eCommerce companies are more than just online storefronts - they’re operational machines juggling inventory, logistics, and customer experience, often under tight margin pressure. Running a profitable eCommerce operation that will adapt as you scale requires sturdy eCommerce apps that can rise to the challenge. 

While off-the-shelf eCommerce apps are a great place to start, being easy-to-launch and covering most use cases well, they’re designed for a generic, imaginary business, not your business. Apps like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix optimize for selling, not operating. They prioritize breadth over depth, and they struggle when you need customized workflows, internal tools, or operational visibility. 

As eCommerce businesses scale, the complexity of running day-to-day operations grows faster than most teams anticipate. The result is operational friction that slows teams down right when volume and customer expectations are increasing.

Most of these challenges show up across four core operational areas: 

• Overall operational overview 
• Returns and Refunds 
• Analytics
• Customer Support

Why build eCommerce apps on Retool?

eCommerce teams need flexible internal tools that bring all these areas into a single, shared view.

Where traditional app development can take months and years, Retool simplifies the repetitive parts, allowing developers to move much faster to build a product that is fully bespoke to your needs, and that scales. 

Retool’s combination of pre-built elements and the full flexibility of code means you don’t face the same limitations as other low-code platforms, nor the rigidity of SaaS functionality. You can build tools that grow with you, without getting stumped by an inaccessible price tag or hitting the low-code ‘wall’.

Read our full What is Retool guide to learn more about the platform.

Bold Tech’s eCommerce UI template

Our app template is built to show you how quickly you can create a custom tool to solve these problems. 

This template provides a blueprint from which you can build something that exactly meets your company’s needs, whether it’s managing stock, inventory tracking, delivery systems or product analysis with the view to finding gaps in the market. See this template as a springboard, inspiration, and an invitation to collaborate with us on building apps that work for you.  

Overview - tracking and reorder dashboard

Teams need a clear, real-time picture of what’s happening across orders, shipping, and fulfillment. Answering simple questions like which orders are delayed, which shipments need attention, or where issues are starting to pile up can require jumping between multiple tools or manually stitching together information. Without a reliable overview, teams end up reacting to problems after customers have already been impacted.

Having that instant visibility of the most important information - whether it’s stock levels or inventory details - is paramount for informing the high-priority actions that need to take place next. We built these features with this in mind:

• We chose to provide an instant, visual overview of stock levels on the top right of the app’s ‘overview section’. 
• The inventory overview allows you to filter by ‘status’, ‘stock levels’, ‘start-end date’, and includes a search bar where you can search for specific items; all of this is designed so your teams find the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. 
• Within each inventory item’s panel overview, you can see how many sales are being made per day on average, the projected runout, plus when the next order date is coming up. This enables you to be proactive in keeping on top of stock maintenance and action appropriately. 
• The quick actions next to each item make this next step intuitive, for example, you could ‘trigger reorder’ if the stocks are getting low, or navigate to ‘more details’.
• We’ve also added an analytics feature which allows you to engage with relevant data in a way that is stock, inventory, and operations-focused, and ultimately informs how you manage your team. 

Returns and Refunds that are simple to navigate

Returns and refunds can be a major source of operational strain. In short, they’re a headache. As order volume grows, returns and exchanges become harder to manage, especially when they’re handled through disconnected systems or manual processes. Teams struggle to track return status, identify bottlenecks, and understand how returns are affecting inventory and revenue. What should be a routine workflow often turns into a time-consuming exception-handling process that pulls attention away from higher-impact work.

At the top of our app, we provide you with a snapshot into the most important headlines you need to be aware of. We recognize the challenge of balancing processing efficiency and keeping an eye on margins and customer satisfaction that is so central to eCommerce companies’ operations. Again, it’s important that the key information displayed on your dashboard serves your company-specific strategy and targets; these headlines can be adapted to meet those. 

Below the overview panel, we included individual panels for specific returns, complete with all the information you’d need to be able to decide which action is needed next as well as the possibility of taking quick action there and then to ‘approve’ or ‘deny’ the request. 

Not only does this streamline your processes, having all the tickets readily available in the list view gives you a sense of what your team is working on, how efficiently they’re processing requests, and where you may need to redirect your resources. In your own app, you could change the key information shown on the ticket to meet your specific needs and products. 

Analytics that drive your decisions

Analytics is where many teams hope to find clarity, but it’s also where fragmentation becomes most visible. Data exists across storefronts, logistics providers, support tools, and finance systems, often with conflicting definitions and delayed updates. Dashboards may show what happened, but not why, and answering ad-hoc operational questions usually requires analyst or engineering support. This makes it difficult for operators to spot trends early, diagnose issues quickly, or make confident decisions.

In our template, the headline panels along the top provide you with the key information you need to know. We’ve also added colour-coded tabs in the right-hand corner of each overview, which tell you the general trend of these stats - is it increasing, or decreasing? 

The graphs beneath give more in-depth information on these patterns so you can quickly identify which areas are proving most profitable. To dive more specifically into which products are influencing these trends most, you can look at a more granular product-by-product breakdown of sales.

For example, within the electronics category, you can see that ‘Wireless Headphones Pro’ are your best seller, and you can look at the revenue, units, and growth rate breakdown.  Gone are the days of abstract analytics that are fiddly to navigate and ultimately slow to action; with a customized app, you can ensure the information is at your fingertips so you have no excuse not to act on it intelligently. 

Customer Support 

Customer support sits at the intersection of all of these systems. Support teams need fast access to accurate order, shipping, and return information to resolve issues efficiently, yet that context is rarely available in one place. Agents are forced to switch between tools, manually look up details, and piece together customer history while responding in real time. As a result, response times increase and the customer experience becomes inconsistent, even when teams are doing their best.

Customer-client interactions remain at the heart of what eCommerce companies do, so the chat function, optimised for your needs, is central to this UI. 

Conversations are easy to navigate, and taking action is made simple through the ‘Quick Actions’ box on the right-hand side, from which you can ‘Issue Refund’, Send tracking’ or ‘Offer Discount’, or even ‘Escalate to Manager’. 

Making these actions simple removes the barriers to promptly and practically responding to customers, and these automated actions can be adjusted according to your company’s specific needs. 

Download our free eCommerce template below and start building.

Scaling an eCommerce business isn’t just about selling more; it’s about operating smarter. While off-the-shelf platforms help you launch quickly, they aren’t built around your specific workflows, data, and operational challenges. As complexity grows, generic tools create friction instead of clarity.

A custom internal app brings everything together - inventory, returns, analytics, and customer support - into one actionable, real-time view tailored to your business. Our template is a starting point: a practical blueprint to help you build tools that fit your operations, not the other way around.

Download it and start creating an eCommerce engine that’s smooth, scalable, and built for profitability.

You can learn more about building tools on Retool over on our blog.

Sign up or login to download the template for free! ⬇️

In any secure production system, determining which layer should handle authentication is a critical architectural decision, particularly when sensitive data is involved. 

Typically, authentication should be handled at the resource layer to enforce consistent permissions. However, MCP introduces challenges here: the server needs to authenticate to multiple resources on the user's behalf while avoiding constant credential prompts and maintaining security.

According to the MCP standards, authentication (checking who you are) and authorization (setting what you’re allowed to do) are both supposedly optional. However, most companies building MCP servers are doing so to provide LLMs with access to company data, and, naturally, that comes with real requirements around compliance, governance, and security. 

What is MCP, and how should you integrate it into your internal tools stack?

MCP creates a standard way for AI to connect to your business tools and data. It’s the difference between AI as a gimmick and AI as your actual command center.

tools.devMitchel Smith

In practice, authentication for most companies will be a pretty unavoidable issue, as access to these data sources will be protected by authorization and authentication procedures.

There are several approaches to how you set up authentication in your MCP, each with its own trade-offs and nuances.  In this article, we’ll dive deeper into some of the considerations you might have when approaching authentication in the context of MCP. 

Locally hosted servers approach

Best for technical folk using MCP in a limited way on a single machine. Worst for large teams and non-technical users.

Let's start with the simplest option: a locally hosted server (i.e., authentication restricted to your computer alone). 

If you're running MCP locally, you can authenticate resources outside of the server using a platform like Postman, and then store the token securely in your Claude config file on your hard drive. 

The security risk here is quite limited, since the server is only ever going to receive calls from your local machine, so there's no need for any complex logic to determine which token belongs to whom. This approach is fairly secure in practice (assuming you're following security best practices for your machine) and reduces the need to re-authenticate between tool calls. 

The downside is purely a setup one: you’ve set up the authentication protocol for one machine specifically, and this set-up can’t necessarily be easily transferred to another machine. What’s more, locally hosted servers are much more complex and technical for a user to set up, and they also don’t do things like automatically update. This means that a locally-hosted setup doesn't scale well for MCP production systems that will require regular updates and changes, and particularly for those being used by non-technical people. 

That said, this is actually how a lot of the MCP servers you'll find on GitHub work: run it locally, set up a config file, maybe grab an API key, and you're off. Great for someone playing around with MCP, but not so great for a full team deployment. 

For most companies that are building MCP servers to enable access to company data for more members of their team, cloud-hosted would be the next logical option. But, there is a catch….

Cloud-hosted approach: authenticating each tool call

Best for avoiding exposing data, but worst for end user experience, which risks MFA fatigue.

So let's assume we're thinking about cloud-hosted MCP servers. The most secure approach to this, in theory, is to have users authenticate each tool call. 

This option really is secure; no access keys need to be persisted anywhere on the server, which means there's nothing to accidentally expose. Even if someone gets access to old chat sessions, there's no data there that they can use. 

The problem is that in reality, this process is just brutal for end users. Every time a tool is called by the MCP, it triggers a fresh authentication for the user to execute. Every. Single. Time. For something simple, like an SSO token to log in, that's not such a huge deal, but realistically, most modern systems now have multi-factor authentication (MFA). This means that if a single query needs to run through several different tool calls (which is really the point of MCP), your users are potentially going through the MFA flow multiple times in a single conversation. 

That's not just annoying, it's actually a security risk in its own right. MFA fatigue is a real and modern attack vector, where users start approving prompts without thinking, just because they're used to seeing them. So you've got the most secure approach on paper, creating its own vulnerability in practice. Not a great place to be for a production system…

Cloud-hosted approach: Authentication at MCP configuration

Best for solving issues of the above options (MFA and scale), but not always feasible, and security can be leaky.

So the natural next step you might work through is to flip the approach: what if we just authenticate the resource once, at the MCP server during configuration, and use that as the credential for everything downstream? That way, the user never has to worry about authenticating it themselves, right?

On the surface, this makes sense. It's simple, it's a single point of authentication set up by the MCP developer, and it gets rid of the MFA fatigue problem entirely. It works a bit as Google Workspace does; you log in once to your Gmail, and you’re already logged in if you then open Docs or Sheets.

The catch is that this only really works if the same authentication covers both the MCP server and the resources it's accessing, and that's not always the case. Say your MCP server uses SSO, but one of the resources it connects to is still on user name and password. Now you've got a mismatch, and authenticating into the MCP server doesn't actually get you into the resource you need to access. 

But even when the auth does line up, there are some issues that pop up in the real world. Think about an in-person environment. Imagine you physically give a colleague your laptop and they navigate to Claude, which is already logged in. They instantly have access to data and actions as if they were you, and no one would know the difference. There are cases, especially for developers or users who have access to a variety of permissioned accounts, where this gets a lot messier. 

If I only auth once, how do I switch to a different user? How do I impersonate a lower-permissioned account to test something? You can't always update the API or backend systems to handle that. 

So, with the cloud-hosted approach, we’re on the right lines, but we need a bit more flexibility on the MCP side to make it actually work. This brings us to our recommended solution.

Our recommended cloud-hosted multilayer approach: single authentication and expiring access tokens

The best solution for scalability and security.

So what does the best solution look like? We’d recommend a 2-layer approach. 

1. First, you authenticate into the MCP server once using SSO during setup as your first layer, and it stays put. 
2. Then, when a tool call actually needs to hit a resource for data, the second layer kicks in: the user authenticates to the resource itself, and that access token gets stored server-side, mapped to their session and their identity. 

In a prompt example, this might look like: 

1. Layer 1: MCP Server Authentication: An admin first configures the connector to an app like Linear in the client’s settings by adding OAuth credentials. When a user wants to use the connector to Linear, they go to their connector settings and click "connect." This triggers an SSO flow (like choosing which Google account to sign in with) that authenticates them to the MCP server itself. This authentication is stored, so users don't need to repeat it every time.
2. Layer 2: Resource Authentication. Even after connecting to the MCP server, users still need to authenticate to the actual resource. For example, when asking "which Linear user am I signed in as?", the system recognizes you're authenticated to the MCP server but not to Linear itself. It then prompts a second authentication flow where you sign into Linear directly. Once authenticated, the MCP server can access your specific Linear data (showing you're signed in as "Mitchel Smith", for instance) for as long as you set that token to last. 

The access token is not sitting there forever, though; it has a lifespan, and that lifespan can be tuned to the sensitivity of the data it's accessing. For something like customer payment data, you might set that at 10 minutes. For something less sensitive, it could be a day, which is longer than most sessions anyway. You could even get more granular than that, calculating the age of the token on each tool call and setting different validity windows for different tools. The point is, nothing persists longer than it needs to.

This covers a lot of the ground we've been talking about:

• You're not re-authenticating every tool call, so MFA fatigue is off the table. 
• The token is mapped to a specific user, so you've got visibility into who's actually making the calls. 
• And because the resources are authenticating independently, it doesn't matter if the MCP server and the resource behind it are using different auth systems. 

This doesn't solve everything, though. If someone is sitting at your open laptop in an active Claude conversation, nothing’s going to stop them from making a call on your behalf (unless you return to problematic option 2 - cloud-hosted, authenticating each tool call). But it’s about as secure as you can get in a workable system.

What happens with this 2-layer method is that the moment the conversation closes or a new one starts, that authentication token is gone. This does mean that each conversation requires re-authentication, but for most real-world scenarios, that's an acceptable tradeoff, especially when you weigh it against the alternative of making your users go through MFA every single time they want to do anything.

TL;DR

Let’s take a very professional analogy to summarize these ideas:

Option 1: Locally-hosted is like hosting drinks at your place; stay in, and drink what you like. The assumption is whoever is in your house in the first place is allowed to help themselves to your hospitality - they’ve already proven who they are to be there. If someone is in the house who shouldn't be, you run into security issues; they could have access to stuff they shouldn’t have. 

Option 2: Authenticating every tool call is like IDing someone every single time they try to get a drink at a bar. They order a drink, and they show their ID. They order a shot and then a beer, and they show their ID twice. More drinks, and eventually, it can get exhausting.

Option 3: Authenticating at configuration is like the bouncer carding people at the door. They prove who they are on entry, and once they’re in, they’re in. If the bouncer missed that the customer’s ID is fake, there’s no stopping them now.

Option 4: The 2-layer approach is like a members club - it makes them prove who they are when they walk in, and then remembers them, at least for a period. Sometimes it might need to re-verify (it's been a while) or need them to prove themselves again (they're looking to buy the strong stuff), but generally we assume they are who they say they are.

