ToolJet vs Retool: published test evidence Source: https://blog.tooljet.com/tooljet-vs-retool-ai-app-builders-same-prompts/ Extracted from the public article on 2026-10-17. Historical test results, not a new run. Publisher and test operator: ToolJet. This is vendor-produced evidence, not an independent evaluation. These are the displayed published prompts, including WordPress typography; this is not a raw submission-log export. Current models, plans and prices may differ. No original logs, app exports or dataset snapshot are included. Screenshots and detailed outcomes remain in the source article. Reviewer protocol: https://tooljet.com/evidence/ai-builder-tests-2026-10/reviewer-protocol.txt PUBLISHED TEST METHOD We gave both products the same prompts, word for word, and judged the app each one built without touching it by hand. Then we asked each for two changes, and tested whether the finished apps actually save data. Every cost in this article is in US dollars: the value of the AI credits used, at each product’s paid top-up rate. Both products meter AI in credits, but a credit is worth ten times more on one side: ToolJet sells 100 credits for $1 ($0.01 each), and Retool sells 1,000 credits for $100 ($0.10 each). Our tests ran on free-plan credits, so these figures are what each build’s credits would cost to buy, not invoices or the total cost of owning an app. The tests Expense tracker (one page, with a design brief). Add expenses with a date, category, amount and note; filter by category and month; show the month’s total. The brief adds a header, a total card with the expense count, the form in its own card, coloured category tags, indigo (#4F46E5) as the primary colour, and set formats for money and dates. The full prompt is at the end of this article. Property manager (eight pages). A property management app for a small landlord: dashboard, properties, units, tenants, leases, rent, maintenance and vendors, with seeded data, working forms and design rules. The full prompt is at the end of this article. Two follow-up edits on the eight-page app: add a Reports page with a CSV export, then switch the theme to navy, drop cents from money and add a new column to the leases list. Save checks on every finished app: add an expense in the tracker, and add a vendor and renew a lease in the eight-page app, each confirmed after a reload. The same models on both platforms: both apps again on Claude Opus 5.5, and on GPT-6.1 Sol (ToolJet) against GPT 5.6 Sol (Retool), using a paid Retool Team account. The models, two tiers on each side: Tier | ToolJet | Retool Entry | GPT-6 Luna, ToolJet’s cheapest model | Retool Mini, Retool’s default Step up | GPT-6.1 Sol | Retool Power Stronger models build better apps on both platforms. GPT-6 Luna is the cheapest option in ToolJet’s picker, and GPT-6.1 Sol or Claude Opus 5.5 are the picks when quality matters more than cost. The rules. One run per prompt and model, no hand edits. When an agent stopped to ask for approval, we approved and counted the stop. Time is wall clock from sending the prompt to a finished app, including any approval stops; our test harness answered each stop within a few seconds, so waiting adds well under a minute to any build. Retool’s tests ran on a new account, one build after another, the way a new customer would use it; ToolJet’s ran in a new workspace. This is a same-prompt test, not a benchmark: one run per model is a fair first impression, not a statistical result, and Retool’s build times in particular varied widely from run to run. Who ran this. ToolJet ran this test and publishes it here. We report where Retool did better, and every prompt is at the end of the article so anyone can repeat it. Versions. Retool’s AI app builder (beta) on its cloud Free plan, and ToolJet AI on the release that adds the page compiler. Tested on 1, 2 and 4 October 2026; the same-model builds and the CLI test ran on a paid Retool Team account. PUBLISHED RUN LEDGER Columns separated by tabs; qualifiers and units are retained. Platform and plan Build Model Time Credits used Cost ToolJet Expense tracker GPT-6 Luna 4m 18s 2.9 $0.03 ToolJet Expense tracker GPT-6.1 Sol 2m 25s 22 $0.22 ToolJet Expense tracker Claude Opus 5.5 1m 40s 72.45 $0.72 ToolJet Property manager GPT-6 Luna 17m 24s 21 $0.21 ToolJet Property manager GPT-6.1 Sol 11m 11s 78.55 $0.79 ToolJet Property manager Claude Opus 5.5 15m 39s 323.17 $3.23 ToolJet Edit 1 GPT-6 Luna 10m 26s 8.1 $0.08 ToolJet Edit 2 GPT-6 Luna 11m 13s 9.2 $0.09 ToolJet Edit 1 GPT-6.1 Sol 8m 1s 64.5 $0.65 ToolJet Edit 2 GPT-6.1 Sol 7m 25s 61.17 $0.61 ToolJet, MCP plugin Expense tracker Claude Code (Sonnet 5.5) 4m 54s, 23 ToolJet tool calls 0 $0 in ToolJet credits Retool Free Expense tracker Retool Mini 2m 8s 18 $1.80 Retool Free Expense tracker Retool Power 32m 47s 43 $4.30 Retool Free Property manager Retool Mini About 56 min 71 $7.10 Retool Free Property manager Retool Power Under 55 min 80 (all remaining) $8.00 or more Retool Free Edit 1 Retool Mini 1m 10s 23 $2.30 Retool Free Edit 2 Retool Mini 44s 15 $1.50 Retool Team Expense tracker Claude Opus 5.5 3m 44s 20 $2.00 Retool Team Property manager Claude Opus 5.5 13m 27s, from our answer to its database question 83 $8.30 Retool Team Expense tracker GPT 5.6 Sol 2m 1s 13 $1.30 Retool Team Property manager GPT 5.6 Sol 3m 19s 17 $1.70 Retool Team, CLI Expense tracker Claude Code (Sonnet 5.5) About 2 min of coding 0 $0 in Retool credits ToolJet Databricks dashboard GPT-6 Luna 12m 49s 10.75 $0.11 Retool Team Databricks dashboard Retool Mini 5m 34s 54 $5.40 ToolJet Databricks dashboard GPT-6.1 Sol 9m 13s 87.44 $0.87 PUBLISHED PROMPTS AND EDITS Read the setup and exception notes before repeating a run. Every prompt below was sent word for word to both products. Expense tracker: Build an expense tracker. Let me add an expense with date, category (travel, meals, software, office, other), amount and a note. Show all expenses in a table I can filter by category and month, with the month's total at the top. Design: a clean, modern light theme on a near-white background; a header with the app name and a short subtitle; the month's total as a large figure in a white card, with the number of expenses beside it; the add-expense form in its own card with the fields side by side and one primary button; category shown as coloured tags (travel blue, meals amber, software violet, office teal, other grey); indigo (#4F46E5) as the primary colour; money as $1,234.56 and dates as Mar 4, 2026. Property manager: Build a property management app for a small residential landlord, with eight pages and a left sidebar to move between them. Seed realistic sample data: 4 properties, 32 units, 26 tenants, a lease for each occupied unit, 6 months of rent payments, 20 maintenance requests and 8 vendors. 