Software Alternatives & Reviews

Active Admin VS Retool

Compare Active Admin VS Retool and see what are their differences

Active Admin logo Active Admin

The administration framework for business critical Ruby on Rails applications.

Retool logo Retool

Build custom internal tools in minutes.
  • Active Admin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30
  • Retool Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04

Active Admin videos

Harry Potter and the Active Admin

Retool videos

Retool - Logic Review

More videos:

  • Review - #Worth?! Ep.12 - Retool (Gameplay / Review)
  • Demo - February NY Enterprise Tech Meetup: Retool Demo

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Active Admin and Retool)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
No Code
8 8%
92% 92
Developer Tools
6 6%
94% 94
Productivity
12 12%
88% 88

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Active Admin and Retool

Active Admin Reviews

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Retool Reviews

React UI Components Libraries: Our Top Picks for 2023
Retool offers extensive documentation and support. Its support is available on its Discourse forum, Slack (if you are a Retool power user), Intercom for live chat, and dedicated support for enterprise customers.
Source: kinsta.com
ILLA Cloud vs. Retool vs. Bubble - Unveiling the Best Low-Code Platforms
In the quest for the best low-code platform, Retool, Bubble, and ILLA Cloud all offer unique features and capabilities. While Retool shines with its self-hosted option and Bubble contributes to the open-source community, ILLA Cloud stands out as a powerful and flexible low-code platform. With its comprehensive feature set, affordable pricing models, and self-hosted...
Top 9 Low-Code Tools for 2023 for low-code development
Retool is a powerful low-code platform that enables developers to build internal tools and apps with ease. It offers a drag-and-drop interface and a wide range of pre-built components for seamless development. Retool integrates with various data sources and external services, allowing users to fetch data, perform calculations, and display results in real-time. Its...
Superblock vs Retool: A Comprehensive Comparison for Low-code development Platforms
Retool caters to a diverse audience, including developers, product managers, and business professionals. Developers benefit from Retool's low-code capabilities, allowing them to build applications quickly without sacrificing customization. Product managers can leverage Retool to streamline internal workflows and enable teams to be more productive. Business professionals can...
Top React component libraries (2021 edition)
Style editors — Style editors are available across all Retool plans and allow you to customize your Retool components within the Retool UI by editing the style properties (e.g., color, border-radius) of any component.
Source: retool.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Retool should be more popular than Active Admin. It has been mentiond 89 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Active Admin mentions (10)

  • Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?
    Can you clarify what's the "tremendous value" you're getting out of the Django admin? At Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ we are using Active Admin https://activeadmin.info/ for Ruby on Rails, which seems quite similar to the Django admin. In my experience, it's mostly useful as a fairly basic read-only view of what's in the database. In Rails, it's so easy to whip together a custom view that we tend to do... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • View code coverage (active_admin and orther .arb file)
    For those who know [https://activeadmin.info/](https://activeadmin.info/) it uses a file format [https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre](https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre). Source: over 1 year ago
  • Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster – Avo
    Very neat! My first thought was that this was a competitor to https://bullettrain.co/. Looking into it a bit more, it seems more aimed at building admin panels than whole apps. I guess it competes against tools like https://activeadmin.info/? - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • From partials to ViewComponents: writing reusable front-end code in Rails
    We briefly considered migrating to a full-grown Rails admin interface, such as ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin, Administrate or Avo. We especially liked Avo which is built on a very modern stack similar to ours (Tailwind + Hotwire + ViewComponents). In the end, we didn’t go this route as we found some of the options a bit too restrictive (even though Avo is very flexible) and we did not feel like trying to amend it to our... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Easiest way to build a CRUD app
    I second Rails. It's incredibly polished and has really good gems to speed up dev. ActiveAdmin is a great gem if you need to quickly make an admin dashboard. It was useful when I had a small consultancy. https://activeadmin.info/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
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Retool mentions (89)

  • The End of Airplane.dev
    I am building https://github.com/claceio/clace and https://retool.com/, allow automation of operational tasks through a web interface while also allowing fully custom web apps. Clace also works great for running simple web apps locally. Building and deploying a web app should be as easy and common for backend engineers as creating a CLI app is. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • FastUI: Build Better UIs Faster
    This seems to mainly be useful for spinning up quick and dirty internal tools. But for that use-case, isn't it easier to use something visual and established like Retool (https://retool.com/) or that generates nice react code, like MUI Toolpad (https://mui.com/toolpad/)? - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Internal tools often make bad startup ideas
    There are obvious counterexamples, like https://retool.com, which is a successful company with solid revenue and multi-B valuation. > software engineers — who are often influencers in a purchase decision — are strongly incentivized to build instead of buy Regardless of what software engineers would rather do, pressure from real users trumps pressure from internal users. This especially true in startups, whose... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • YC: Requests for Startups
    I submitted an application for w24 that fits in the "Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools" category but wasn't accepted. I suspect my pitch probably needed work, and I also haven't started building at all yet and submitted as a solo-founder which it seems has less chance of being accepted. Here's the pitch and some details, in case anyone else is interested in the idea: > Supportal uses AI to... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    ReTool — Low-code platform for building internal applications. Retool is highly hackable. If you can write it with JavaScript and an API, you can make it in Retool. The free tier allows up to five users per month, unlimited apps and API connections. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Active Admin and Retool, you can also consider the following products

Jet Admin - Build business apps really fast

Airtable - Airtable works like a spreadsheet but gives you the power of a database to organize anything. Sign up for free.

Avo - Prevent human errors when implementing analytics

Bubble.io - Building tech is slow and expensive. Bubble is the most powerful no-code platform for creating digital products.

Forest Admin - Execute fast and at scale with no time wasted on internal tools developed in-house.

Appsmith - Appsmith is an open source web framework for building internal tools, admin panels, dashboards, and workflows.