Choose the right authentication strategy for production-grade MCP systems

In the end, authentication in MCP isn’t about picking the “most secure” option in isolation - it’s about designing a system that balances security, usability, scalability, and operational reality, so your architecture protects sensitive data without exhausting the people who need to use it.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way, and every major company has jumped on the AI bandwagon. Notion and Figma use AI to help you design apps. Cursor supercharges your coding. Leonardo generates complex images. The AI gold rush is real.

But there’s a problem when it comes to business tools: all these AI tools were trained on information from the internet. They're brilliant at general knowledge but clueless about your company's data. Your customer database, your internal documents, your proprietary systems? The AI can't touch them. It’s like hiring a genius consultant who knows everything about the world but nothing about your business.

To respond to this challenge, companies have had to resort to either training their own model - costly in money and time - or to passing huge amounts of data to the AI, with little control over how it was stored, used, or retained. 

The widespread and imperfect adoption of AI, for a multitude of different use cases, increasingly highlights a missing piece: standardization. MCP (Model Context Protocol) solves this, providing a universal, interoperable approach that makes AI truly plug-and-play.

So, what actually is Model Context Protocol (MCP)? 

And is it the genius consultant who knows everything about my business? 

Well, it’s not the genius consultant itself, but it certainly helps AI to be. 

For the less technical folks: think of it like a USB adaptor for AI and your business knowledge base. 

For the technical folks, you can think of it this way: MCP is to AI what HTTP is to the web. Just as HTTP defines standard rules so any browser can communicate with any website, MCP defines standard rules so any AI model can communicate with your company resources. 

MCP itself isn’t a resource, though; it’s the protocol that tells the AI models what resources they should have access to. The way it actually exposes access to these resources is by defining tools. These tools can be anything: a function that adds two numbers, a tool that encrypts text, or (most commonly at the moment) tools for accessing and processing data (LLMs). MCP helps us interact with our data in two main ways:: 

1. Centralization: MCP brings all your AI tools and data access points into a single, unified protocol, reducing fragmentation and simplifying orchestration across models.
2. Accessibility: By standardizing how tools expose capabilities and share context, MCP lowers the barrier to building more complex AI workflows. It makes advanced AI behaviour possible, even across tools that were never designed to work together.

How do MCPs work?

For those who are new to MCP, let’s illustrate how it works with the commonly used USB analogy.

If an LLM (Large Language Model) is the computer that wants to perform useful functions, and your systems and APIs are the mouse, screen, and keyboard by which these functions can happen, MCP is like the USB port that standardizes the connection and makes sure nothing explodes when you plug them in.

MCP has three parts:

• The MCP Standard: The USB plug design. The standard is a set of rules, so as long as the USB-A adaptor is designed to correctly fit the USB-A port, it will work. "Follow these specifications, and what you build will work with anything that accepts MCP." 
• The MCP Client: the port. The client is the USB port. Its job is to be the right shape for an MCP server to plug into so it can deliver what it needs. For USB, that's power and data transfer. For MCP, it’s the AI application that's securing access to LLMs and accepting compatible MCP servers. 
• The MCP Server: what you plug in. Just like a thumb drive provides data transfer (whether vacation photos or a virus), or a power cable provides power, when you ‘plug in’ an MCP server, you might provide access to your company’s data. 

Why do standards matter? Ten years ago, every device had a different charger. Now, you can grab any USB-C cable and plug it into any USB-C port - but you still choose what you plug in, and who’s allowed to use it. That's what MCP does for AI and data: one universal interface, with clear boundaries and access controls, instead of a drawer full of fragile, custom cables. 

MCP and your internal tool stack: key considerations

Here are a few things to think through before you start building MCP servers to integrate into your internal toolstack.

Knowing when and what to build

So MCP sounds like the shiny new magic solution to all your work problems, right? Not exactly. MCPs take time to build, require ongoing fine-tuning (as your business needs change), and need proper security implementation. You're essentially creating another piece of infrastructure that needs to be deployed, monitored, and updated. And just like with any internal tool, it's essential to evaluate the true value of an MCP server before building one.

The question isn't "Can we build an MCP server?" but "Should we?" Not every data source needs AI access. Not every workflow benefits from automation. Just like with any internal tool, before you start building, you’ll need to consider whether the time saved justifies the time invested, whether your team will actually use it, and whether the data you're exposing is worth the effort to secure and maintain.

The true power of MCP is unlocked when you intelligently connect your tools, layering the power and flexibility of LLMs on top of them, and make them easily accessible to your team.

Deployment approaches

There are two main options for deploying MCP, and it’s best to decide before you start building, as each approach impacts how you actually build the system and how you tackle problems like logging, authentication, and security. These are:

• A containerized deployment that each user hosts locally
• Cloud deployment

Your choice depends largely on who's using the server. For small, highly technical teams, a containerized local deployment can work well - updates can be installed manually, configuration lives close to the team, and everyone is working in a terminal.

For larger organizations with thousands of users and varying technical skill levels, this approach doesn’t scale. Cloud deployment becomes essential, enabling automated installs, centralized configuration, and admin-level control so tools can be rolled out, updated, and enabled with minimal friction. 

The power of multiple MCP servers

Building a single server locally is straightforward. I can connect to my Postgres MCP server, which helps me write SQL queries and execute them against my database - useful, right? But it’s nothing groundbreaking on its own: most of us who could spin up this MCP server could spin up the SQL query ourselves without too much difficulty anyway.

The real potential for MCP comes when multiple deployed servers work together. 

The true power of MCP isn't in a single isolated server. It's the ecosystem. One MCP server pulls customer data from your CRM, another grabs financial reports, a third generates charts, and a fourth summarizes and distributes via Slack.

Each server does one thing well. Together, they compress hours of manual work into a single AI conversation. Just like a computer becomes a workstation when you plug in a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, AI becomes your command center when you plug in your systems.

That said, it often makes sense to separate servers by domain or security boundary. You might have one server for your CRM, another for your financial systems, and another for communication tools, not because you technically have to, but because it's cleaner to maintain and easier to control access permissions. 

What is MCP good for? 

Just like a great internal tool does, MCP excels at connecting multiple tools into a single, coherent workflow. 

Say you need to pull data from your database, generate charts in Power BI, and email them as a PDF report to your team. Normally, that means jumping between several tools - querying data in one place, exporting it, importing it somewhere else, and repeating the process until everything lines up. That's normally multiple separate tools you're jumping between. 

With MCP, that entire workflow can happen inside Claude, ChatGPT, or your favorite MCP Client. You can work step-by-step with AI, refining your approach while it's actually directly accessing and operating on your data.

Instead of juggling 8+ different tools - write something here, copy-paste there, download, repeat - you move to a single conversation: "do this, now do that." MCP supports the full end-to-end workflow without you needing to do all this context switching, and everything lives in one place that you can return to later. 

Just as importantly, MCP lowers the barrier to using technical systems. Non-technical users don’t need to read API documentation, understand schemas, or learn new interfaces. They can simply ask the AI what’s possible - “Can you pull this kind of data?” - and the AI either does it, or explains why it can’t.

What is MCP not good at yet? 

Error handling is rough. MCP often gets stuck in "Oops, something went wrong, let me try again" loops when it doesn't find what it expects. It will continue to just fail over and over until it just sort of… dies. This can be particularly problematic for more complex tasks.

It's still an LLM. An MCP client will say "Great idea, let's go for it" instead of pushing back on bad requests, which can send you straight into those failure loops. 

Deployment isn't fully mature:

• Local containerized deployment is solid technically, but asks a lot of non-technical users. They need to set up Docker, edit config files, create secure keys, and run terminal commands. This might be fine for small technical teams, but not scalable to hundreds of users. Nevertheless, for the moment, we find that MCP runs better locally.
• Cloud deployment is much easier to configure (literally click and paste a URL), but it is more complex to deploy securely and comes with additional hosting costs. 

It's non-deterministic by design. MCP standardizes how AI connects to and uses tools, but it doesn't guarantee identical outputs every time. If you need perfectly repeatable results, use an API endpoint instead. The tools within MCP are consistent, but the AI decides when and how to use them, so your results can vary. 

Think of it this way: MCP ensures a stable workflow and safe access to your resources, while the AI interprets and plans tasks in a flexible, intelligent way.

Building your MCP ecosystem

At Bold Tech, we believe that a unified, thoughtful ecosystem approach is the difference between AI as a gimmick and AI as a useful tool. A single MCP server is fine, but having multiple servers working together with LLM-supported workflows is where true, long-term value comes from. 

We've seen these implementations before. We know which patterns work, which pitfalls to avoid, and how to connect your MCP servers into workflows that genuinely save time. If you're considering MCP integration or broader AI adoption, we can help you design an ecosystem that delivers real value, not just another tool that sits unused.

Here's a fun fact about Bold Tech founder Joey: when he's not building internal tools, he's scaling actual walls. He's such a climbing enthusiast that he even owns a small e-commerce store selling the gear.

Now, imagine being the founder of an agency that builds efficiency tools for other companies and noticing that inefficient shipping costs were eating 44% of your eCommerce profit. That's like being a personal trainer who takes the elevator. So, naturally, he built Box-it in Retool to save himself thousands on shipping. Because if you can't practice what you preach, what's the point? 

What’s more, this app won him the Retool December Shipping Spree competition ‘Move the Needle’ award for Best Business Impact. So without further ado, you can go ahead and watch the demo, or read more below.

How Joey cut shipping costs by 35% with a custom box optimization app

A week-long build that saves his small business $24,000 per year.

Like most small online retailers, Joey uses Shopify for everything: sales, inventory, fulfillment. It's been great for getting his business off the ground, but, after his Black Friday sale last year, he realized he had a serious problem.

He'd just shipped over 100 parcels in a single week and spent more than $9,000 doing it. When he crunched the numbers, Joey discovered that 44% of his gross profit was disappearing into shipping costs on boxes that were just too big. He was literally paying to ship air. His package sizing was completely unoptimized, and international orders were the worst offenders. A single shipment to Asia could cost him over $400 because of oversized packaging.

The problem nobody's solved.

Joey figured there had to be a tool out there to help small businesses optimize their packaging. Surely someone had built this, right? After scouring the internet, he was shocked to discover that no such solution exists for businesses of his size. 

Then he learned why: we actually can't solve this problem mathematically.

The package optimization challenge is what's called an NP-hard problem. Despite packing millions of boxes every day globally, no algorithm can find the absolutely perfect solution. We can only get close. But even getting close would save Joey a fortune, so he decided to build his own solution.

The result? Box-it, a custom package optimizer Joey built in less than a week using Retool. With just the first version, he's already saving 35% on shipping costs and has increased his net profit by 17%.

Building for 80%, not 100%.

Through his experience running an agency that's built hundreds of apps in Retool, Joey has learned something crucial: the best internal business tools get you 80% of the way to a perfect solution, but can be built extremely fast. These often move the needle more than "perfect" solutions that take a year and a whole development team to build.

Retool lets builders solve business problems and iterate on solutions dramatically faster than traditional coding. Within a week, Joey had a working package optimizer. That $410 shipment to Japan he mentioned? With Box-it's recommended packaging, he could have saved $235.

Solving the unsolvable

Joey started by adding dimension metadata to his Shopify products, then connected Retool to Shopify via their dev store API. 

The real puzzle was the packing algorithm. Since finding the absolute optimal solution would require impossible amounts of computing power, Joey settled on a series of heuristics (educated guesses based on proven patterns). Fortunately, his products come in rectangular boxes, which simplifies things compared to items that can be stacked or compressed irregularly.

His algorithm tests six possible layout configurations, like stacking items vertically or placing the two largest items on the bottom. But here's the twist: shipping providers don't just charge by box size. They use "dimensional weight," which factors in both dimensions and actual weight. With help from AI, Joey built a JavaScript transformer that calculates dimensional weight for each layout option and selects the winner: the configuration that would be cheapest to ship.

Iterating toward the real solution

The first version worked well, but it had a flaw: it might recommend a box size Joey didn't have in stock, and he couldn’t exactly stock every possible box size.

The real question wasn't "what's the smallest possible box?" It was "what small set of box sizes would cover most of our orders cheaply?"

This is where Retool really shines. Joey could quickly iterate and add a box recommendation feature. This algorithm now analyzes his last 100 orders and suggests six optimal box sizes to keep in stock. He then built a simple inventory management CRUD using a Retool database, ordered those six boxes, and updated the algorithm to work with what he actually has on hand.

The results

For December alone, Joey's business spent $5,600 on shipping. With Box-it, that would have been $3,670, a saving of over $2,000 in a single month. He's reduced shipping from 44% of net profit to just 27%.

For a small business like his, this translates to over $24,000 in annual savings, and that number will grow as he scales.

The best part? As Joey adds new products, he just needs to include their dimensions in Shopify, and the algorithm handles everything automatically. Even the 3D Plotly visualizer he built shows his team exactly how to pack each box according to the winning layout.

This app demonstrates what's possible when you focus on building fast and iterating quickly. Not bad for a week's work.

Chegg is an educational powerhouse. Founded almost 20 years ago, Chegg has helped millions of students learn more effectively and get better grades. Chegg Skills is part of Chegg’s broader mission to help learners build practical, job-ready skills. Through career-focused programs and hands-on learning experiences, Chegg Skills supports adult learners as they develop real-world capabilities aligned to today’s workforce needs.

To deliver these programs at scale, Chegg Skills relies on strong internal systems that enable teams to design, build, and continuously improve learning experiences efficiently.

Why Chegg chose Retool

For teams focused on learning design and operational excellence, time and skills are precious and should be spent doing what they do best: improving educational outcomes, not building internal tools entirely from scratch.

Chegg Skills selected Retool as the foundation for its internal tooling because it enabled rapid prototyping and deployment of applications, while reducing the overhead typically associated with custom software development.

Retool also made it easier for engineers and non-engineers to collaborate on shared workflows, connecting internal tools directly to existing content and operational systems, while remaining flexible as processes evolved.

This balance of structure and adaptability allowed Chegg Skills teams to move quickly without sacrificing consistency or quality.

Why Chegg chose Bold Tech

By early 2024, Chegg Skills already had several Retool-based MVP tools in place. What they needed next was a partner who could help harden those prototypes, apply best practices, and support long-term scalability.

“We've had the pleasure of working with Bold Tech since the beginning of 2024 to augment our engineering team, particularly. They’ve been an exceptional partner that is collaborative, reliable, and deeply invested in our success.” - Alex Gonzalez, Senior Group Manager, Chegg

The Chegg Skills team partnered with Bold Tech with a clear objective:  to consolidate internal tools into a cohesive experience that replaces manual and inefficient workflows with streamlined, automated processes. 

Through collaborative discovery and system reviews, Bold Tech initially focused on strengthening existing applications. As the partnership matured, the teams began identifying opportunities to introduce AI in targeted, responsible ways that improved efficiency while keeping humans firmly in control.

Nearly two years later, the collaboration continues, with both teams iterating on and refining internal tools that support Chegg Skills’ evolving needs.

Our solutions: Scalable apps and AI-powered workflows

Over the course of the partnership, Bold Tech has worked closely with Chegg Skills to design and build internal Retool applications that are maintainable, scalable, and easy for teams to adopt. 

