Production-ready apps from a prompt
Any AI app builder can create a prototype. Retool ships apps built for production—on your data, in your cloud, with enterprise governance by default.
What are AI app builders?
Regular AI app builders turn natural language into interfaces and logic. Most are built for prototyping; their apps rarely survive a security review or a production deployment.
What is AppGen?
AppGen is our approach to AI app building. Prompt-based generation combined with the governance and security foundation to ship production-ready apps.
Trusted by 10,000+ teams to ship production-ready AI apps
Generating apps is easy. Governing them is not. Until now.
Prototypes don't ship. Retool does.
Other app builders
Built for teams that ship operational software and keep it governed at scale
You'll get the most out of it if you need:
Internal apps that talk to real databases and APIs, not mock data
SSO, RBAC, and audit logs enforced by default
One platform to build, launch, and scale governed apps—no stitching together separate tools for hosting, auth, and monitoring
What teams ship in Retool
Build tools for customer lookup, order management, and inventory ops—generated in minutes, governed from day one.
Plug LLMs actions into real workflows with the guardrails to run them in production.
Stop working out of a spreadsheet. Create purpose-built tools where analysts query, review, and act on customer data—all from one interface, with the data access they actually need.
Common questions about AppGen
An AppGen platform is a system that pairs AI-driven app generation with the infrastructure needed to actually run those apps: data connectivity, security, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. Generating a UI is step one. An AppGen platform handles steps two through two hundred.
AI coding tools—Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code—help developers write and edit code faster. An AI app builder generates entire applications from a description: UI, logic, data bindings, and interactions. Retool goes a step further. The apps it generates aren't raw code you deploy yourself—they're live applications already connected to your data and governed by your security policies.
LCNC made building faster by replacing code with drag-and-drop. But simplicity became the ceiling. When requirements get complex, teams hit the platform's limits. Retool's AppGen platform is the next step from low-code/no-code technology: Professional developers set the guardrails, and anyone can fluidly move between natural language, visual editing, and custom code in the same environment. You get speed without the ceiling.
With most tools, your app runs on their cloud, and their governance is all you get. That's fine for prototyping, but those platforms weren't built with production-grade security in mind. Retool generates apps from the same kinds of prompts, but composes them from modular, trusted building blocks with built-in guardrails. And you can deploy them however you need—including self-hosted in your own environment.
Trusted by 10,000+ teams to ship production-ready AI apps