Thanks! Workflows and Airflow are similar in that they can both be used for ETL tasks and we do see customers use Workflows as an easier to use replacement for Airflow. Airflow is specialized for heavyweight ETL so it's a better fit for that whereas if you're interested in doing non-ETL tasks like alerts and APIs in addition to ETL, Workflows would be a great choice.
Hi all, product engineer who worked on this. Workflows is something we’ve spent almost two years working on and we’re all excited to announce it has gone “GA” (generally available)!
There’s _a lot_ that goes into shipping a new product to GA within an existing company that I hope to write about later, but today I’m just excited that it’s finally out there for everyone to use.
We initially created Workflows because a lot of Retool customers wanted a way to build automations – like jobs to search Twitter for topics and dump relevant Tweets into a database. We prototyped and user-tested a bunch of different UIs, and landed on letting users drag and drop code blocks on a 2D canvas, while also making each code block a self-contained REPL.
We found that it struck a nice balance between the simplicity and speed of visual programming and the power to extend and customize everything (including the built-in logic blocks) with code.
There’s a lot more that we’ve built to make it more useful and powerful for engineers (time traveling debugging, split-screens, tree-views, auto-layouts, etc) that I’d be more than happy to answer questions about!
(Retool PM here) Our automation product Workflows (https://retool.com/products/workflows/) now has an AI actions block so it's easy to build flows with steps like “summarize text” or “classify image”. Our approach is to make it easy to chain different steps together into flows whether those steps are code (JS/Python/SQL), API calls, database queries, or LLM prompts.
Zapier is no-code, catering more towards a citizen developer audience, where we’ve built Workflows with professional developers in mind. We typically see customers turn to Workflows when they want scalable self-hosting and more customization options (e.g. complex branching/looping, source control, custom error handling) than what Zapier is offering.
