Company
Date Published
Author
Retool Team
Word count
2024
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Modern companies rely heavily on data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift for storing and analyzing data, often using SQL GUIs to facilitate access and analysis by non-engineering roles such as data analysts and scientists. While built-in SQL GUIs provided by these platforms integrate well with their respective cloud services, they often lack robust features and cross-platform capabilities, leading many businesses to opt for external GUIs like Preset, Metabase, Hex, and Retool. Preset, based on Superset, offers a rich UX design and advanced features, but it is not open source and comes with a cost. Metabase is an open-source option known for its simplicity and form-based SQL queries, though it offers fewer visualization types than competitors. Hex provides a notebook-style interface compatible with multiple languages, ideal for teams familiar with Jupyter-like environments, while Retool stands out with its drag-and-drop visual editor, enabling the creation of data applications. Each tool has distinct strengths, with choices often depending on specific team needs, budget, and desired integration capabilities.