These applications have, on average, saved 80 hours per month for all their internal teams. It has also allowed them to maintain high compliance standards that are required by external agencies.  

Across these initiatives, two guiding principles emerged:

• Applying Retool best practices to reduce complexity and technical debt
• Using AI selectively to enhance efficiency and creativity, without over-engineering solutions that require precision and reliability

Here are a few examples of that work.

An end-to-end course development workflow

One of the largest initiatives supported the full lifecycle of course creation across multiple Chegg Skills teams. This internal workflow helps teams move from early research and validation through course structure design and content development.

Over multiple iterations, Bold Tech helped evolve this workflow to better support collaboration, consistency, and scale.

AI was introduced to assist with early-stage ideation by generating draft structures based on existing internal patterns and inputs. Rather than replacing expert judgment, this approach gave subject-matter experts a strong starting point, reducing time spent on blank-page work while preserving instructional intent.

The AI experience is embedded directly into the workflow, allowing users to refine outputs within clearly defined boundaries. This ensures AI supports existing educational standards and practices rather than introducing uncontrolled variation.

“[The Bold Tech] team has played a key role in launching major products like our Program Builder and improving the performance of tools like our AI Simulation platform.” - Alex Gonzalez, Senior Group Manager, Chegg

Interactive learning scenarios 

Chegg Skills also uses interactive, AI-powered scenarios to help learners apply knowledge in realistic contexts. These guided conversations encourage active practice and reflection, reinforcing learning objectives through experiential engagement.

Bold Tech supported the creation of internal tools that allow course designers to define scenario structures, feedback styles, and evaluation criteria, ensuring consistency across learning experiences while still allowing flexibility in design.

These tools integrate seamlessly with Chegg Skills’ existing content systems, making it easy to create, update, and deploy scenarios as programs evolve.

AI-assisted quality review 

Quality assurance was another area where AI could provide meaningful support. Previously, reviewers relied on manual checks to identify formatting issues, missing information, or inconsistencies, a process that was time-consuming and difficult to scale.

Bold Tech helped design an AI-assisted review workflow that performs an initial pass against clearly defined quality criteria, flags potential issues, and generates reviewer notes.

This approach allows human reviewers to focus on final judgment and instructional quality, while AI handles repetitive checks. The result is a faster, more consistent, and more scalable review process.

Knowing when not to use AI

Not every workflow benefits from AI. In some cases, Chegg Skills and Bold Tech found that deterministic, rules-based solutions were more reliable.

For example, an internal scheduling tool initially explored AI-driven logic, but this approach introduced inconsistencies. Replacing it with a straightforward algorithmic solution resulted in significantly improved reliability and predictability.

The lesson was simple: AI excels at exploration, synthesis, and creative support. When precision and correctness are required, traditional logic often remains the better choice. 

The impact

Today, Chegg Skills operates a robust suite of internal Retool applications that are:

• Easy to maintain and evolve
• Closely aligned with real-world team workflows
• Significantly more efficient for course designers and operators

By combining Retool best practices with a pragmatic approach to AI, Bold Tech has helped Chegg Skills scale internal operations while preserving the quality and control that underpin effective learning experiences.

“Bold Tech has consistently delivered high-quality work, and we truly value the partnership.” - Alex Gonzalez, Senior Group Manager, Chegg

Media teams of all kinds - from television to advertising - need to be able to manage a sometimes sprawling concoction of assets, approvals and rights. Data and content management can become overwhelming. Ultimately, it can distract you from meaningfully engaging with the content itself, and its creators.

Custom-built apps that help media teams and companies to stay organized - whether it’s concerning content distribution, rights management, or reporting - are essential in streamlining the busywork so you can focus on creating, distributing, and scaling content that performs.

👀 Want a sneak peek of what you could have with Retool? Here's a quick demo of our app template:

Why do media companies need custom apps? 

Too many tools spoil the broth…and integration is key

As a media company you’ll be relying heavily on internal tools to keep on top of all your content, but how many apps are you using? Perhaps you’re using Slack for internal comms, Asana for project management, Iconik for your asset management, Media Shuttle for file delivery… we could go on.

As this industry evolves, you want to be ahead of the curve, not struggling to keep up as you wade through a growing amount of mess. A lack of integration between apps can lead to mistakes and a lot of inefficiency: duplicate data entry, inconsistent metadata, slow handoffs between teams, difficulty gaining a unified view of content or performance, to name a few…

Overcomplicated workflows slowing down progress

But the deeper challenge isn’t just the number of tools, it’s the fragmented, complex, non-standardized workflows that grow around them. Editorial, video, design, ad ops, distribution and monetization teams all develop their own processes around the apps they already rely on - whether it’s Adobe or Avid for editing, Frame.io for review, Iconik or Dalet for asset management, Airtable for planning, or Brightcove for distribution.

Each team finds its own ways to version files, track rights, deliver assets, request approvals, or move content downstream. Over time, these workflows become harder to maintain, customize, or scale. The result is a user experience that feels more like wrestling with systems than empowering your team to do their best creative, operational or strategic work. 

All the while, the demands on media organizations aren’t slowing down, they’re accelerating. New content types, emerging platforms, and increasingly powerful AI tools require systems that can adapt… and fast.

Many internal systems being used currently by media companies struggle to keep up. Metadata and rights management becomes messy and legacy tools rarely handle these scenarios cleanly, forcing teams to patch together custom solutions on a case-by-case basis. Far from efficient. 

But modernizing isn’t easy…

Upgrading or replacing internal tools - CMSs, DAMs, MAMs, ad systems, rights-management tools - often turns into multi-year overhaul projects. Migrating massive content libraries, building custom integrations with dozens of systems, and retraining teams require enormous time and investment.

And even with all these tools, the gap between data and decision-making remains wide. Media companies want unified reporting, cross-platform metrics, real-time dashboards, and predictive insights tied directly to production workflows.

OK, enough problems! We’re writing this article because we (Bold Tech) have come up with solutions: and to show you how, we’ve even created a template for a custom, integrated, media-operations app, built in Retool and designed to bring together your workflows, your data, and your teams in one cohesive system. It’s a system built for the realities of how media companies work today, which is flexible enough to support how they’ll work tomorrow. 

Why use Retool to build custom media tools?

Where traditional app development can take months and years, Retool simplifies the repetitive parts, allowing developers to move much faster to build a product that is fully bespoke to your needs, and that scales.

Retool’s combination of pre-built elements and the full flexibility of code means you don’t face the same limitations as other low-code platforms, nor the rigidity of SaaS functionality. You can build tools that grow with you, without getting stumped by an inaccessible price tag or hitting the low-code ‘wall’.

Bold Tech’s media tool template 

Bold Tech’s media dashboard template brings together the sprawling roles media companies need to be able to perform and needs you are striving to meet, all in one place. A good custom app can be split into four key sections: Collections, Insights, Support and Campaigns.

Let's dive into what makes a good custom-build app for your business, and then look a bit more specifically at Bold Tech’s template UI highlights. 

If you want to skip the explanation and go straight to downloading the template at the end of the page (which is free to download if you’re subscribed to Bold Tech’s newsletter). 

File management and asset collections 

Media companies will typically be dealing with huge qualities of assets and metadata. To manage this ‘stuff’ ideally you want to be able to access it from a centralised dashboard, not multiple environments. Having a section of your app - like this one’s ‘collections’ tab - makes this possible, giving you one place from which you access storage.

If all of this data is in one place, it means you can quickly access information about the total number of assets, how much storage space you have left, which assets have been published and which assets are pending approval (and perhaps you need to prompt). 

With a custom tools like this, you can organize it according to your needs, by file types, tags, file names, quality levels, date published, or metrics like numbers of views. More on insights about how well your content is doing in the next section. 

Long story short: your information should be organized in a way that serves you, not so messily that storing and navigating it creates work for you. Having a dedicated section of your app which organizes your content in a user friendly format is a game changer when it comes to finding what you need, fast. 

Insights for better business intelligence

Getting the most out of your data requires a bit more than well-organized content, though. Having a data insights dashboard makes your data readable, facilitates informed decision-making process much easier.

Whether you need to assess audience behaviour in the most recent quarter, or understand the watching habits of your audience through the devices by which they’re accessing your content, or you need to hone in on what content is performing best at the moment via a live-updating ‘top performing content’ league table, a dedicated dashboard for your data ‘insights’ empowers you to be more strategic in how you work. 

You don’t need to choose between data that’s packaged into reports, or more raw analytics: you can have access to both in the same place. While analytics might allow you to search for some specific stats you need to communicate to a client, reports can be helpful in generating a snapshot overview for a presentation to senior management, or for strategy setting with your team. 

The bottom line is, your business needs to be led by the data, for you to make strong, strategic decisions, and this is massively simplified by a well-designed data insights dashboard. For more on the UI features of our specific template, scroll down to the ‘UI Highlights’ section. 

Customer support

Customer support requires a sensitivity to the client that is essential for any business’s longevity. To tailor your support to each individual customer, you need to know who they are, what their needs are, and any relevant context that might inform your response. This information can be tedious to gather, and relying purely on an individual employee’s initiative or personal knowledge creates variability in the quality of support delivered… and leaves plenty of room for human error.

The solution? Create consistency in customer responses by centralising - in one dashboard in your Retool app - all the resources needed to appropriately meet a client’s request. We’re talking customer details, communication history, ticket status, and even quick actions, all surfaced together so agents have immediate context and can respond efficiently.

Along the left-hand side, agents can track tickets at a glance. This view provides an immediate snapshot into what each ticket concerns, its status, when it was last opened, the volume of communication so far, priority level, and ticket number. By organizing the information like this, you make it much easier to retrieve or revisit information later on.

The main chat area offers an efficient way to communicate with the client. Designed like a messaging interface, it feels intuitive and human, meaning interactions (both for the client and your team member) are made much less daunting.

Customer details are surfaced clearly and immediately, providing crucial context for every interaction.

Finally, Quick Actions allow agents to respond decisively without navigating away from the screen. With all the relevant information at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions in the moment instead of hunting through multiple tools or pages. Centralizing this information saves hours of time and frees you up to focus your energy where it belongs: solving problems for your customers, not searching for data.

Media campaigns with better targeting and results

Campaigns are only as powerful as the actions they inspire. In a business, one of the key purposes of advertising and marketing campaigns is connecting to your client. So, what use is a campaign which beautifully promotes your business, only to result in no real follow up or tangible next steps? To make the most of your campaigns you need to be able to pull data from them to make actionable decisions which are rooted in the data. 

In your app, you can create a dedicated section for Campaign management, where you can both design the campaigns and track their progress after they’ve gone live, as well as analysing audience behaviour more generally. Campaigns can be designed, monitored, and optimized in one place. This dashboard brings together everything you need post-launch: performance metrics, audience insights, and quick visibility into what’s working and what isn’t.

On the main panel, active campaigns are clearly listed with their status, audience, channel mix, and key performance indicators. You can see total leads, qualified leads, conversions, quality score, and budget progress - all without drilling down into separate reports. This makes it easy to compare campaigns side-by-side and quickly identify which ones are underperforming or exceeding expectations.

To the right, the Audience Segments overview provides deeper context. Segments such as high-value prospects, website visitors, trial users, or enterprise prospects are displayed along with growth trends, conversion rates, and risk levels. This helps you understand not just how campaigns are performing, but who they are resonating with. You can merge segments, add new ones, and refine your targeting strategy directly from this view.

Finally, the navigation on the left organizes everything from draft campaigns to A/B tests, templates, budget management, and audience builders. This structure makes it easy to move from planning, to execution, to analysis, without jumping between tools.

With all of this unified in a single dashboard, campaign management becomes less about manual reporting and more about continuous improvement. You’re able to iterate quickly, double down on what works, and re-target where needed… all guided by live performance data rather than assumptions.

Template UI highlights 

Here are some of the highlights from this app that we think can inspire your Retool apps.

Collections snapshot - insights at a glance

In our template, the panels at the top give you a general overview of assets, meaning you instantly have a snapshot of the general status of asset management -  essential when managing large volumes of content.

Above the asset tabs - ‘Total Assets’, ‘Storage Used’, ‘Pending Approval’ and ‘Published Today’, there’s a panel where you can filter the assets more granularly, by asset type, status, quality, date or even title, tag or creator. 

On the left hand side, you can navigate to particular folders, designed according to the needs of your company, for example by ‘collections’ of assets, ‘channels’ or ‘status’. The folders are each assigned an emoji, making the experience more user-friendly and intuitive to navigate.

The use of color throughout this dashboard further adds to ease of navigation. For example, the color tags make it simple to identify different types of task, progress status, and different priority levels. Tags are also a great idea for organizing tasks and projects because they make it possible to filter later on. 

On the right hand side, we’ve added a task overview section, which allows you to quickly gain insights into your approval workflow and your recent activity. Below, the Storage analytics provide a visual aid regarding how much storage you have used, and how this storage has been allocated, enabling you to make assessments of which content types are taking up the most space. 

Finally you’ve got the ‘Upload Content’ button which is always present - on every dashboard - in the top right corner. This means you can quickly navigate to this action wherever you are in the app.

Optimized insights for better readability

In our ‘Insights’ page we’ve formatted the data into graphs and other visuals to make your data more readable. Not only is presenting your data in this way important for you to be able to digest and apply the data, but it can also be useful in subsequently communicating with stakeholders about progress. Why not impress your clients with a few nicely formatted graphs and pie charts? 

Similarly to the ‘Collections’ dashboard, in ‘Insights’ we’ve grouped the information into logical groups on the left hand side; we’ve organized the smaller folders into three sections: Analytics, Reports and Insights, and again we’ve used emojis to assist the user in navigating to the right folder as quickly as possible.

On an Insights page, it’s always important that the most important headlines jump out at you at a glance. On our dashboard, we’ve also included panels on the right hand side which tell you the ‘Top Performing Content’, including little icons for the different information highlights. It’s clear, and efficient. 

Similarly, you can see the headlines about audience engagement in the panel in the centre top of the page, which uses color to ensure the figures are bold and stand out. 

Support 

Again, on our support page we’ve been intentional about our dynamic use of color. For example, on the left hand side, you can quickly identify the level of priority of the task based on the color of the tag. On the right hand side, the activity headlines of your team members are presented in four main areas of information, which are colored accordingly: Online, Active, Average, Satisfaction.

The tickets log on the left hand side is cleanly and clearly displayed, in neat boxes as well as including the option to search for specific tickets. Within each ticket panel, you can see the most important information to enable you to action the ticket appropriately: the ticket title, client name, the progress status, the number of messages exchanged, the time of the ticket etc.

Again, the chat layout makes it feel familiar and easy to use, with different colors for each person in the chat. 

The three boxes on the right hand side contain key information that might be employed in the chat with the customer: customer information, team status and quick actions. 

Every part of the template has been placed for a reason and serves a clear purpose; nothing is there to simply fill space! Think about this when making your own app: what do you need in your app so that it serves your specific needs well? 