1. Dashboard: KPI cards for occupancy %, rent collected this month vs expected, total overdue balance and open maintenance requests; a 6-month rent collection chart; occupancy by property as a bar chart; and a list of leases ending in the next 60 days. 2. Properties: a card grid showing each property's name, address, unit count and occupancy %; clicking a card opens a panel listing its units. 3. Units: a table with property, unit number, beds, baths, square feet, monthly rent and status (occupied, vacant, notice given); filters for property and status; rent is editable inline. 4. Tenants: a searchable directory; selecting a tenant shows their contact details, current lease, payment history and open maintenance requests. 5. Leases: a list with tenant, unit, start and end dates, rent, deposit and status (active, expiring, ended); a form to create a lease for a vacant unit, which marks the unit occupied; and a Renew action that extends the end date by 12 months. 6. Rent: a ledger of payments by month; a form to record a payment against a lease; and an overdue list showing days late, with a 5% late fee added once a payment is more than 5 days late. 7. Maintenance: requests grouped by status (new, scheduled, in progress, done) with priority (low, medium, high, urgent); a form to log a request for a unit; and the ability to assign a vendor and change status. 8. Vendors: a list with trade, phone, email and rating (1 to 5); the number of jobs assigned to each; and a form to add a vendor. Design: a clean, modern light theme on a near-white background, white cards with soft borders, emerald (#059669) as the primary colour for the main buttons and active navigation, status tags in consistent colours (green for good states, amber for warnings, red for overdue or urgent, grey for neutral), money shown as $1,234 and dates as Mar 4, 2026. Edit 1: “Add a ninth page, Reports, to the sidebar: a chart of monthly rent income against maintenance spend for each property over the last 6 months, a table with the same numbers per property and month, and a button to export that table as CSV. Track a cost on each maintenance request so the spend is real data, and fill costs in for the existing completed requests.” Edit 2: “Change the primary colour from emerald to navy (#1E3A8A) everywhere in the app, show all money without cents (for example $1,234), and add a ‘Days to lease end’ column to the Leases list, sorted with the soonest first.” Databricks dashboard (sent after connecting the workspace’s sample tables on each platform): Build a sales analytics dashboard for Bakehouse, a bakery franchise chain, on my Databricks data. Use my connected Databricks data source. The tables are samples.bakehouse.sales_transactions, samples.bakehouse.sales_franchises and samples.bakehouse.sales_customers; read them to learn their columns. The data is read-only: query Databricks live, and do not create, copy or change any tables, and do not use sample or seeded data. Three pages with a left sidebar: 1. Overview: a date range filter (defaulting to the full range in the data), a franchise country filter and a payment method filter that drive everything on the page. KPI cards for total revenue, transactions, units sold, average order value and active franchises, each with the change against the previous period of the same length. Charts: revenue by day as a line chart with a 7-day moving average; revenue by product as a horizontal bar chart showing each product's share; revenue by hour of day; revenue by day of week; payment method mix as a donut chart; and the top 10 franchises by revenue as a bar chart. 2. Franchises: a sortable table of every franchise with name, city, country, size, revenue, transactions, average order value and revenue rank, with country and size filters; selecting a franchise shows its revenue by day, its product mix and its busiest hours. Add a scatter chart of franchises by transactions against average order value. 3. Customers: KPI cards for unique customers, revenue per customer and repeat customers (more than one transaction); revenue by customer country; customers by gender; and a table of the top 25 customers by spend with name, country, transactions, total spend and favourite product. Design: a clean, modern light theme on a near-white background; a header on each page with the page title and a one-line description; KPI cards in a row of white cards with soft borders, the value large and the change as a green or red tag; charts in white cards with a title and a short subtitle, in a two-column grid; amber (#D97706) as the primary colour for buttons, active navigation and the main chart series, with warm neutral colours for other series; money as $1,234 on KPIs and charts and $1,234.56 in tables, and dates as Mar 4, 2026. RERUN LIMITATIONS Use disposable test data. A successful save check is not a security, accessibility, scale or production-readiness certification. Do not generalize a single run into guaranteed cost, speed or quality. Same-family models are not identical-model controls. Record subscription and infrastructure charges separately from the dollar-equivalent AI usage. Include coding-agent charges when comparing MCP/CLI routes. Raw data and export gaps should be disclosed rather than filled with estimated observations. The Retool Opus property-manager timing starts after the database-question answer; compare it separately from timings that start at prompt submission. Retool Power property-manager cost is a lower bound; exact time and approval count were not captured.