Picture a 25-person company. Operations runs on four spreadsheets, a shared inbox and a lot of Slack messages. Someone in ops says, "We should just build a proper tool for this," and the first name that comes up is Retool, because it's the best-known internal tool platform.

Then the questions start. Who on the team will actually build it? What will it cost when all 25 people use it? Where does the data live, since there's no Postgres database, only the spreadsheets?

This article compares two ways to get that tool: Retool , a low-code platform where you assemble screens on top of your existing data, and an AI app builder like Mythex (disclosure: I work on Mythex), where you describe the tool and it builds a complete app with its own database. Both are good products.…