Simple, intuitive campaign tracking

On the left-hand side, you’ll find the options are grouped in a logical way: Campaigns, Audiences, Testing, and Automation. This grouping makes it easy to move between planning, targeting, experimentation, and execution without getting lost in a long, unstructured list.

The main view is divided into two primary sections: Active Campaigns and Audience Segments. In Active Campaigns, you can track the progress of ongoing campaigns in real time, which each campaign card showing relevant, key information. The horizontal progress bar acts as a visual 'thermometer', giving you an at-a-glance feel for performance without needing to dig into detailed reports.

On the right, Audience Segments gives you instant visibility into who your campaigns are reaching. These insights support fast decision-making - helping you prioritise which audiences to double down on, where to refine messaging, and when to create or merge segments.

Together, these elements create a workspace where you can design campaigns, monitor performance, and understand audience behaviour, all from a single dashboard.

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.

Sign up below to download the free template!

If you work in a healthcare company, you’ve probably battled with old-school Electronic Health Records like Epic, torn your hair out trying to get reporting out of Kareo (now Tebra), or wished you had a more centralized patient overview than what tools like Luma can offer. 

Spending time on manual processes doesn’t make workflows more diligent; it slows operations and increases room for error. At the same time, vital financial and operational data often lives in fragmented systems, making it hard to track margins, monitor compliance, or make confident decisions. This fragmentation can even put organizations at risk of falling short of HIPAA and other data protection standards.

Why build healthcare apps in Retool? 

Healthcare staff typically use 6-12 different apps daily. Surely that’s pretty inefficient, right? Creating a custom app in Retool can bring all of these moving parts together into one cohesive environment. It can unify financial, operational, and patient-facing data into a single, secure interface, enabling healthcare teams to manage information efficiently while upholding compliance. 

Where traditional app development can take months and years, Retool simplifies the repetitive parts, allowing developers to move much faster to build a product that is fully bespoke to your needs, and that scales. 

Retool’s combination of pre-built elements and the full flexibility of code means you don’t face the same limitations as other low-code platforms, nor the rigidity of SaaS functionality. You can build tools that grow with you, without getting stumped by an inaccessible price tag or hitting the low-code ‘wall’.

Read our full What is Retool guide to learn more about the platform.

By centralizing workflows in Retool, you can: cut the MSO with more efficient back-office tools for your teams, and replace disconnected systems and manual processes with a streamlined, data-driven foundation that reinforces - not replaces - the human relationships at the heart of modern care. 

Custom and compliant tools not only benefit healthcare providers, but also those working in pharmaceuticals, insurance, and start-ups innovating in the healthcare space. 

Bold Tech’s Healthcare Template

At Bold Tech, we understand the key challenges faced by modern healthcare companies. We’ve worked with Pharmaceutical companies like Vial and healthcare innovators like Oxeon to build their back-office apps, so we’ve seen first-hand what a difference better internal tools can make.

In our healthcare UI template, we show how quickly you can build internal tools like:

• Practice management dashboards that centralize information and automate repetitive tasks, so your team can work with focus and productivity. 
• Patient outreach apps which enable you to manage efficient, proactive, and responsive patient engagement. 
• Call scripts apps to guarantee consistent and thorough interactions with patients, which also follow regulatory and compliance rules.
• Financial dashboard and analytics to make sure you’re staying on top of, and acting on, relevant data, ensuring data-driven decisions.

Building a UI from scratch can seem daunting, so this template gives you a practical starting point. You can download it today and get started immediately on Retool’s free plan. 

From there, you can wire this up to your data sources, use JavaScript to build in your custom business logic, and get started right away.

Or reach out to us for personalized advice and development support by filling out the form below.

The Bold Tech template is crafted by our in-house developers, and it’s free to download if you’ve subscribed to our newsletter. If you want to skip straight to downloading the template, go right to the bottom of this article. 

Practice management dashboard

Responding to patient needs requires two things: straightforward access to patient data and the ability to act on this information appropriately. The EHRs you might be using currently - like Epic or Cerner (now Oracle) - are typically clunky, with outdated UX, poor interoperability, and data trapped in silos. 

With a practice management dashboard that centralizes patient information and actions all in one app, you can promptly and appropriately respond to patient needs. Manual work can be reduced and repetitive tasks automated by all the relevant information being made available from one primary source. What’s more, you can design an app your staff actually wants to use every day.

Patient outreach app

You might be using patient engagement tools like Luma or Klara, which often have limited customization, a fragmented view of the patient, and no centralized dashboard. Creating a custom patient outreach app can address all of these challenges.

A bespoke patient outreach app facilitates better relationships between your team and its clients. You can build personalized workflows that reduce inconsistency and haphazard approaches to customer care, and instead, through better automations, allow you to strategically manage patient engagement and free up your team to focus on the human, personal aspect of their job. 

As well as maintaining existing client relationships, you can build new, efficient workflows for outreach campaigns to grow your patient/client base, all completely unique to the way you and your business operate. 

Call scripts app

When you’ve got a lot on your plate - and a lot of clients on your roster - planning for new patient outreach campaigns can be an unnecessary burden that takes away from the energy you’re able to dedicate to your other patients. In a custom app, you can simplify client communication through built-in scripts, direct call options, and outreach. 

AI options also help to improve the productivity and efficiency of your teams. And all of this is delivered with data regulation in mind; out-of-the-box security features and high compliance is possible for sensitive data.

What’s more, the call scripts app can be combined with your patient data and outreach apps so that workflows are seamless and you can investigate issues live on call to deliver the most responsive care possible. 

Ultimately, a well-designed Call Script App can enable medical professionals to focus on the most important part of their role, and the part that technology can’t mimic: human relationships with patients. 

Financial dashboards and analytics

You need to focus on what you do best, but you can’t lose sight of the financial aspects. Many smaller practices are unaware of their profits and losses, but integrated tools can do the hard work for you so you stay in the green. Rather than relying on external data tools, which can necessitate a heavy reliance on IT teams and a confusing combination of sources - such as Tableau, Power BI, or Snowflake- integrate and centralize your data using a financial dashboard. 

Beyond the instant headlines provided by a financial dashboard, access to financial data and analytics all in one place helps with taxes and accounting, and allows for data-driven decisions. What’s more, your financial dashboard can be directly plugged into management data to react quickly to pressing issues, while also providing the information you need to plan with a longer, strategic view. 

You can afford to be ambitious with your strategy when you’re empowered with the right information, and when you’re able to provide the right people with this information; with a financial dashboard, you can export data into whatever formats are needed to make it digestible for stakeholders. 

Retool UI highlights and inspiration 

Here are some highlights of this healthcare UI that you can implement in your Retool apps.

A dashboard that makes sense

To battle the challenge of disparate and difficult-to-read data, in our template, you can instantly see key data and get immediate oversight on business performance and customer satisfaction, and patient statistics, using color design to help give an instant understanding. 

With the notifications panel on the right-hand side, you’re also less likely to miss pressing issues: 

As a manager, you can obtain and interpret data efficiently and zoom in on priority actions, as well as enable your team to work more productively and independently through custom software, which provides them with only the tailored information they need to know.

Focussed patient engagement

Our template has an optimized UI for understanding large amounts of data and stats easily (great for insurance or pharmaceutical companies performing outreach), as well as boasting a user-friendliness which can simplify seemingly complex workflows, enabling you to build something that works for your team and doesn’t require extensive training to understand: 

For that one-on-one communication, which remains at the heart of what medical professionals do, we’ve added action buttons to call or email immediately, rather than you having to fumble around to find the correct contact details and the key points concerning a particular patient’s profile. Plus, it reduces the risk of missed follow-up calls or high-risk cases slipping through the net. 

Rather than needing to access an external application to communicate with clients, communication can be actioned from within the same app; you can easily connect email and phone, or whatever app you use to communicate, and add to a dashboard. 

Call scripts and other automated features 

In our template, the ‘Cold Outreach Queue’ shows you upcoming calls, and provides you with all the information you need in advance of making the call; information about last contact, context on patient activity and the level of priority. On the right-hand side, you can prepare your call script, either using AI or a pre-made script, as well as actually make the phone call from within the app:

The AI script generator allows you to craft a script appropriate to your needs, taking into account ‘Patient Type’, ‘Call Outcome’ and ‘Tone’, meaning you can enter the call with confidence and clear goals, and facilitate a productive and efficient conversation. 

Financial analytics that you can easily read and action

The user-friendly and easy-to-read panels at the top of the financial dashboard in our template mean that you never miss the headlines or get so bogged down in the details (or simply sourcing the information) that you miss the bigger picture that’s essential for acting strategically. For more detailed breakdowns, our template provides insights into more particular areas, including Revenue Streams, Operating Expenses, and Cash Flow Analysis: 

You can provide instant snapshots into important areas of your company’s operations, including monthly revenue, insurance collections, and revenue per patient, as well as giving an overview of profit and loss, and cash flow analysis - this gives you immediate and global data insights so that you don’t get so bogged down in details that you miss the wider picture. You can also build in more detailed insights into particular areas, including Revenue Streams, Operating Expenses, and Cash Flow Analysis. 

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.

Sign up below to download the free template!

Softr is a front-end, no-code tool that works on top of your existing database platforms - it complements, rather than replaces, platforms such as Airtable or Google Sheets. Softr enables you to set up a front-end UI that connects to your back-end data source (such as Airtable) and build out with web apps, internal tools, client portals, and directories, without needing to write code. 

Softr was originally built as a kind of ‘plug-in’ for Airtable - the platform offered a means of creating responsive, powerful interfaces, while maintaining Airtable as the exclusive datasource. Today, Softr can integrate with many other data platforms (you can find more information in our ‘What is Softr’ article), though many users still focus on using it for the Airtable integration.

Why use Softr over Airtable interfaces?

Airtable provides a straightforward, spreadsheet-like grid or list view that allows for flexible manipulation of the data. Nevertheless, this flexibility of Airtable’s bases can leave it more vulnerable to breakage, as anyone can accidentally edit a record. Softr helps builders transform data into interactive desktop and mobile applications that maintain data integrity and control functionality. What’s more, it does so at a price-per-user that can be cost-effective for teams of all sizes. 

If you’re familiar with Airtable, you might be thinking: doesn’t Airtable already have its own solution for front-end interfaces? In fact, a lot of builders are likely to come to Softr for interfacing as an alternative to Airtable Interfaces but pricing is a primary differentiator between Softr and Airtable’s own Interfaces. The price of Airtable’s built-in version comes in at $24/person on the least expensive plan. This can get costly when adding up internal staff and external clients at $24+ a pop. Softr offers a plan for $49 per month for 20 users, a much more affordable starting point for smaller teams. 

When it comes to cost-efficiency for SMBs, Softr provides a pathway to build internal business software (and even portals) that can save time and money along the way. 

So, in this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to use Softr to build an app on top of your Airtable data. With this app you can: 

• View orders and their details, and filter and search this information,
• Create new orders,
• Edit orders...
• ...And delete them.

This is known as creating a CRUD interface.

Here’s a preview of what our final app will look like: 

Building your app: a step-by-step process

Getting started with Softr is pretty simple. This guide will take you through the process, one step at a time. That said, Softr is so no-code and automated that a lot of the steps are pretty self-explanatory; if you find yourself wondering, ‘that was so easy, did I miss something’ the likelihood is, it really was just that simple!

Set up your account with Softr

Begin by signing up for a free account, which includes a personalized onboarding experience tailored to your needs. Once inside, you can choose from a variety of templates to speed up the process, or start from scratch to build an app exactly how you want it.

Connect Softr with your Airtable Base (or another data source)

The perk of a no-code solution is that you don’t have to write code to design your layouts, and you don’t need to write advanced API calls to visualize your data into an application. 

Thankfully, Softr walks you through the data sync process, making it simple to pull in the data you need. All you need to do is click Data on your main studio home screen, select the data source you want to connect, which is Airtable in our case.

Here’s what it looks like to connect to Airtable:

Finally, select the base you want to share, and this will create an OAUTH integration for you: 

Once you’ve granted access, you’re already done! It’s that simple. 

Navigating Softr’s Development Studio

When it comes to the building experience, Softr provides a visual design studio made for beginners, with some custom code options for deeper customization. In the Softr studio, you can customize everything from pages, block layouts, and even style preferences per page. 

The platform allows you to tweak individual blocks or apply global changes across your app, this level of customization ensures that the app suits your style and functionality preferences.

Navigating Softr’s development studio is often a simple experience compared to other more technical platforms like Noloco, Glide, or even Figma. Where Softr truly stands out is making it easy for beginners to get started and design applications on their own without needing a lot of advanced technical experience.  

Once you’re in the studio, have a play around! You’ll notice the left-hand navigation menu, where you can select the main home page or any other pages you’re working on. The real magic happens in the center of the screen, which serves as your development playground. Here, you can add, move, and customize blocks’, which are sections of content like data visualizations, forms, and other elements. Think of it like stacking toy blocks, where you can arrange them however you’d like in order to create the desired layout for your app.

Customizing your components and actions

To further refine your app, the right-hand menu offers detailed customization options. This menu has five tabs: Source, Content, Actions, Style, and Visibility. The Source tab lets you pull in your data sources, while the Content tab allows for personalization of each block, mapping each field from Airtable to the location it needs to be visualized in Softr.

The Actions tab is where you can add buttons and configure user navigations, while the Style tab gives you control over the visual design, allowing you to tweak the look of individual blocks. 

Finally, the Visibility tab controls who can see each block, giving you the flexibility to set permissions based on user groups. As you build, you can preview your app in real-time in the studio or with a more ‘’live’ feel by clicking Preview. 

The very top navigation bar in the studio allows you to view and adjust the design for different device sizes, invite collaborators to review or edit the app, and publish any changes to the app. For example, in desktop view:

If you’re on a smartphone, it also automatically adapts your apps for a mobile view: 

Read: Set up the Orders list page to view Airtable records

Now that we’re a bit more familiar with the Softr builder, let’s jump into our application and start building out some functionality. We’ll start with the ‘Read’ part of our CRUD, and pull in our Airtable data to be viewed.

In Airtable we have a ‘Base’ for our list of orders. Instead of a spreadsheet view, we want to visualize our data in a dynamic way that users can interact with from a desktop or mobile device. Here’s what the data looks like when in Airtable:

Now, let’s set this up in Softr so that it’s easier to read and interpret.

First, click Pages, then click the yellow + button to add a new page. The page will start out empty: you can click into the + section to add in dynamic data from your data sources (or static data that you can type in manually). 

To present our data, we’ll use a List Block. A List Block is one of the most common blocks you’ll see across Softr, alongside the Cards block. The Cards block is best when you have images in your data.

Once you pull in the List Block, you’ll see the settings on the right-hand side that allow you to configure it. We’ll start by opening the Source tab and connecting to our Airtable data.

To do this, select the data source from the source tab, including the base and table from Airtable that your data is coming from. Softr will then auto-select the fields it assumes that you want to display, which you can then further configure under the Content tab. 

You can change the fields that were mapped automatically by clicking on them and changing the mapped field, the field type (text, number, dropdown), or both. To add new fields, that process is now as simple as clicking add then toggling on or off as many fields as you want. 

The List Block also has additional useful features, like the ability to have a collapsible details section or links to ‘details’ pages. Content can be stacked vertically or in condensed columns with the click of a button. 

