Superblocks vs Retool: In-Depth Comparison

May 9, 2024 by Ronan McQuillan

Low-code development has exploded in popularity over the past decade, with more and more companies seeking out faster, more cost-effective ways to output custom applications.

Today, we’re diving deep into two of the biggest names in this space to see how Retool and Superblocks stack up against one another.

See, the low-code market is hugely varied. In particular, different vendors target distinct types of user personas, use cases, and organizations. This can make it tricky to determine which is the best choice for your specific requirements.

Retool and Superblocks occupy a similar corner of the market, focusing on empowering developers to ship internal tools faster by prioritizing visual development, reusability, and streamlined UI design.

By the end of this guide, we’ll have a clear picture of how each platform compares to the other, including its strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases. We'll also see how Budibase stacks up against each.

Let’s jump in with a summary of what each platform offers.

Retool vs Superblocks: positioning

Before we get to the nitty-gritty of what we can do with each tool, it’s important to get a grip on how each is positioned in the market.

We said a second ago that they’re both primarily developer-focused tools. Even within this, there’s plenty of room for variation.

User personas

Of the two platforms, Retool is more explicitly optimized for professional developers.

While it’s undoubtedly one of the most popular solutions in its class for expediting internal tool development, some users complain that we need custom code for a relatively large number of common tasks compared to some of its competitors.

One way of thinking about this is that Retool largely targets full-stack engineers who are comfortable working with client-side JavaScript, databases, and APIs but need a faster way to output UIs for internal tools.

In this sense, its grid-based drag-and-drop editor succeeds in providing a fast, easy way to build app screens.

Superblocks casts a slightly wider net in terms of target users. While it’s also an attractive offering for engineers, Superblocks is equally suited for a range of technical users, including designers and data scientists.

So, in addition to front-end JavaScript, we can add custom React or server-side Python and NodeJS.

Design experiences are very similar in Superblocks in the sense that it also offers a grid-based drag-and-drop UI. However, this feels a little bit more imprecise than in Retool. On top of this, Superblocks only offers a few dozen native UI components, whereas Retool ships with 100+.

Use cases

Retool and Superblocks are very similar in terms of their ideal use cases.

Retool is tightly focused on internal tooling. For instance, admin panels, approval apps, workflow tools, dashboards, and other basic UIs for interacting with organizational data assets.

This is centered on a wide range of integration options for databases, API standards, and back-office tools. Retool also offers hundreds of templates for common internal tool use cases, making it relatively easy to get up and running.

However, it’s a less attractive option for other kinds of use cases, with external user pricing being potentially prohibitively expensive.

The picture is largely the same for Superblocks’ target use cases. Again, we can see just as much optimization for internal tools development. With support for Python and a slightly more flexible chart component, it may be the better choice for dashboards and admin panels.

Support for internal business data is largely similar, with a range of native integrations for relational and non-relational databases, office tools, and APIs.

Pricing

On that note, let’s think about pricing in a little bit more detail.

Like most tools in this space, both Retool and Superblocks bill on a per-user basis. They also both distinguish between app creators and end users within their pricing models.

Retool’s free tier enables us to build unlimited apps for up to five users, 500 monthly workflow runs, and 5GB of stored data.

For unlimited cloud users and up to 5,000 workflow runs, we can upgrade to the Team or Business tier, billing at $10 per standard user and $5 per end user or $50 per standard user and $15 per end user, respectively.

Unfortunately, these tiers are limited to 25 users if you opt to self-host Retool.

Feature restrictions also heavily push users to higher pricing tiers. For instance, we’ll need a Business license for external users or embedded apps, while SAML/OpenID SSO and custom branding are restricted to enterprise customers.

Superblocks also offers a working free tier, but this is somewhat more restrictive, limiting us to five users and 100 monthly automation runs.

Besides this, their pricing model is a little bit simpler. There’s only one fixed pricing tier, Pro, billing at $49 per creator and $15 for end users. This is also limited to $1,000 automation runs per month, with an additional fee per 10,000 extra users.

