Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Retool VS Backbone.js

Compare Retool VS Backbone.js and see what are their differences

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Retool logo Retool

Build custom internal tools in minutes.

Backbone.js logo Backbone.js

Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events
  • Retool Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • Backbone.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

Retool

Website
retool.com
$ Details
freemium $10.0 / Monthly (Startup)
Release Date
2017 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
California
Founder(s)
David Hsu
Employees
10 - 19

Retool features and specs

  • Speed of Development
    Retool allows developers to rapidly build internal tools with a drag-and-drop interface, reducing the time it takes to get functional applications up and running.
  • Integration Capabilities
    Retool supports integration with a wide range of databases, APIs, and other services, making it easier to connect different data sources and systems.
  • Customizability
    While Retool provides prebuilt components, it also allows for custom code and scripting, enabling developers to tailor applications to specific requirements.
  • Collaboration Features
    Retool supports collaborative features, such as sharing applications with team members and version control, making it easier to work in teams.
  • Security
    Retool provides robust security features, including access control and data encryption, to help protect sensitive information.

Possible disadvantages of Retool

  • Cost
    Retool can be relatively expensive compared to building internal tools from scratch or using some other platforms, potentially making it less accessible for smaller teams or startups.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, there can be a learning curve for new users who need to become familiar with its specific functionalities and scripting capabilities.
  • Customization Limitations
    Though Retool offers customizability, there might be certain limitations compared to fully bespoke solutions, impacting highly specific or complex use cases.
  • Dependency on Retool
    Relying heavily on Retool may create a dependency that could be problematic if the company changes its pricing, features, or discontinues services.
  • Performance
    For very large datasets or highly complex operations, performance can become an issue, as it is with many platform-based solutions.

Backbone.js features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Backbone.js is minimal and lightweight, which means it has a small footprint and adds very little overhead to your project.
  • Flexibility
    Backbone.js provides a flexible structure to developers by allowing them to build their own MVC or MVP architectures using models, views, collections, and routers.
  • Ease of Integration
    Backbone.js can be easily integrated with other libraries and frameworks, such as jQuery or underscore.js, enhancing its capabilities without much difficulty.
  • Large Community
    Backbone.js has been around for a long time, resulting in a large community and a plethora of plugins and extensions that can be leveraged.
  • Detailed Documentation
    The official site offers comprehensive documentation which includes tutorials, examples, and a detailed API reference, aiding developers to understand and utilize the library efficiently.

Possible disadvantages of Backbone.js

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    New developers might find Backbone.js difficult to learn due to its non-opinionated nature and lack of enforced structure.
  • Sparse In-Built Features
    Backbone.js provides only the basic building blocks, requiring developers to write more boilerplate code or rely on external libraries for additional functionalities.
  • Outdated
    As newer frameworks and libraries (like React, Vue, and Angular) have emerged with more robust features and better performance, Backbone.js has somewhat fallen out of favor in modern development practices.
  • Event Binding Complexity
    Managing event bindings in Backbone.js can become complex and sometimes messy in large applications, which can lead to difficult maintenance and debugging.
  • Limited Two-Way Data Binding
    Backbone.js does not provide two-way data binding out-of-the-box, unlike other frameworks such as Angular, necessitating additional code to sync views and models.

Retool videos

Retool - Logic Review

More videos:

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

Backbone.js videos

Introduction to Backbone.js

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to Backbone.js
  • Review - Backbone.js Code Review w Backbone.js Mentor Jonathon

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Retool and Backbone.js)
No Code
100 100%
0% 0
JavaScript Framework
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

Retool Reviews

Top 5 Dynobase alternatives you should know about - March 2025 Review
The choice ultimately depends on your environment and use case. Many teams use a combination of tools: for example, Dynomate for developers, and a Retool app for operations or support teams. By understanding the strengths of each alternative, you can select the tool (or combination of tools) that best integrates with your AWS workflow, making DynamoDB development smoother...
Source: www.dynomate.io
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...