For our example, we’ve opted for the collapsible details format, so we can see a simple list of orders and can expand the information when needed. 

Create: Setup a Create Order Form for different user types

So that our users can add an order, we need to create an order form. 

You can do so as an individual block on an existing page, by clicking on the black + icon above or below an existing block and choosing a Form Block, or by adding a brand new page just like we did above.

Let’s set up our form on its own page: this means we can link it out publicly so that we can share it directly with our customers. 

Softr’s forms have several design options, including a centered form, a form with a large image to either side, or a form that progresses one question at a time. 

The first decision you need to make is where to send the form responses. Since we are storing our data in Airtable, we can select Data Source, then our Airtable base and table. 

Next, we can set our general form settings, such as a header image, heading, and sub-heading. 

Luckily for us, Softr will auto-add the questions it assumes we need based on our Airtable fields, and we can edit those in the same way we did for the orders list, by clicking on them and mapping to a different field, or clicking Add field and toggling on and off other fields from our Airtable database.  

As simply as that, we’ve set up our create form. Softr has even taken care of the connection back to Airtable, so any information filled out and submitted in this form will automatically be sent back to your Airtable base.

We can now share this form with external users by using the form’s URL link, just make sure the page is set to 'All users' or 'Non logged-In Users' so the form can be viewed publicly. 

Top tip: Within your form build, you can also choose multiple pathways for your users to proceed through the form based on their responses or user groups, so that it works more like a wizard. You can also set different end screens, which determine how the user navigates away from the form once it has been submitted. This kind of functionality goes way beyond what a simple spreadsheet or basic Airtable base can offer, and is great for building better UX/UI.

Open the form for our app

Now, we also need to be able to access this form from our app. To do this, we’ll add a button above our order list.

When you pull in Softr’s list blocks to your canvas, they will automatically start out with an Add Record button. Since we built our form out on a separate page, we can remove this button and add a button to navigate the user to the form page instead. 

If you’d like for your users to stay on the same page, you can have the form open up as a pop-up modal, or keep the initial Add Record button, which also opens up as a modal. We’ll go over how to set up form fields from an action button later on in this tutorial when we show how to edit an existing order.

Now, when somebody submits a new order in the form, the responses will be saved to our Airtable base, which will then appear in our Orders page in our Softr app!

Edit: Add an option to edit existing Orders

Next, we want to ensure we can edit our orders if needed. To do this, you can add an ‘editing’ feature to the form submissions. 

Head to the 'Actions' tab of your List. Underneath Actions, you can set ‘top-bar’ actions. 

‘Top-bar’ actions always appear on the top of the block whether the block is in list or card view. 

With 'top-bar' actions you can also Scroll to another block on the existing page, navigate to a different page, open an external URL or add a new record. If you’re on the professional plan, you can even export your data from a top-bar action. 

To set up your edit functionality, all you need to do is select ‘Edit record’ and map the fields in a similar manner as we did for our New record form.

However, one key difference is that the fields won’t be auto-mapped or automatically added for you. To allow users to edit the record, you must manually toggle individual fields on or off from the start. This step is a bit hidden if you’re not used to the platform. Above the header Update Record Modal Settings, there is a tiny section where you’ll find another yellow plus icon. Here’s where you’ll click Add field and map the items to your respective Airtable data. 

When you click Add field, you can choose which values to include in your form. 

This form is currently only allowed as a modal pop-up, so your users will see a darkened background of their orders and a pop-up modal when they click this item button.

The form is automatically pre-filled with the data from the table row we clicked, so the user can easily update the fields you made editable.

And once again, with just a few clicks we’re all done! Now your users can edit the records using a simple form when needed. 

Delete a record

Deleting from an item or record-level is even simpler, as Softr provides a pre-built action you can choose to include.

We’ll set this up in the same space as adding a new record or editing a new record, from the List component settings. 

To delete a record, an individual order in our instance, you click Add item button under Actions, just as we did in the Edit section of our tutorial. Now, you select the Delete Record action.

Finally, customize the error message you want users to see before they fully delete the item. 

With that, you already have all four CRUD actions covered, in just a short space of time! 

Customize and publish the app

Before we launch, let’s add some additional design customization to our app.

You can change all styling elements at the block level or at the individual field level. To change styling levels for the entire block, navigate to the Styles tab and expand the various sections to make changes to that block’s style. 

You can change overall padding on the top and bottom of the block, background colors, list or ‘card’ colors, button colors, Title sizes and alignment and text weight. 

If these customization features are not enough to suit your fancy, advanced developers can further customize their applications through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For access to this level of customization, you will need to upgrade to at least the Basic Plan. 

Sync your users and create user groups 

Now our app is ready to deploy, let’s add our users. 

Users are always stored in Softr’s user page, under the left-hand navigation panel. Whether you sync your users from an Airtable database table, or add users to Softr directly, anyone who needs to login to your application will need to be added to the Softr user page. 

To sync users from Airtable, or another data source, click Sync with data source on the Users page. Softr’s prompts will guide you through selecting your data source, as well as the table and fields that your user data is stored in. 

To add users manually into Softr click Add Users and either include an individual user by typing in their email and name, or import a bulk set of users by adding a csv file and selecting which columns include the email addresses and names. 

User groups are managed on the Users page as well. Having custom user groups is available only on Softr’s paid plans, with more user group numbers available on the highest plans. 

User groups allow you to customize the application pages or blocks based on which user group needs to see the information, for example hiding staff salaries on staff group blocks, while making them visible on their manager or administrator’s blocks, for example. 

Conclusion

Now that you’ve made an Orders List page, an Orders Form and an Editing Orders feature, your Orders application is ready to go live! When you’re ready to publish your app, it’s as simple as clicking the black Publish button on the top right of your Softr studio. 

This app will now provide a log-in portal for customers to place, review, edit and delete their orders. 

If you’re interested in comparing the Softr platform with Airtable’s own interface building tool, check out our article here. 

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.

Retool offers plenty of useful tools and integrations for safely managing Enterprise deployments, versions, and releases. To ensure greater structure and reliability of your releases, we recommend - if you are on the Retool Enterprise plan - using Git to implement source control, as much as you would in traditional development environments.

Why using Git source control in Retool is a good idea: 

• Safer, more structured deployments: Git-based workflows in Retool support rollbacks, allow for better traceability of who changed what and why, and branching allows you to experiment with larger changes without fear of losing work.
• Better collaboration between devs: pull requests are supported in Retool, which allows for code review and quality checks, and branching supports features and bug fixes without disrupting others’ work, which can be automatically merged. 
• Avoid overwriting changes in Retool: though Retool technically offers a ‘multiplayer’ development option, some users experience issues with overwriting other dev’s changes and losing work, or publishing another developer’s work before it’s ready. Source control allows for simultaneous development without the risk of erasing work.
• Improved security: GitHub logs and audit trail of changes to apps, queries, and resources. Using Pull requests, teams can also thoroughly review changes before they go into production.

The best Git-based workflow in Retool

While the Retool docs support with set-up, many of our Enterprise clients struggle to understand the best way to manage source control within the Retool infrastructure, particularly if they aren’t already familiar with GitHub.

In most use cases, we recommend using GitHub as your source control provider, whilst using Retool Spaces with separate, protected Git branches for implementation.

This setup provides several key benefits:

• Environment isolation: Retool Spaces fully isolates your environments, so databases, APIs, and even users can be separated. This means your teams can have separate source control repositories and apps available to them. In this case, we suggest creating a ‘Development’ and ‘Production’ Space for each set of apps you are deploying.
  • This is particularly important for creating a secure environment where your developers don’t need to worry about impacting prod data, and where production data is only exposed to necessary users.
• Simplified deployment: Pushing code from your development ‘Space’ to production is as simple as merging the development branch into main.

Setting up Git Source Control in Retool

Create a Git repository and deactivate Retool’s version control

First, create a Git repository and app by following Retool’s documentation. To do this, you’ll need to follow these four steps (you may need to be the Space ‘Owner’ to do this): 

1. Create Git Repository
2. Create and Install a GitHub App
3. Generate a private key
4. Configure Repository Settings

Next, you’ll need to individually protect all of your apps. 

If you are using Retool’s native version control, you need to unpublish all applications, themes, and modules that you will be sharing across environments. Your app, while protected, won't read off the source-controlled files until you unpublish the release.

You can unpublish each application by going to the applications' Releases and History section and clicking ‘Unpublish’. If it says something like “1.0.1 (Live)”, open the Versions menu by clicking the tag and select Unpublish release on whichever version is live.

Set up configuration variables

Next, to prevent exposing secure data in the GitHub repo, convert hardcoded values and those that differ between environments (e.g., API URLs, credentials) inside each resource or application to configuration variables. This allows you to protect sensitive data and access keys, manage staging and production environments more easily, and allows for easier updates with generic code.

You can do this in the Settings section of the Retool environment.

A couple of important things to remember:

• Configuration variables are specific to the Retool Space, meaning the same variable can have a different value in the Development Space than it does in the Production Space.
• You must name the variable in exactly the same way in each Space. Capitalization and spacing matter.
• All Spaces will use the production environment, so it is the only environment you need to set the variable value on.
• To reference variables in Retool, you use the syntax {{environment.variables.NAME }} in resources and {{retoolContext.configVars.NAME}} in apps and workflows.

Configure GitHub and Retool Spaces

Now that you have set up your configuration variables, you need to configure your Retool Spaces setup and connect these to your GitHub repository.

If you haven’t yet set up Spaces, follow the steps in the Retool Spaces docs to configure them.

For this article, we’re going to assume you currently only use one space, which will become your ‘Production’ space. This Production Space will house all the apps that your end users are actively using, including your production data. Your developers will no longer work in this Space when adding features or fixing bugs; they will instead work in the Development Space and push changes to the Production Space.

Once you have your Production Space set up, you need to connect this to your GitHub repo. In Retool, head to Settings > Source Control and select GitHub. Now, you will use the GitHub App values from the app you created earlier to fill in the Access Configuration section. 

Make sure to point your ‘Production’ space to the main branch.

Now, Retool should auto-deploy your Space’s code to Git. However, if it does not, you can manually Deploy latest by selecting the button on the right under Deploy.

Once the Main branch has synced with Retool, head back to GitHub to create and protect a Development branch.

To do this, from the default Main branch in GitHub, navigate to your Repository > Branch and click New branch.

Next, head back to Retool to create your ‘Development’ Space. This will now act as a sandbox environment, where you can develop and add new features to your apps without affecting production. 

From here, you can ensure that there are some basic protections added to the development branch. We recommend at least blocking it from being deleted, setting up automated code reviews and limiting who is allowed to merge into it.

This space will initially be empty, but don’t worry, we will shortly import the data from our Production space. You’ll be able to move between spaces you have access to from the top right of the Retool home screen, or by navigating to the Space’s URL directly. 

Now, we need to head back to GitHub and configure Source Control for this Space in the same way as Production, but point it to the Development branch instead. 

You can follow the same steps to configure this branch in the ‘Source Control’ settings in Retool, though this time you will use ‘development’ for the GitHub Branch rather than ‘main’. 

One common mistake people make in this final step is clicking ‘copy to Space’ to duplicate their apps to both development and production. This can result in lots of duplicate apps across your environment, as they were already duplicated when creating the dev branch off main. You should only copy resources if they cannot be source-controlled.

 ⚠️ Edge Case: How to handle resources that cannot be source-controlled

Whenever possible, you should protect resources rather than manually duplicating them. Manual duplication loses many of the benefits of source control.

Any resources that you were not able to protect due to differences between dev and production environments - such as completely different authentication processes - will need to be manually duplicated between spaces (here you can use the ‘Copy to Space’ option).

If not, create the resource in your development space and name it EXACTLY as it is named in the production space, because this means all queries and functionality will continue to work as usual.

How to use Source Control best when developing in Retool

Now that you have source control set up in your Retool environment, this is the process we recommend for using it best in your daily development. Once you are ready to make changes to your staging app:

1. The developer creates a new branch in the Development space by branching off the protected Development Branch. 

You can do this in Retool by heading to the Development space, clicking the three dots to the right of the app you’d like to edit, and clicking Create new branch option.

If you don’t see the create new branch option, then the app has not been protected properly. You can learn more about configuring protection in the Retool Docs.

A couple of tips: 

• Note that two different developers working at the same time on different features that won’t overlap should create distinct branches. Nevertheless, we recommend working on different pages in a multipage system to avoid merge conflicts.
• Likewise, if you are working on different features on distinct parts of the app, create a new branch for each new feature.

2. Next, develop the new feature as usual, using commits rather than draft releases as save points.
   • To make it easier to cherry-pick the features you would like to push to production, go for small, well-named commits that describe each change you have made.

3. After completing a feature or getting to a good point for you to test your work, merge the branch back into the Development Branch. This allows you to safely test the new feature in the Development environment, before pushing it to the ‘main’ branch in your Production Space.

A couple of tips: 

• Feature branches should not be merged directly into main unless necessary. It should usually go feature branch > merge feature to development branch > merge development branch to main. Though this may be done in cases where you are pushing a bug fix or need to make an urgent change when other dev work is still unfinished.
• You can merge one feature branch into another one.

4. Handle any conflicts and complete the merge. If Retool finds any conflicts, you can use the code editor to resolve them.
   • Review the conflict and determine which branch’s changes to keep.
   • For simple conflicts, you can do this using the GitHub GUI. For more complex conflicts, you must resolve them using the CLI. Once conflicts are resolved, merge the branch immediately, as Retool doesn’t pull changes from GitHub.
   • We recommend always working on different pages within multipage to avoid these conflicts. 
   • Once conflicts are resolved, no further changes should be made to the branch via the Retool editor, as Retool doesn’t pull in changes made directly via the GitHub GUI/CLI.
   • Occasionally, the conflicts are complex enough that it’s worth rebranching and reimplementing changes. You can avoid this by following the advice above for small, non-overlapping branches that are frequently merged in.
   • The Retool Docs give some useful tips for avoiding merge conflicts.

Once you’re confident that the merge has been successful and you won’t need to roll back the change, delete the branch to avoid clutter.

5. When you have thoroughly tested your app in Development and it’s ready for a production release, merge Development → Main by creating a Pull Request in GitHub between the two branches.
   • This should be done frequently so that it is easier to review what commits you are merging. 
   • If necessary, you can pick and choose certain commits to avoid merging incomplete features to production.

Here’s how this might look in practice: 

Be sure to check out the previous articles in our Retool for Enterprise series:

• Part 1: The Basics
• Accessing audit log data via SQL for on-prem deployments
• Advanced permissions in Retool: The Fundamentals

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.

Tracking high-intent visitors (leads) to your site, in real-time, is essential for sales teams. n8n, a powerful workflow automation tool, allows you to build seamless integrations between different services, including APIs, webhooks, and messaging platforms like Slack.

