erin_Masatsugu suggests that it might be good to reach out first:

Question: What is the status of mult-player for self-hosted in 3.253?

  • Is it on by default?
  • If not, is it robust enough to be enabled?
  • Should we have a call first?

3) Retool version & hosting setup (Docker, K8s, cloud provider, etc.):

self-hosted on GKE via Retool Helm Chart

2

Hi @michael_h ,

Thanks for reaching out!

I apologize that the documentation for multiplayer on self-hosted instances is a bit confusing -- we are working on that now!

To answer your questions:

  • Multiplayer editing is supported on 3.253.0, but it is opt-in / disabled by default
  • To enable this feature, you'll have to enable the enableMultiplayerEditingOrgWide feature flag as well as update your infrastructure to support it.
  • This should be straightforward if you are already using our Helm chart -- there are further instructions here.

Best,
Erin

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3

Hi @Erin_Masatsugu

thanks a lot of the quick response. The extra instructions are super helpful!

If I read this correctly - there are three steps:

  1. We prepare our infrastructure (multi-player service + ingress/routing) -> installation-wide change
  2. Retool activates the feature flag -> org-wide change
  3. We activate the beta feature -> space-wide change

So after step 1 and step 2, we could safely test multi-player editing in a dedicated space, without affecting other spaces? The other spaces just wouldn't make use of the api/multiplayer route?

All the best
Michael

4

Hi Michael,

I believe there is no separate step 2, you can enable the feature for your space yourself. But let me know if you have trouble there. And yes, if the flag is disabled for a space, they simply won't make requests to /api/multiplayer.

Best,
Erin

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5

Hey Erin,

quick update: everything went well :grinning:

We've expedited the multi-player activation and already performed it on 3.196 (before the upgrade to 3.253)

  • Our ops team performed the infra changes and restarted all pods
  • In Settings > Beta, there was not yet a switch to enable multi-player
  • The ops team reached out to support, and got a feature flag activated on Retool side
  • We've also bumped to the latest version (3.196.26) which again restarted all pods
  • In Settings -> Beta, there is now a switch "Multiplayer: enable org-wide"
  • We've activated this in one of our spaces, and multiplayer works well :tada: - it is only activated in this space, which is exactly what we wanted. So, the copy on this switch makes it look a little bit more scary, than it actually is. It seems to activate space-wide, not org-wide. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks again for your help
Michael

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6

Thanks so much for letting us know!

And for anyone else reading this, yes that sounds right -- on 3.196, an additional step is needed on the Retool side to toggle a flag so that you can toggle the Multiplayer: enable org-wide switch (which as you noted is a per-space control).

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