Feature restrictions are quite similar. Notably, we can’t use the built-in RBAC tools on the free tier. We’ll need an enterprise license for SSO, embeds, custom branding, or external users.

Building apps in Superblocks and Retool

Now that we have a good grasp of the basic positioning of each platform, we can delve deeper into the more specific functionality and developer experiences provided by each.

Data

First up, let’s think about what each offers in terms of data connectivity.

Retool’s internal database is built on top of PostgreSQL. This is managed by Retool for cloud users - but if you self-host, you’ll have to provide your own Postgres DB.

This is a powerful solution, as we can combine spreadsheet-like interactions in end-user apps with custom queries on internally stored data. It also makes it relatively easy to migrate data to Retool.

Retool is also a relatively strong offering in terms of connectivity for external databases with 20+ native connectors for database tools, plus a wide range of APIs and JDBC configurations.

Superblocks is a slightly different story. For one thing, there’s no built-in database, so we’ll need to connect to an external data source to create an application. Using this within UIs is also quite a complex process, often requiring custom queries for basic use cases like forms and tables.

UI design

As noted earlier, both platforms rely on a drag-and-drop grid for adding and arranging components.

In Retool, this is somewhat more opinionated. It’s based on a twelve-column grid, so it’s relatively easy to create professional-looking screen layouts, although we sacrifice a little bit of flexibility in doing so.

In terms of accessing data from our UIs, we have two options - either manually writing queries for each component or using a visual GUI to connect data to the likes of forms, tables, and display elements.

We know already that Retool offers a much wider range of components than Superblocks natively. On top of this, individual components often offer a greater degree of visual configurability. For instance, we can create highly tailored table designs without custom code.

We can also group components into reusable modules, which is potentially a real quality of life improvement in terms of building similar screens quickly.

However, there are a few areas where Retool provides somewhat awkward developer experiences. By default, app screens don’t feature navigation menus. Rather, we’ll have to add and configure these ourselves.

In Superblocks, the drag-and-drop builder is based on an array of points that are evenly spaced horizontally and vertically. This gives us more flexibility in terms of how we lay out our app screens, but it can also be slightly more fiddly than Retool.

Connecting data to components in Superblocks can also present difficulties, as we’ll need to create queries to our data source and then bind relevant component fields to the response.

Automation

In Retool, all automations are contained within the Workflows portion of the platform. This is a powerful flowchart editor where we can create relatively complex automation rules with custom code, branching logic, and looping actions diagrammatically.

We can start from scratch or use one of Retool’s templates for generic use cases, such as updating the internal DB from an API or sending Google Analytics data to Big Query.

In Superblocks, automations are divided into workflows and scheduled jobs. Workflows are defined sequences of actions that are triggered by API requests.

Customization

Superblocks and Retool both offer scope for customization, but they handle this a little bit differently. In Retool, this mostly comes in the form of adding custom UI components. These can be written with React and then imported into your Retool instance.

Customization is an area where Superblocks has an edge over Retool.

We can use the Superblocks CLI to build React components using our chosen IDE.

Hosting and lifecycle management

Both platforms are available as cloud-based or self-hosted solutions. We can self-host Retool in a virtual private cloud or behind a VPN, with options including Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

Superblocks offers an on-premises agent for deploying to virtual private clouds, including AWS Fargate, Google Cloud Run, Kubernetes, and virtual machines.

Turn data into action with Budibase

Superblocks and Retool are two of the biggest names in the low-code space. However, they’re also two platforms that occupy a very tight niche, primarily targeting engineers and other colleagues with a high level of coding knowledge.

However, we take a different approach. Budibase is the open-source, low-code platform that empowers IT teams to turn data into action.

With extensive external data support, a powerful built-in database, free SSO, low-code automations, autogenerated screen layouts, optional self-hosting, and more, Budibase is the ideal solution for solutions architects, data professionals, systems engineers, support teams, and other non-developers in the IT department to ship professional custom tools.