One practical use case is detecting when a large company (a "Big Fish") is browsing your website or submitting a form. By leveraging Abstract's API, you can automatically check the company size and, if it exceeds a certain threshold, trigger an instant Slack alert for your sales team.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build an automated Big Fish detection system in n8n. This workflow will:

1. Send a Slack alert notifying the sales team that a Big Fish is swimming.
2. Check if the company size is over 100 employees,
3. Use Abstract's API to fetch company details,
4. Capture website visits or form submissions,

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a fully functional n8n workflow that helps your team track high-value leads effortlessly 🎇

Step 1: Set up Abstract

Head over to Abstract’s Company Enrichment API page. Click Start for Free to create your account. This will help us retrieve lead data with accurate company details like company size, location, and industry, which we’ll integrate into your n8n workflow shortly.

Once your account is set up, navigate to the Company Enrichment section from the dashboard.

Here, you’ll find your API key and the request URL format, as shown below. Copy both; you’ll need them to integrate Abstract’s API with n8n for retrieving company size in your workflow.

Step 2: Set up Fillout

Now, let’s focus on creating the lead capture form using Fillout. Head over to the Fillout homepage and click the Get started – it’s free button. This form will collect lead information, which we’ll connect to the webhook in n8n to trigger our automated workflow.

To create your lead capture form, choose Blank form as this allows you to start from scratch and customize the form fields to collect exactly the data you need, like name, email, and company domain. Once the form is ready, we’ll connect it to the webhook in n8n to trigger the workflow.

Name your form something like "Lead Generation Form" or any name that fits your workflow. Once you’ve named it, click Continue to start creating your form.

Use Fillout’s builder to add fields like text inputs, dropdowns, or checkboxes.

To connect your Fillout form to n8n, head to the Integrate tab at the top of the Fillout dashboard. From the list of popular apps, select Webhook. This will allow you to send form submission data directly to the n8n webhook URL we set up earlier, triggering your automated lead workflow.

Paste the URL from which will be gotten from n8n later in this tutorial into the Webhook URL field and enable Advanced View.

In the webhook setup, set the HTTP method to POST. Under Body, map the form fields to match your data structure - like name, email, company.name, and domain. This ensures that when a lead submits the form, all the necessary details are sent directly to your n8n workflow, click Finish setup to complete the integration. This will allow your form submissions to trigger the workflow in n8n.

When satisfied with all your set up, click Publish in the top-right corner. You'll receive a shareable link or embed code.

Step 3: Set up n8n

To get started with automating lead alerts in n8n, head over to n8n.io and click the Get started for free button in the center of the page, as shown in the screenshot. This will guide you through setting up a new account. If you already have an account, simply click Sign in at the top right corner. 

After completing the registration form, n8n will prompt you with a few quick questions to tailor your experience. Select the options that best fits you, then click OK to proceed. This helps n8n customize the platform to better suit your needs, but don't worry, your choice won't affect the workflow creation process!

Once you've completed the setup, click the Start automating button to start creating your workflow.

You'll land on the n8n dashboard. To create your first workflow, click Start from scratch in the center of the screen or use the Create Workflow button in the top-right corner. 

Once you’ve started your workflow, click Add first step... in the center of the screen. This is where you’ll add your trigger, this could be a new submission in your form which will kick off the automated process. Let’s set up that first step!

After clicking Add first step..., you'll be prompted to choose a trigger to start your workflow. Search and select Webhook from the list. The webhook will listen for new lead data and trigger the workflow when it's called.

Configure your webhook by setting the HTTP Method to POST and copying both the Test URL and Production URL provided. These URLs will be essential when we connect the webhook to the lead form later in the tutorial. For now, keep them handy: we’ll return to this step once the form setup is complete.

Click the plus (+) icon next to the Webhook node, then search for "HTTP" in the right-hand panel. Select HTTP Request as shown in the image below.

In the HTTP Request node settings:

• Set the Method to GET and paste the API endpoint from Abstract's Company Enrichment API into the URL field.
• Dynamically insert the domain from the form submission using the expression {{$json.body.domain}}. This will fetch company details like size, location, and industry based on the submitted domain.
• Once configured, click Test step to ensure the request pulls the correct data.

Now, let’s filter for the big fish! Click the plus (+) icon next to the HTTP Request node, search and select  IF to add a condition to your workflow. 

Configure the condition to check if the employee count is greater than 100. Use the expression {{$json.employee_count}} > 100. This ensures that only leads from companies with over 100 employees will proceed to the next step in your workflow. Click Test step to check the condition is working correctly.

Now, let’s send an alert when a lead qualifies! Click the plus (+) icon next to the IF node’s true branch, search and select Slack. This will allow you to send a notification directly to your Slack channel whenever a lead from a company with over 100 employees comes through.

Choose Send message from the options under Message Actions.

In the Slack node settings, click Create new credential to connect your Slack account to n8n.

Select OAuth2 (recommended) and click Connect my account.

Once authenticated, choose the Slack channel where you want to send lead alerts under Send Message To. Then, craft your message using lead data from the workflow - like company name, size, and contact info. After setting it up, click Test step to ensure everything is working correctly.

Your automated lead alert workflow is now complete! All nodes - from the Webhook to the Slack message - are connected and ready to go. Click Save in the top-right corner to secure your workflow. 

Finally, toggle the workflow to Active so it will automatically trigger whenever a new lead comes in. Congratulations! You've officially set up your Big Fish Swimming workflow!

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.

Education platforms are usually spinning many plates: supporting students, teachers, and parents with varying needs, organizing vast amounts of content, and adhering to strict data security requirements. This can mean a crash course in chaos… and custom internal apps can be the difference between productivity and an organizational nightmare.  

With the right internal tool setup, you can:

• Strategically manage education content, including editing, creating, and authoring capabilities, with ease.
• Understand and apply data analytics intelligently and securely.
• Maintain responsive and efficient communication with your students and educators.

Complex needs like those of education platforms require complex solutions - but the tricky problems might be easier to solve than you think. With Retool, you can build highly customized apps that handle your unique workflows. 

What's more, by using Retool, you'd be in good company too - we've worked with education giants like SeeSaw and Chegg to build better apps on Retool to support their teams.

Why build Education apps on Retool?

Where traditional app development can take months and years, Retool simplifies the repetitive parts, allowing developers to move much faster to build a product that is fully bespoke to your needs, and that scales. 

Retool’s combination of pre-built elements and the full flexibility of code means you don’t face the same limitations as other low-code platforms, nor the rigidity of SaaS functionality. You can build tools that grow with you, without getting stumped by an inaccessible price tag or hitting the low-code ‘wall’.

Read our full What is Retool guide to learn more about the platform.

What is Retool and what is it used for? Ultimate Guide 2025

Retool is a business software builder aimed at helping developers build faster. Devs require decent knowledge of JavaScript and SQL but can build highly custom apps much faster than traditional code.

tools.devTools Team

Bold Tech's Education UI template

If you’re looking for inspiration and want to skip some of the setup, the Bold Tech Education UI template can help. Building a UI from scratch can seem daunting, so this template gives you a practical starting point. You can download it today and get started immediately on Retool’s free plan. 

You can wire this up to your data sources, use JavaScript to build in your custom business logic, and get started right away.

Or reach out to us for personalized advice and development support by filling out the form below.

You can download the LMS template at the bottom of this page, but first, let’s give you a little tour... 

Key features of this Education template

Custom LMS homepage to manage content, authoring, and versions

Educators and content teams often use a patchwork of tools and platforms, meaning version control and consistency can quickly become a nightmare. With Retool, you can centralize the resources you already use - such as your SQL databases, Google Docs, Hubspot CRM, and even Moodle and Canva, because Retool connects to any data source, either natively or via REST API. 

Many LMS platforms lock you into predefined course structures, but perhaps those that don’t truly fit your business model or workflows. Building a custom LMS allows your content teams to break the mold, unlocking creativity and making sure your tools fit your processes, and not the other way around. 

Our LMS dashboard demonstrates how you could build workflows for content management and review that match your teams’ existing processes and approval flows, while being plugged into performance and analytics data so your decisions are informed by the data. 

In Retool, it’s possible to create entirely custom content management systems that facilitate creating and editing content, as well as enabling bulk actions on content, managing, organizing, and building courses. What's more, you can build these apps so they scale as fast as you do, with the kind of infrastructure fit for enterprise companies.

While this is just a simple homepage UI framework, Retool enables developers to build out much more complex functionality, much faster than traditional code.

Customer support center

Strong relationships are at the heart of effective education. Education companies typically manage relationships with a wide range of stakeholders, not just with teachers but with students and, often, parents. With Retool, customer support can be built directly into a single, centralized app, rather than straddling complex combinations of tools, like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom. 

Building a bespoke customer support tool means that CS agents can respond to customers directly and resolve actions from within the same interface - which is already connected to your resources and data - rather than wasting time jumping between multiple apps. 

With Retool, it’s also easy to integrate AI features that help your CS team respond even faster, enabling your team to respond personally to more complex requests while simultaneously supporting those who need a quick and simple fix. 

Using Retool, you can create functionality that supports exactly what you need… and cut out all the functionality that you don’t. That way, CS teams can be onboarded quickly and focus on doing their jobs using highly optimized and specific tools. 

User analytics dashboard 

As an education platform, your decisions need to be driven by data. Building robust, actionable data insights requires integrating multiple resources, data apps, and user analytics into bespoke dashboards that help you better understand your users and evolve to meet their needs.

Traditionally, building this level of insight has meant relying on a complicated (and often costly) mix of business intelligence tools and software, such as Tableau or Power BI. While these platforms can be useful for some contexts, they often exist externally to your other apps, slowing down decision-making, that require specialized expertise to maintain and manage, and may well be overly complex for the needs of your company. 

With this template, you can integrate your existing data sources and visualize them directly within your app, creating interactive, custom dashboards that surface the metrics that matter most, without leaving your platform or adding unnecessary complexity. 

User management

Finally, managing app users is key, both for your back office and your product, facilitating their experience to ensure that everyone is getting the most out of your platform. Once again, you could integrate user management directly within the same app ecosystem, alongside your support app, so that all customer experience is managed in the same environment. 

Once your Customer Support App and Main App are connected, you’ll be able to access this user information anywhere in your app system. This kind of interlinking created a centralized system that is both bespoke and efficient; by managing information in this way, you cut onboarding and training time and significantly improve productivity. 

Before you go, let’s take a closer look at some of the UI highlights and inspiration that you could apply in your Retool apps!

Retool UI highlights and inspiration 

Headline banner

When users log in, the banner at the top immediately delivers the headline for that day; it might be a new course, a recently published piece of content, or what the team’s been working on most recently. You can choose what you want your users to see, so it’s an effective way to communicate key and perhaps time-sensitive information with your users. 

Quick actions

In several of the pages, we built in a quick actions section so that users can jump to whatever page they need quickly - no need to switch between several disjointed apps to achieve the same results. 

We’ve put this in a box container on the homepage, and on the user management page the most useful and frequently-employed actions are displayed above the user table. The most common actions on each are solid buttons using a primary color, and the secondary actions are designed to be less visually dominant, whilst still being clear to action with icons and colors.

Quick data overview 

On their homepage, users can see an overview of the back office and get an instant snapshot of the state of affairs. The two column layout, with each sections separated with a subtle differentiation in background or outline color allows users to immediately understand and categorize the information they see. The use of color and icons in the Integration Status segment immediately notifies them of any issues. 

The data summary in the Customer Support app gives users a quick, overall understanding of the progress of the team and the status of various issues. Again, this simple layout with colored icons allows users to understand data at a glance.

Finally, the panel at the top of the user management surfaces an instant overview of what’s going on among your users, particularly focusing on any changes with the green and red secondary values, meaning you can immediately identify priorities. 

Organizing data for full visibility

In the first panel of the customer support app, the agent can nimbly find and switch between requests. The middle panel is where the agent can interact directly with the customer and the third gives the agent access to information and context needed to resolve the issue (and even resolve the issue through Quick Actions) without leaving the page. 

Despite there being a large amount of data and buttons on the page, organizing these into clear categories and using thoughtful components, color and positioning helps guide the users to the exact information they need.

This kind of simple and logical layout can cut resolution time to a fraction of what it was. 

Be sure to check out our other templates for app ideas and UI inspiration, such as the Hubspot CRM UI, or Hospitable template, or head to the templates page for more.

Sign up or login to download the template for free! ⬇️

Softr is a no-code platform that enables users to build around their existing, basic databases, levelling up usability and functionality. What makes Softr stand out is its user-friendly building studio, access to ‘plug-n-play’ advanced integrations such as Google Analytics and Hotjar, and responsive mobile design features. 

While Softr initially made its name building front-end interfaces on Airtable bases, it has since evolved into a broader no-code solution, allowing SMBs to connect databases and build more complex applications, without needing to be a tech guru. You can now integrate multiple data sources into a Softr app, in just a few guided clicks. This means that instead of having to manually sync up your data with resources like Airtable, Google Sheets, or Xano, Softr takes care of the complex parts for you.

Softr empowers businesses to customize user experience, access their data on mobile or tablet devices, and separate their external data, so that teams only see what they are authorized to see. 

You can’t introduce Softr without mentioning its pricing, which is competitive with the likes of Glide and Airtable. If you’re an SMB trying to keep things cost-efficient, Softr gives you pretty good bang for your buck in enabling you to build internal business software while eliminating the prerequisite of coding know-how. See this article’s section on Softr’s pricing for a more detailed breakdown of how it stacks up against Airtable.

For advanced developers, one of Softr’s standout features is its support for custom code - including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - at both global and block levels. While some other no-code tools (like Glide) offer limited options through computed fields or integrations. Softr provides far greater flexibility by letting you inject scripts and styles directly. 

As such, custom code can be added at the global app level, on each app page, and on every block section. If you already have custom code you’ve implemented for previous solutions, you can even pop those into a ‘custom code’ block to be visible for users in seconds. We’ll go into more depth in the custom code features later on in this article.

Key features and limitations

Visual builder for front-ends

If you’re looking for a front-end solution to pull all of your data together in one place, or you want to customize your data according to what client or user is logged in, Softr can help you speedily whip up a simple app.

This is a great option for those that are reliant on Airtable or Google Sheets data, and want to create more controlled views or functionality on top of these tables, such as adding buttons or forms with data validation.

Affordable options for SMBs and quick learning curve

If you or your business is just starting out, there’s a lot of ways to try Softr without having to break the bank. The Free or even Basic plan offers plenty of room to grow, especially compare to alternatives like Airtable that often lock key features behind higher tiers. 

If you decide to commit to building with Softr, you also don’t need to hire to a full-time developer; with Softr's ease-of-use, product owners can get started on their own or bring in an expert only when needed, which keeps the cost down while still allowing for rapid prototyping and quick time-to-market - at least for an MVP. 

That said, the lower-tier plans do limit the number of apps you can deploy. For smaller teams this might not be an issue, while larger organizations may find Enterprise more suitable - though many mid-sized companies can scale effectively on the Business plan. 

Simple permissioning and user groups 

Many folks will inevitably resort to Softr because the solution they’re currently using doesn't support the permissioning options they need. This is common when a builder is starting out with Airtable Interfaces, only to discover they cannot add different clients from different companies into the Interface without a lot of manual lift, high price tag, or the security of knowing clients won’t be able to access one another's or proprietary data. 