Backbone.js Reviews

20 Next.js Alternatives Worth Considering
A veteran on the scene, Backbone.js is all about giving structure to your JavaScript-heavy applications. It’s standing the test of time, enabling you to keep your data logic and display logic neatly side by side, all while being lightweight.
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
Backbone.js is based on the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. The library supports seven components: Models, Views, Collections, Routers, Events, Sync, and Options. Backbone.js also provides an asynchronous communication layer that allows the application to communicate with a backend service.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Backbone.JS is a lightweight JavaScript library that provides a framework for developing structured and scalable web applications. It offers a set of tools for building client-side applications that interact with RESTful APIs. Backbone.JS is well-suited for developing single-page applications (SPAs) where most of the user interface is rendered in the browser, rather than...
Source: www.bocasay.com
20 Best JavaScript Frameworks For 2023
Backbone.js is a JavaScript-based framework that connects to an API via a RESTful JSON interface. Backbone.js is known for being small and light because it only requires jQuery and one JavaScript library, Underscore.js, to use the entire library.
Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development
Backbone JS is a JavaScript framework based on the MVP app design. As the name suggests, it acts as a strong backbone to your project. It is lightweight in nature and hence, is considered ideal for developing single-page applications. It offers a simplistic frontend and makes the best use of JavaScript functions.
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Retool should be more popular than Backbone.js. It has been mentiond 98 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.

Retool mentions (98)

  • Code or No Code? The AI Revolution in Web Development
    Retool – Low-code platform for business applications. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can't stop
    As mentioned by another poster, check out "Partner portals" section on https://retool.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • How to Build Internal Tools 100x Faster
    It is possible to speed up the development and delivery process for many internal applications by using no-code or low code tools. These vary in offerings from open source to SaaS, including popular ones like AirTable, BudiBase, Retool, NocoDB and others. These can all greatly help speed up delivery times. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Do you need a No Code tool for Firebase?
    There are some No Code tools for Firebase. Some of them are fully integrated, some of them use some limited functions of Firebase through their API. If a tool allows you to integrate with a REST API, you probably can use it. Some of them are: FlutterFlow, JetAdmin, Retool, Bubble, etc. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Visual Basic 6 rebuilt in C# – complete with form designer and IDE in browser
    >The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem. >Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options that can quickly get expensive. A RAD tool like... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
View more

Backbone.js mentions (17)

  • JavaScript Views, the Hard Way – A Pattern for Writing UI
    Https://backbonejs.org/#View There is also a github repo that has examples of MVC patterns adapted to the web platform. - Source: Hacker News / 20 days ago
  • JavaScript evolution: From Lodash and Underscore to vanilla
    Underscore was created by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator of Backbone.js) in 2009 to provide a set of utility functions that JavaScript lacked at the time. It was also created to work with Backbone.js, but it slowly became a favorite among developers who needed utility functions that they could just call and get stuff done with without having to worry about the inner implementations and browser compatibility. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • React is 10 years old
    Got it thanks for the context. I've read the web app and it seems to me it is just https://backbonejs.org/ re-written in Typescript and allows JSX. I'm very certain Typescript and JSX will have improved the DX for Backbone like apps, but it doesn't address all of the other issues that teams had with Backbone. e.g. Cyclical event propagation, state stored in the DOM (i.e. Appendchild is error prone in large code... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs
    Even further nowadays, docs are created using Docusaurus. I don't have problem with it but documentation should be good (eye) friendly than easy to write. Why not be creative while writing docs such as - Backbone.js - https://backbonejs.org Or https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html as code annotation. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • The Emperor's New Library
    What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Retool and Backbone.js, you can also consider the following products

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

AngularJS - AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop.

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

ExpressJS - Sinatra inspired web development framework for node.js -- insanely fast, flexible, and simple

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

ember.js - A JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web apps