I am currently on Retool Cloud, tested on latest version of Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers and I get the same.
After having left Retool for a period and now returning back to Retool, I must ask something.
But before I proceed I will say that Retool is in my opinion the best tool of its type. The UI is intuitive, the logic is simple, it has both Frontend and Backend tools, it is not limited only to building internal tooling for companies, AI can be fully disabled and pricing is reasonable, BUT there is a ‘but’.
Now forgive me for what comes next, its just that I find the UX so time wasting and frustrating, every 20-30 seconds I have to be refreshing the browser page to get it back to normal, to check if changes are saved, or to check if everything is where it should be the way it is meant to. So I need to know if I am the only one finding 5 different highly relevant issues per hour while building an App with Retool.
And before anyone starts jumping to conclusions: I have no automatic resource running, everything runs in a very controlled and strict order. Current app is a simplification of a previously existing app that had hundreds of resources put into only one page, and have now been moved to a few dozen pages, making everything more clear and easier to debug. So to say it clear: all issues are because of UX internal logic, not because of the app being built.
I am not looking for a solution, I am not requesting help, I have absolutely no hope in seeing the issues I describe fixed in the near future, and I will definitely not open support tickets or report a breakage or send feedback. Already tried it long ago. But maybe, just maybe it can have a long term positive impact.
These issues have already been reported many months ago, most have been answered that they are not reproducible, so devs can’t offer a solution, which forced me to leave Retool and start looking for another similar service (I found nothing else close to what Retool has to offer), and now I was hopping to see some improvements, and I feel sad to say that all issues have gotten worse (and its not just a figure of speech, the UX feels more unreliable, more intrusive, and more time wasting then before):
(I use the word ‘resource’ to refer to elements in the ‘Code’ section of Retool on the left side of Editing app, it is only to make it more clear when I speak about the code element, or the code that it contains)
- resources are suddenly empty, loose all content, configuration stays but code is gone. it happens as soon as I open a second browser tab to work in parallel on two different pages. Can’t say exactly what it triggers it, but clearly internal UX processes have a conflict. As I said almost 1 year ago: loosing data should never be possible, yet it still happens. An unreliable UX.
- the Save button bugs, showing back ‘Save’ after having saved. The issue with this is that it is the preliminary of the previous issue where all code is gone. If I do a browser full page refresh it seems that it has successfully saved although if I want to close that tab it will give a warning, plus combined with the issue above it forces me to refresh page to know if everything is ok. This happens each 3-5 saves, so it happens every 1-2 minutes, which is a lot! A broken UX.
- when typing code the editor cursor will jump to the end of line. It happens mostly when renaming functions or resources. I copying code from one page to another a lot so I am constantly renaming resources in code, so I am encountering this every few minutes. This is what I call an intrusive UX, manipulating text and cursor unrequested.
- when typing a resource name the editor cursor jumps to end of line. It happens always after duplicating a resource and the name clashes in the process of renaming that new resource. I am not trying to use same name for two different resources, I am simply renaming them to something different but during that edition for a second the name clashes with another resource and UX will start doing strange stuff. I am creating new resources or duplicating them a lot so this is very annoying. Again an intrusive UX.
- when typing a resource name the editor recovers original resource name. It happens just like in the previous issue, not so frequently only if the name clash stays there for a long period of time. And again I understand that two resources can not have same name, and it is not what I am trying to do, it is simply that I have many resources and when typing their name it happens to be the same as an existing one, only for a split second while I type next character, BUT before I manage to type the next character the UX has already done something weird. Again an intrusive UX.
- in the Resources List the ‘order manually’ is randomizing the list. My app is new, I have not tried to position resources in the list, yet my list is not following any common logic. Creating a new resource should position it by name, yet my list is entirely random. With 10-15 resources is not much of an issue, yet when the number of resources is bigger and I have to be constantly moving from one page to another, having to make those extra clicks to have my Resources List correctly ordered is annoying. There should be an option to make ‘order manually’ not be the default option for ordering the Resources List. I would like to always have resources ordered alphabetically, others might want different, so we should each be allowed to set preference about this. Since the default is displaying wrongly I call this yet again a broken UX.