Softr solves this with built-in user permissions and user groups.  Instead of creating dozens of views, you can design your app once, set visibility rules, and let Soft handle who sees what - ensuring clients or employees only access the data meant for them.  This can be a major time-saver for the manual view creators out there. 

It’s worth noting, though, that the most advanced customization options unlock only at higher-tier plans. For SMBs on tighter budgets, the limits on permissions in the lower plans may be a turn-off.

Recently upgraded design layouts

Up until 2024, Softr hadn’t had much of a design upgrade. Outdated visual layouts turned some users away from implementing Softr, when to do so might not make their applications look as nice as something that was custom designed using full scale coding; there wasn’t much pulling users towards Softr’s no-code designs because carefully tailored layouts - using coding - were much more visually appealing.

In 2024, Softr rolled out major updates to its visual blocks, including redesigned List and Card views aligned with Google’s Material Design and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Many of these are already live, while others continue to roll out in beta through 2025. This gives builders more polished design options, though some blocks still lack the depth of fully custom-coded layouts. 

Customizing apps with code: HTML, JavaScript and CSS support

When it comes to the building experience, Softr provides a visual design studio made for beginners, but tailorable for advanced developers. In the Softr studio, you can customize everything from pages, block layouts, and even style preferences per page. The platform allows you to tweak individual blocks or apply global changes across your app. This level of customization ensures that the app suits your style and functionality preferences.

Navigating Softr’s development studio is a simple experience compared to other more technical platforms like Noloco, Glide, or even Figma. Where Softr truly stands out is making it easy for beginners to get started and design applications on their own without needing a lot of advanced technical experience.  

In the Studio, in the left-hand navigation menu, you can select the main home page or any other pages you’re working on. The real work happens in the center of the screen, which serves as your development canvas. Here, you can add, move, and customize blocks’, which are sections of content like data visualizations, forms, and other elements. Think of it like stacking toy blocks, where you can arrange them however you’d like in order to create the desired layout for your app.

Responsive apps for varied screen sizes: Mobile apps

One issue with Airtable was that it only recently - in the last year - granted Mobile accessibility for all mobile types in its interfaces. Even now, there are limitations on what the user of an iPhone or Android can do. All Softr interfaces, on the other hand, are mobile-friendly. That said, it’s important to note that Softr provides mobile access via internet browser - creating an app that you could download from the Apple or Google store is not possible with Softr.

While mobile navigation is common in no-code platforms, each one differs in two ways: how much access users have on mobile and how much effort you have to put into building a mobile experience. Building a mobile-first design on Softr, or providing a mobile accessible application for primarily desktop users, is fairly straightforward because it functions the same way in the studio as building a desktop version. 

In the Studio, builders can preview the application as a desktop, tablet, or mobile view. All changes made to one view are automatically applied to the other views.

Limited selection of integrated data sources

If you're connecting to data resources like Google Sheets or Airtable, Softr is a great option for building out app functionality on top. It also supports Notion, SmartSuite and Xano integrations on the lower tiers, and a handful of others on the professional and Business tiers. Connecting via Rest API is currently in Beta and options are limited.

In terms of pricing, Softr seems to focus more on resources than the user count; for example, though you might be able to have 20 users with the Basic plan, your resources will be limited. While this might limit bigger companies using more complex data sources (and more of them), this can be ideal for SMBs because you only pay more if you increase data complexity, as opposed to user accounts. That said, if you have specific resources you know you need to integrate from the outset, it’s worth thinking carefully about whether Softr is a good fit.

Softr primarily relies on external data sources like Airtable, Google Sheets, or Xano. Recently, they’ve introduced Softr Tables (a lightweight internal database, currently in beta). While not yet a full replacement for a traditional database, it allows you to store simple records directly inside Softr, reducing reliance on third-party tools for small projects. For larger or more complex applications, external databases are still recommended. 

While Softr now offers Softr Tables for simple internal data storage, most applications still require external datasets, unlike other no-code platforms such as Glide or Noloco, which let you start entirely with internal tables. 

Do also note that on the lower plans, the external data sources must be native integrations. The Business or Enterprise plans allows you to pull in data using the Rest API feature, but this doesn’t allow you to manage or edit - i.e. patch, push or delete - data from within the Rest API. As Softr explains: say you want to build a real estate app - you could connect to a CRM like HubSpot or another proprietary system via REST API to pull in live data. Currently, REST API connections in Softr are read-only, so you can display data but not push updates back. 

Website build and analytics

Softr can still be used to build out a fully static website - writing out any copy and adding any images you’d like - but it now also functions as a front-end solution for databases like Airtable, similar to how you might do so on website platforms such as SquareSpace, Wix, and Webflow. 

A great use case for this is for startups, who need both an application and a website to promote their new app. Taking advantage of Softr’s native analytic and SEO integrations, you can stay up to date on your website traffic through Google Analytics, save keywords on Facebook Keywords, add leads to a CRM in HubSpot, and take payments with Stripe. Website pages can be added as public pages, so no one has to login to view your primary content.  

Who is Softr good for? 

Softr is a particularly great option for those without much technical knowledge looking to upgrade their functionality from Google Sheets or Airtable.

Like other no-code tools, Softr emphasizes user permissions, which are generally more robust and customizable than spreadsheets and Airtable. This means it can be a good option for building simple client portals, as you don’t need to build individual apps with your Airtable data for individual clients or use cases. Softr allows you to create one application that can serve a variety of user needs.

When it comes to building an app itself - not just managing user permissions - Softr started with a simple mission: “empower anyone to create software, without code”. That “anyone” really spans a wide range: from those who’ve never touched HTML to those who know a bit about SQL or Postgres. Though it’s a platform designed primarily for non-developers, people with some coding experience may also find it a convenient way to quickly build web and mobile apps. 

Softr is especially suited for client portals, internal employee hubs, and general business operations improvements. While experienced engineers could leverage prebuilt layouts to speed up development, most developers will likely prefer more code-first platforms like Retool or Windmill for complex or highly customized projects.

Softr's pricing

Airtable may have its own solution for front-end interfaces - ‘Airtable Interfaces' - but the price is a bit of turn-off, at $24/person on the least expensive plan. This can get costly when adding up internal staff and external clients at $24+ a pop. Airtable’s newest portal “add-on” runs at an even higher $120/month for only 15 users, on top of the monthly paid plan per user. Softr, on the other hand…

When compared to other platforms, Softr is pretty cost-efficient . On Softr’s lowest paid plan you can pay $49/month for 20 internal users. That would cost you $480 a month for the same amount of users on Airtable’s lowest paid plan. 

The pricing structure does have its limitations, however. While Softr is built with the intention of being for “anyone,” pricing segments based on the number of logged-in users you want to access your app, increased complexity comes with steep hikes in the price tag. The more complex your data sources are, and the amount of data you want to use from those data sources.

Please note: A user is anyone who is logged-in to the application. That means if you’re using Softr primarily as a public website that anyone can go to with a url link- you don’t need to worry about user counts. It's only if you want people to be able to login and view individualized dat that you are limited by the plan you choose. 

Let’s have a look at the pricing plans in a bit more detail.

Free Plan

If you are just starting out and want to try out Softr for free, you can do so on the Free plan. The Free plan offers the lowest level of complexity and is best for those who are only using Softr as a public website, only need to build one application, or who have a small team and do not plan to have a lot of logged in users.

Professional Plan

In the middle of the road is the Professional plan, where builders and product owners can expect to sync up standard data sources along with more advanced sources like Supabase. This path is still limited, though, to 100 logged-in app users. 

Enterprise Plan

Enterprise is where you’ll, of course, get your most flexible customization of Softr. With all 14 data sources available to you, you can connect data from the most common storehouses in the no-code industry, including Hubspot and SQL server. There is still a user limit with an Enterprise plan, so there is never an “unlimited users” option with Softr. 

What use cases is Softr best for? 

External client portals or internal team hubs

Picture this: you’re managing multiple clients across endless spreadsheets. They all need to know where you’re at in their project. They all want an update, ASAP! They all need to have that report sent to them right now at 9pm at night. And you’re living a custom client communication nightmare. You know the feeling.

With Softr, you could build out 1 custom client portal that you could then set permissions for using user groups so that each group only sees the information for their respective company. This means being able to access all of your client data in the same place and in the same format, while at the same time your clients have their own individualized access they could log into. 

Utilizing Softr as an internal team portal on top of your Google Sheets or Airtable data is another good use case, as you can set up team permissions so that each team only sees what they need to.

Softr is excellent for simple client portals and internal hubs with good customization and white labeling. But for custom logic, advanced UI/UX design, or a fully branded experience, you might hit its limits and need custom embeds or other platforms.

Tables, Bases, and Spreadsheets

You might already have your data in Airtable or Google Sheets, but these easily  become cumbersome and spread across multiple bases or sheets.

Softr is a great way to link up all these separate data sources into a single, combined application that can be specifically designed for the way you work with your data, regardless of how you store it. 

Say you have all of your company’s data stored in separate Airtable bases or across multiple Google Sheets. Airtable bases are severely limited in being able to communicate with one another, toggle between them quickly, or update a set of data on one base when you’re physically in another. This is where Softr shines. 

With Softr you can set up a single page (or multiple) that are based on the tasks you perform with your data. For example: 

• You need to be able to review an employee’s payroll data, which is on a Payroll Base in Airtable.
• While reviewing their Payroll data, you discover that you need to also update the employee’s home address.
• Their contact information, however, is on a separate Employees Base in Airtable and you can’t edit data between bases, only within the same base.
• By visualizing this separate data in Softr, you can pull in Payroll data from Payroll and pull in contact data from Employees into separate blocks, but consolidated onto one single summary page. 
• You could create a list of Employees then a details page that drills down into the individual contact data when you click on it. 

What use cases is Softr not so good for?

Native Mobile Applications 

If you’re wanting to launch an app from the Apple or Google store, Softr is not your path forward. Other platforms such as Bubble or FlutterFlow would be a better avenue to make your application accessible to the masses for download. Many no-code platforms like Softr, only have the ability to access the app from an internet browser. This is technically the same as opening up any website on your mobile device where you access it via an internet connection.

The difference between an app you can access on a browser and an app you download (as a generalization) is that you cannot access or use Softr applications without internet connection. For mobile apps that you can download, you’re able to use those with cellular data, even if you don’t have internet access at that time.. This makes platforms like Bubble and FlutterFlow more appealing for use cases that may have limited internet access, when the app would be most used. 

SaaS Products

If you’re trying to build a SaaS application, the user count limit is going to severely limit you and Enterprise would likely be your only option. Even with the Business tier plan, users are limited to 2500 app users. That would stack up fairly quickly if you were trying to scale an application for as many users as possible to monetize your application. 

When you’re new to no-code, having to worry with record counts and user limitations can be a barrier, especially if you’re thinking that you can pop out a quick money-making SaaS in a few minutes, with endless capabilities for scale. That’s not the reality for no-code tools like Softr today, nor necessarily where Softr intends to go in the future.  

How does Softr compare to other similar tools?

Softr vs. Airtable

Softr is so commonly associated with Airtable that it’s almost difficult to separate them as competitors, but ultimately they are. Softr’s technical capabilities for storing data within the platform itself are limited. As such, you always needed an external data source like Airtable or Google Sheets to be able to use Softr at all. That said, their plans to go full-stack in 2025 will drive their competitive edge against tools like Airtable and Google Sheets, because Softr will be able to internally support the functions that users were going to Airtable for. 

Until that launch, though, the common differentiators between Airtable and Softr come down to pricing, especially considering Airtable’s price-per-user.  Though Airtable offers more options for database storage and automation, it is considerably more expensive, which can be a major limiter for companies considering large-scale deployments. Softr is the more budget-friendly option.

Softr vs. Glide

In Glide, you can store your own data right inside Glide platforms already, so builders may choose to go that route instead of waiting on Softr’s upgrade to full-stack. The data source integrations are very similar for Softr and Glide, with Softr having started as a front-end builder for Airtable and Glide initially being a front-end builder for Google Sheets. Glide does currently come in second to Softr, though, when it comes to more expansive coding customization. 

The building experience is also something to note when it comes to Softr vs. Glide. Glide’s build experience is mobile-first, optimized for progressive web apps that behave like installable mobile apps in a browser. Softr, by contrast, is desktop-first but lets you adjust layouts for mobile in its studio. Neither platform publishes directly to app stores, but Glide’s emphasis on mobile-first design can be a better fit for teams prioritizing smartphone users. 

Summary

Overall, Softr is a straightforward solution for no-coders and semi-technical builders looking to launch an app quickly. It's currently best for users whose data is stored in their limited selection of native resources, but more full-stack data options are on the roadmap for 2025.

Softr enables builders to create apps using multiple data sources - like Airtable, Google Sheets, or Xano - with responsive layouts that work on desktop, tablet, or mobile (via browser).

However, there are limitations to consider:

• Apps are browser-based only - you can't publish them to mobile app stores or offer offline access.
• User limits and pricing tiers can make it less suitable for fast-scaling SaaS products or larger organizations.
• External data source dependency means you can’t build apps entirely within Softr (yet).
• Customization freedom is tied to plan level, with key features like advanced permissions, REST APIs, and custom code access locked behind higher tiers.
• Despite design improvements, some visual components still feel limited or in beta compared to fully custom-coded solutions.

In short, Softr is best for simple internal tools and client portals - especially for startups or SMBs who need fast deployment, clean UX, and affordability, and don't need too much customization. But if you're aiming to scale rapidly, require a native mobile app, or need deep backend logic, you may eventually hit the ceiling. Have a look at some of our other articles assessing similar platforms here.

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.

Platforms like Zoho offer fully comprehensive CRM solutions to help you manage sales, marketing, and client relationships, often with a high price-per-user to match. Typically, software like Zoho, Salesforce, and Hubspot offer huge amounts of functionality to their users, but that depth often goes far beyond what most companies actually need or use in practice. 

What’s more, while these systems are technically capable of being customized to fit your specific processes, doing so can quickly become complex and expensive. Not to mention, building out this kind of custom functionality more often than not requires specialist developers or certified consultants. Integrating other tools or workflows can add further costs and maintenance overhead… Many businesses find themselves adapting their processes to fit the software, rather than the other way round. 

Building your own CRM app allows you to control exactly what functionality goes in, and allows you to take much greater control of your data. Building on a platform like Retool means this process doesn’t have to take months and years; you can build within a matter of weeks.

To show you how easy it is to build your own CRM as a custom solution, we’ve built a Zoho-inspired CRM template that you can download for and import into your Retool environment.

Here’s what it looks like:

Download the template at the end of this article, or keep reading for some details on how we built it out.

Key features

Simple navigation interface

The double sidebar is a common sidebar interface that users are accustomed to using in their everyday apps, with page groups visible only as icons, and a collapsible page menu to navigate pages.

This kind of UI helps keep complex apps organized and straightforward to use, and the hide functionality keeps the screen tidy when navigation is not necessary. This is built using a sidebar frame, which persists across all pages, and two containers within it acting as columns. The collapsible page menu is a tabbed container that switches according to the page group selected.

To ensure that the icon navigation of the left menu is easy to use, we added Tooltips to the menu items so that users can hover and easily see the page group title, such as ‘Reports’. To hide the menu, we switch the sideframe container between small and large.

