Comparison
A modern alternative
to Retool
Curiosity builds tools on a context graph; Retool builds interfaces on the databases and APIs you point it at.
Who each tool is for
Different problems, honestly stated
Curiosity
For industrial and regulated teams whose knowledge sits in engineering systems and structured records, where the answer depends on how those records connect, and where the deployment has to run on their own infrastructure.
Retool
A platform for building internal tools, workflows and agents on top of databases and APIs, with AI to generate apps from a prompt. It is popular with engineering teams, and it can be self-hosted.
How Curiosity compares
An interface on your APIs, or a tool on your context
Retool is a strong way to put an interface on data you have already joined and secured. Studio does the joining and the securing too: the records come connected, typed and permission-aware, so a generated tool can trace its answers.
Grounded, not guessed
A tool Studio builds runs on the graph, so every figure it shows traces back to a record in a source system.
Your permissions, inherited
A generated tool cannot show a user anything the source system would not already show them, down to the individual record.
From prompt to production
The tool ships to real users with an audit trail, not as a prototype someone has to rebuild before it goes live.
Runs on your infrastructure
On premises or in your private cloud, with the language model you choose.
Side by side
Feature comparison
| Curiosity | Retool | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Cloud or self-hosted, ready to use | Cloud or self-hosted |
| Data model | Managed context layer and knowledge graph | Apps on databases and APIs |
| Industrial fit | Built for industrial and enterprise teams | Internal tools, engineering-led |
| Data reach | Connects your sources out of the box | Databases and APIs you connect |
| Residency | EU hosted, or entirely your own infrastructure | Your choice |
At Airbus, we developed the next generation of customer support AI assistance tools with Curiosity, enhancing our technical support’s ability to access and navigate vast data from multiple sources, including millions of documents.
Services Innovation Team
Airline Services at Airbus
Your data. Your infrastructure.