- when copying resources from one page to another, it duplicates wrong resource instead of copying: I right click the resource I want to copy > then I go to the page where I want it copied > I open Resources List > right click on any existing resource to bring the contextual menu up > and click Paste: and instead of getting the resource I copied, I get a duplicate of the resource I right clicked to bring the contextual menu up. This is so stupidly broken, I mean someone has messed up big to allow this to happen!! If I Copy a resource and I instantly go and Paste it in another page why does it not do that?! I will give you a hint on how to trigger this bug: it will not happen if you first left click on the element in the Resource list that you are going to right click on. Does it make sense? You first have to do a left mouse click, before doing the right mouse click. The UX is broken in so many ways regarding the Resources List, what I see is that the selector marking the active resource is not reliable: it will many times show wrongly the active resource, or said with different words: I am editing a resources but selector is on a different resources. This incongruence might be related to the reason why Copy - Paste is not working properly. Again a broken UX.
- Right clicking on the Resources List should always bring the contextual menu up, but it only does when clicking on a item of the list, or if no item on the option to add a new resource.
- reshaping/resizing components using mouse its now extremely tedious. I click and drag and nothing happens, and I always end up using keyboard to move things instead of wasting 10-15 tries to do it by mouse. This was the first thing I noticed a few days ago when I opened Retool for the first time. It was like: “What the fuck, it’s not moving!! How can this be?! It’s just so obvious, how can they allow it?!”
- if a resource does not exist it will be removed from events when clicking to edit the event. Since I am copying resources and components from another app, sometimes the resources don’t exist when I go to edit the event related to the newly copied component. I understand the idea BUT since the app is perfectly aware of missing resources, and debug window clearly shows a message that a resource does not exist, why do you need to completely remove the reference to that resource? Leaving it there bothers nobody, and gives a clear debug information, while removing it makes my app transition a pain, because finding the missing resource by its name is easy, while finding it by having to first locate the component name is hard. Is this an intrusive UX or excessive automation?
- when browser first loads it will load old version of Retool, meaning browser cache breaking is wrong. In just a few days I got two times the message to refresh the page because of retool version, after having only opened browser just a few seconds ago. Not the end of the world but it is remarkable to see such a simple cache breaking logic fail.
- while the Output pane is very useful when testing/running a resource, I would like to have it minimized, and skip the extra step of constantly having to minimize it every time I click on a resources. This extra step is like 2-3 times per minute, so it really adds up fast to an already existing list of extra steps that I am forced to do. It should only make itself visible after a test/run, rest of the time is just eating space showing blank content.
- editing field Value of an Event, constantly makes cursor to jump forward. Specifically I am editing Event with Action = Set variable and Method = Set value, handlers for a component of type Table, its Row actions; but any input field that’s on the right side (the component options in the Inspector) and allows you to type dynamic code {{ }} will do the same. Here for the Table component it is just so extremely obvious: every second letter I type makes the cursor jump forward, obviously typing at the start/middle of the text, not at the end.
- Export to JSON and Export to Toolscript ZIP generates file with wrongly encoded characters. Spaces become %20 and ‘ - ‘ (space-space) becomes 20
- Changes are not there after refreshing, in fact changes made last DO exist but changes done some time ago do NOT, pure random. It makes no sense, at first it feels like I suddenly went back multiple steps/versions, but then I realized it is only specific components, and it comes back to normal after refreshing page multiple times. THIS IS BIG because I feel like I am wasting my time constantly doing same edits over and over again. I sometimes spot the regression, but sometimes it passes through and I just keep editing. Last time I reported this I received a simple answer saying that it is impossible. I do not know internal mechanism of how things are stored/saved on Retool cloud (and I don’t need to know), it is probably storing/saving each component separately, mixed with a poorly designed caching mechanism, I as a user end up loading an old version of the data, and doing same changes again and again. This will probably be the reason I leave Retool again, if I get this too frequently in the next few days, together with seeing my SQL queries completely empty after a very helpful assistant instructed me that it can not reproduce the issue.
And I insist, this is only to know if I am the only one encountering issues every 20-30 seconds?
And yes, all the issues except first and last one are easy to workaround, and I could just ignore them, but the fact that all of them happen so often, making them so obvious, makes me wonder if it’s only me wanting perfection or there truly is a problem in Retool governance.
Just like in 2025 you were constantly adding new features, while leaving existing features untouched, never fixing the issues they had, just pushing forward like a bulldozer making clear progression but at same time leaving many many things broken behind.
This is a highly opinionated post, with many issues in one, not meant for discussing the issues themselves, but rather if they are acknowledged by others and to what point these issues represent a problem in using Retool.
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