Best practice forms

Since the contact page requires lots of information, we use a full page to ensure there’s enough space for users to complete the data easily. This also means the form can easily be linked to any page or a quick actions bar. 

We use the same page for the New and Edit contact forms to avoid creating repeated functionality. The default form is blank, and when the user clicks on a table row, this sets the ‘contactForm’ data and prepopulates the inputs with the selected row’s data.

The form ‘submit’ button switches between the update and create query. Using a proper Retool Form component in place of random input components and a separate button ensures that data is properly validated before being written to your data source. 

To learn more about Forms best practices, you can watch Milan’s quick intro to Using Forms best in Retool. 

Useful table features

For datasets with large amounts of data, it can be helpful to give the option to show a different number of records on the page. To do this, we added a dropdown and used this to set the number of displayed records using the pagination attribute. In this case, we did client-side rather than server-side pagination as we weren’t working with a connected database.

{{ filtered_contacts.value.slice(selectRecordsSizeContacts.value*(paginationContacts.value-1),(selectRecordsSizeContacts.value * paginationContacts.value)) || [] }}

Another useful feature is using a ‘deleted_at’ column in your dataset, rather than actually deleting data. This means when the ‘Archive’ button is clicked, the current date is set in the ‘deleted_at’ column. Users can choose to search for archived records or only live records (filtering out any values with a date in the ‘deleted_at’ column), meaning that record ‘deletion’ is less permanent and more traceable. 

This method is generally best practice as database ‘delete’ functionality can cause irreversible changes to data if mistakes are made.

User settings 

To make sure that this app functions seamlessly as the team grows and evolves, we built in a user settings and groups section. This means that managers can directly manage team members with access to the app without needing to go into the Retool interface. You can set this up by connecting to the Retool API to action permissions directly in-app. Find out more in the Retool docs.

You can download the template below and play around with it in your Retool environment. Be sure to check out our other templates for app ideas and UI inspiration, such as the Hubspot CRM UI, or Hospitable. 

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Part 1 took us through Documentation systems, followed by Part 2’s look at Core Workflows and, then, Part 3, which deep-dived into Security and Permissioning in Notion.

Let’s get straight into the 4th and final instalment: How to use Notion for Automation and Integration. 

• PART 1: Internal documentation systems (SOPs, ops docs)
  
  
• PART 2: Core workflows for operations and project management (projects, OKRs)
  
  
• PART 3: Permissions and security
  
  
• PART 4: Automations and integrations

Why are automations and integrations important? 

Connectivity is one of Notion’s biggest strengths, but just because you can automate or integrate everything doesn’t mean you should. The right level of integration depends on your team’s size, tooling maturity, and how consistent and standardized your operations are.

What all teams need to know

Every team benefits from some level of connectivity between apps in their toolstack, as well as process automation. At the simplest level, that might mean pushing updates to Slack or automating emailing with the Gmail integration. As your org scales, so does your integration ecosystem, and so should your strategy.

The goal isn’t to automate everything - it’s to automate the repetitive, and integrate what’s essential. When workflows stabilize, smart automation saves serious time.

Notion offers a few built-in automation features that make it easier to streamline workflows without leaving the app, including recurring templates (like generating a new team meeting note every Wednesday). Until recently, automations were fairly limited, but Notion listened to the community and delivered new features that unlocked a lot of great functionality:

• Database automation formulas: You can define variables and pass dynamic data to your automation to customize the output. Project roadmaps are a fantastic example of this functionality - you can define task due dates based on the project start date and task owners based on the project team dynamically using a single automation.

• Scheduled automations: You can run actions on a recurring schedule. For example, every first of the month, you can create your weekly recurring tasks for the entire month upfront!
• Webhooks: You can trigger an external webhook when a database property changes, or use it to kick off native Notion actions (like creating a new database item). For example, you can set a ‘Resolution date’ when someone changes the status of a ticket to 'Resolved’.
• Button automations: You can also let users trigger actions manually, including third-party webhooks, with a single click. You can use them to generate a DocuSign document (though you need a tool like Make or Zapier as the intermediary), submit a request for software access to your IT team through Notion, and more! All without leaving Notion.
• Gmail and Slack automations: You can automatically send Slack messages or emails when a specific condition is met. With the Gmail integration, you can even pull in values from your database using database automation formulas. For example, you can send a personalized onboarding email when a new hire is added to your HR tracker or inform job applicants of your decision when you update their submission in your HR applicant pipeline.

For more complex workflows, Notion’s API makes it easy to integrate with tools like Zapier, Make, or your internal systems that have API connectivity.

Team-specific advice

Small Teams: Keep it lightweight using Notion’s out-of-the box setups

Startups and small teams are still shaping their workflows and lack technical know-how (and oftentimes resources) to know what to automate, let alone build complex automation, so investing too much time and resources into automations rarely makes sense. Stick to what’s available out of the box - integrating Notion with Slack, Gmail, and the Notion Calendar integration are often more than enough to add basic connectivity without creating unnecessary overhead. As your processes mature, your automation needs will evolve naturally. For now, keep it flexible - you don’t want to build technical debt before you’ve built your systems (or business) and especially when you don’t have teams that can maintain them efficiently.

If you do have repeatable workflows, Notion’s native automations are a great, lightweight solution. Use them to trigger reminders, generate project roadmaps, or update data (like setting a completion date when you close a task - quick to set up, easy to maintain, and just enough to keep things moving.

SMBs: Start to better integrate your tools and tap into Notion’s automation tools and AI feature

As teams grow and workflows mature, deeper integrations start to pay off. Connect the tools your teams already use - like Jira, Linear, or GitHub - and implement SSO for secure, unified access.

Notion’s automations also level up here: use variables to dynamically set values like ownership, due dates, or project phases. For more complex workflows, external tools like Zapier, Make, or webhooks can link Notion with the rest of your stack.

Plus, this phase is where Notion AI starts to shine - with a growing base of content (plus integrations like Slack or Google Drive), it’s an affordable way ($10/user) to summarize meetings, find buried info, and surface relevant knowledge on demand.

Enterprises: Extend visibility and security with tools like Panther

At scale, integrations shift from convenience, to visibility and control. Enterprise teams often connect Notion to tools like Panther for security monitoring or use webhooks to track workspace activity in real time, effectively turning Notion into an auditable system of record. These integrations can feed into SIEM tools, internal dashboards, or trigger alerts when sensitive content is accessed or changed.

At this level, automations and integration become part of your compliance, observability, and risk management stack.

Everything relevant for SMBs - SSO, third-party tools, Notion AI, automation triggers - still applies here. In fact, the value increases at scale because these systems now support hundreds or even thousands of people.

Conclusion: Build what works today - and scales tomorrow

The biggest mistakes we see in Notion workspaces aren’t based on the platform’s technical limitations - they’re most often based on the way users have architected them. Systems built without a plan or intention get harder to fix the longer you wait.

The fundamentals don’t change: every team needs clarity, structure, and the right level of access and ownership to keep data safe and systems well organized. But how you apply those principles should shift as you grow.

Startups need simplicity. SMBs need structure. Enterprises need governance. When used right, Notion can offer all these. 

Knowing where you are - and where you’re headed - is the first step to building intentionally.

This 4-part guide gives you the blueprint: what stays the same, what needs to change, and where to draw the line between flexibility and control. For SMBs and Enterprises, it’s not uncommon to bring in a Notion consultant or implementation partner to help make those calls - and to build the system right the first time. If you need an expert, get in touch with…

Regardless of size, though, build with intention. Scale smart and don’t wait until you have to rebuild. 

If you’d like to learn more about Notion, head over to our article outlining all the basics. If you didn’t catch the other 3 parts of this four part series, find them here:

• PART 1: Internal documentation systems (SOPs, ops docs)
  
  
• PART 2: Core workflows (projects, OKRs)
  
  
• PART 3: Permissions and security
  
  
• PART 4: Automations and integrations

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.

Here's what we're covering in this guide.

• PART 1: Internal documentation systems (SOPs, ops docs)
  
  
• PART 2: Core workflows for operations and project management (projects, OKRs)
  
  
• PART 3: Permissions and security
  
  
• PART 4: Automations and integrations

How to use Notion for security & permissions

As we’ve discussed throughout this guide, Notion is purposely open and flexible by default. Without some guardrails, that openness can become a liability, fast!

On the free plan, every member is a Workspace Owner, meaning they have full control over everything, including billing. That setup makes sense for individual users, but most teams start on the free plan and never revisit those settings when they upgrade. As a result, critical admin privileges and visibility remain widely available across the entire team even as teams scale, often without anyone realizing it, causing a security risk.

That level of freedom creates shadow systems, exposes sensitive content, and leads to a flood of disconnected spaces no one’s responsible for.

Security isn’t just about who can edit a doc and view sensitive information - it’s about who can create new systems, who controls the visibility of sensitive data that not all employees (and especially not people outside the company) should see, and who’s responsible for maintaining structure. It’s about giving the right people the right access, with the least amount of friction, all while keeping your data secure and having clear oversight over who can see what.

What all teams need to know

No matter the size of your company, a few foundational security practices go a long way, especially once you're on a paid plan with access to workspace-level admin tools:

• Use permission groups: Assign permissions to user groups in Notion (e.g. Marketing, Finance, Product) rather than managing access one person at a time. It’s faster, cleaner, and scales better.

• Limit Workspace Owners: Most organizations - even at the enterprise level - don’t need more than a handful of Workspace Owners. These users have elevated permissions at the org level, including access to billing, organization-wide admin settings, and other features like security controls, data retention, and integration management. Since these settings aren’t touched often, there’s no reason to have more than a few trusted owners in charge. Fewer owners mean fewer chances for accidental (or unnecessary) changes.
• Restrict Teamspace creation: Teamspaces help organize operations and manage sensitive content, but when everyone can create them, they quickly clutter the sidebar and fragment your systems. Limit creation to Workspace Owners to prevent sprawl and maintain consistency.

• Minimize full access. Most users don’t need full editing rights. Default to view or comment access - especially for evergreen systems (like the Company wiki) - and only grant edit access where direct engagement with content is required. Full access should only be granted to users who manage architecture.
• Define clear ownership: Every system or shared space should have an assigned owner. In small teams, this might be one person. In larger orgs, each department or hub may need its lead to manage structure, access, and content quality.

These are simple practices, but they prevent major headaches later on.

Team-specific advice

Small Teams: Start small, but be intentional when establishing permissions

When you’re moving fast, it’s easy to treat permissions as an afterthought. Everyone has full access, everyone’s building, and there’s no real separation between experimentation and core systems. And that works - until it doesn’t.

Small teams often lean hard into autonomy and creativity, but without a lightweight security structure, it’s just as easy to overwrite someone’s work as it is to contribute to it. One misplaced database, one teamspace spun up in isolation, and suddenly your ‘move fast’ culture turns into a cleanup job.

This is the moment to define enough structure to avoid chaos later:

• Follow good practices, outlined above.
• Choose one Workspace Owner who will manage workspace settings and architecture
• Build a single ‘Company’ teamspace
• Define permission groups. Two should be plenty at the beginning - ‘All Employees’ and ‘Notion Architects’. Use these two groups to manage permissions in the ‘Company’ teamspace.

You don’t need enterprise controls - you just need clarity. Hey, you can even define these rules using in your Notion wiki! See our Documentation systems guide in Part 1. Start with thoughtful defaults now, and your future self (and your growing team) will thank you.

SMBs: Introduce structure and tighter controls through intentionally organized teamspaces and permissions

At this stage, companies begin feeling the real pain of poor permission hygiene if they haven’t been following good practices. If you haven’t already, implement the good practices outlined above and clean up your workspace of redundancy and security concerns.

Most companies introduce SSO tools like Okta at this stage and nominate a few IT or operations champions to manage permissions and policies in Notion.

At this point, it also makes sense to begin aligning teamspaces and permission groups with departments (e.g., Marketing, Sales, HR). The goal here is structure without friction, so don’t overdo it - establish clear Teamspace structure and ownership, and just enough control to keep the system scalable. Define clear governance for how your organization uses Teamspaces — write it down (ideally in your Notion wiki), and make sure it’s followed. Having this documented (and enforced) helps prevent sprawl, reduces confusion, and ensures consistency as new people join or teams evolve.

A few key elements to cover in your guidelines:

• Teamspace organization: How are Teamspaces grouped - by department, function, or another model? Department is the most common aggregation point.

• Creation rules: When should new Teamspaces be created, and who’s allowed to create them? As explained earlier, we recommend limiting creation to Workspace Owners unless there’s a clear reason to expand access.
• Ownership model: How many owners should each Teamspace have? For small teams (up to 10 people), one owner is usually enough. For larger teams, 2–3 owners may be appropriate, but rarely more.
• Permission levels: Define who gets what level of access:
  • Owners: Usually full access to manage structure and permissions
  • Teamspace members: Usually edit access to contribute and collaborate on data
  • General access: organization-wide access. This will usually be ‘can view’, ‘can comment’, or ‘no access’, depending on the sensitivity of the content inside.

Teamspace strategy becomes critical here. Avoid over-creating Teamspaces - not every team needs their own space. Unless you need permission separation, more teamspaces mean more friction. They clutter the sidebar, fragment information, and degrade UX across altitudes. Department-specific teamspaces are the perfect level of granularity to reduce sidebar noise and keep navigation sane.

Fewer, well-governed Teamspaces mean a better UX and stronger adoption across the org. Make sure to align permission groups on the same altitude level.

Enterprises: Security becomes infrastructure

At enterprise scale, security and governance are formalized. Workspace-level access is controlled by IT and typically integrated with tools like SAML, SCIM, or enterprise-grade SSO.

But ownership can’t live in the IT department alone - not with the volume of users and complexity of org structure. Department trailblazers - often ops leads or power users within departments - take responsibility for maintaining the Notion system architecture and content quality within their teams. That said, Teamspace permissions should still be managed centrally through IT and permission groups to maintain control and consistency.

Don’t overlook the value of enterprise-level controls. They’re one of the key reasons to upgrade to Enterprise. Features like advanced data retention policies (up to 10 years), external sharing restrictions, and the ability to disable exports, guest invites, and public sharing give IT the tools needed to protect sensitive data at scale. If you're on the enterprise plan, use it to its fullest.

Conclusion

Strong permissions and security practices are what turn Notion from a flexible collaboration tool into reliable company infrastructure. By putting guardrails in place early - whether that’s a single owner and simple groups for small teams, structured teamspaces and tighter controls for SMBs, or enterprise-grade governance integrated with IT systems - you reduce risk, prevent sprawl, and keep sensitive data safe without blocking collaboration. With permissions handled, we’re ready to look at the final layer of using Notion to the best of its ability, in part 4 of this guide: Automation and Integrations. 

If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 (Documentation Systems) and Part 2 (Core Workflows) of our guide on how to best build in - and get the most out of - Notion. For a more general overview of Notion and what it has to offer, check out our ‘What is Notion’ article! 

Want to learn more about internal tools and how to build them? Check out our sections on low-code tools like Notion and Airtable, or developer tools like Retool and Windmill.