ToolJet vs Lovable for internal tools: we built the same apps on both

We gave Lovable and ToolJet the same internal-tool prompts. Lovable is quick and its screens are polished, but internal tools live or die on shared data, and that is where the two split. Lovable’s free plan ran out of daily credits partway through our eight-page app. On Pro, the finished app kept every record in one browser, and when we asked Lovable to sync it, each user got their own separate copy of the data. Every ToolJet build wrote to one database the whole team shares, passed every save check, and cost a fraction as much.

• Shared data: Lovable’s eight-page build kept all its records in the browser’s local storage, so a vendor saved on one laptop never reached anyone else. Asked to sync, Lovable added sign-in and gave each account its own copy of the data, as its summary said and the access rule in its generated code confirms, so teammates still see separate records. Every ToolJet build wrote to one database all of the app’s users share.
• Free plan: Lovable’s free plan gives 5 build credits a day. It built the one-page tracker, then, with the 3 credits left that day, paused the eight-page app about four minutes in. ToolJet’s free 100 credits a month have no daily cap and cover four eight-page apps on GPT-6 Luna.
• Speed: Lovable was faster. Its Pro build of the eight-page app took 6.5 minutes, and each follow-up edit about 90 seconds; ToolJet took 11 to 17 minutes and 7 to 11 minutes.
• Cost: the eight-page app cost $2.08 on Lovable Pro, $0.21 on ToolJet with GPT-6 Luna and $0.79 with GPT-6.1 Sol.
• Governance: ToolJet offers SSO and audit logs on its Team plan, and on Enterprise controls access inside an app, page by page and component by component. Lovable’s Business plan can limit who opens a published app, but not what each person sees inside it; SSO needs Business and audit logs need Enterprise.
• Self-hosting: ToolJet has a free open-source edition you can run yourself. Lovable’s builder is hosted only; on any plan you can sync an app’s generated code to GitHub and host that app yourself.
• Upkeep: each Lovable app is its own generated codebase, with more than 40 npm packages in our property manager and their versions locked per app, so a security fix reaches each app only when that app is updated and republished. ToolJet apps have no packages of their own: a fix to ToolJet’s shared runtime and components reaches every app at once.
• Your own data: on a live Databricks warehouse, both built a working three-page analytics dashboard. ToolJet’s cost $0.11 to $0.87 and connected with a personal access token; Lovable’s cost $1.75 and needed an OAuth service principal and two permission stops.

This is a test of building internal tools: the dashboards, trackers and back-office apps a team runs on its own data. Lovable is a general builder that also makes websites, landing pages and consumer web apps, which ToolJet does not aim to do, and none of that is judged here.

Both products got the same prompts, word for word, and we judged what each built without touching it by hand. These are the same prompts we used in our Retool comparison.

1. Expense tracker (one page, with a design brief): add expenses, filter by category and month, show the month’s total, in a specified look.
2. Property manager (eight pages): dashboard, properties, units, tenants, leases, rent, maintenance and vendors, with seeded data and working forms.
3. Two follow-up edits on the eight-page app: a Reports page with CSV export, then a navy theme, money without cents and a new column.
4. Save checks: add an expense; add a vendor and renew a lease; each confirmed after a reload.

Plans. Lovable on its Free plan, then on Pro (the 100-credit tier), with the account upgraded between runs. ToolJet on GPT-6 Luna, its cheapest model, and GPT-6.1 Sol, a stronger one. Lovable has no model picker.

Dollars. Lovable’s Pro tier sells 100 credits for $25 ($0.25 each); ToolJet sells 100 credits for $1. Costs below are the value of the credits each build used at those rates, not invoices.

Rules. One run per prompt, no hand edits. When an agent stopped to ask for approval, we approved and counted the stop; time is wall clock, and where our harness was slow to answer a stop we say so. This is a same-prompt test, not a benchmark.

Who ran this. ToolJet ran this test. We report where Lovable did better, and every prompt is at the end. Tested on 4 October 2026.

Lovable’s free plan meters building by the day; ToolJet’s by the month, and its credits go further on internal apps.

	ToolJet Free	Lovable Free
Price	$0	$0
People	2 builders, up to 50 end users	Unlimited workspace members
AI build credits	100 a month (worth $1), no daily cap	5 a day, at most 30 a month
Eight-page apps the credits build	4 on GPT-6 Luna	Not shown: our attempt started with the 3 credits left that day and paused about 4 minutes in
Database	ToolJet Database, 10 tables and 500 rows	Lovable Cloud, 20 Cloud credits a month
Code export	Not applicable: apps open in the visual builder	Git sync on every plan; code download on paid plans
Self-hosting	Free open-source edition	Builder: not offered; a generated app can be self-hosted from its code

Sources: ToolJet pricing, Lovable plans and credits, Lovable subscription plans, read on 4 October 2026.

All three trackers saved an expense that survived a reload; ToolJet’s cost 3 to 22 cents and Lovable’s about 50.

Build	Time	Cost	Approval stops	Add-expense check
ToolJet, GPT-6 Luna	4m 18s	$0.03	0	Passed
ToolJet, GPT-6.1 Sol	2m 25s	$0.22	0	Passed
Lovable Free	6m 49s (about 4.5 min active)	About $0.50 (2 of the day’s 5 credits)	1	Passed

Lovable’s tracker matched most of the brief: indigo buttons, coloured category tags, the form in its own card. Its total card showed an all-time total rather than the month’s total the prompt asked for. Lovable stored the data in its Cloud backend, and paused once to ask before a database change (“Removes all test expenses from the expenses table so you start with a clean slate”); that stop waited about 2.5 minutes for our harness, which is why we give its active time.

Lovable Pro built all eight pages fastest, but stored the data where only one browser can see it; both ToolJet builds wrote to a shared database.

Build	Time	Cost	Approval stops	Pages	Where the data lives	Save checks
ToolJet, GPT-6 Luna	17m 24s	$0.21	0	8 of 8	ToolJet Database	Vendor and renew passed
ToolJet, GPT-6.1 Sol	11m 11s	$0.79	0	8 of 8	ToolJet Database	Vendor and renew passed
Lovable Free	Paused about 4 min in, out of credits	The day’s remaining 3 credits	0	Partial: sidebar and dashboard		Not run
Lovable Pro	6m 34s	$2.08 (8.3 credits)	0	8 of 8	The browser’s local storage	Vendor saved, visible only in that browser

Where Lovable put the data. Lovable’s Pro build created no database. It seeded the sample data into the browser and kept every change there, under one local-storage key holding about 24,000 characters of JSON. A vendor we added survived a reload in the same browser. Anyone else opening the app starts from the original sample data, and clearing the browser’s site data wipes every change. For an internal tool, where the point is that the whole team sees the same records, that is a working demo rather than an app. Lovable’s own follow-up suggestion after the build was “Sync data across devices”, which means another prompt and more credits.

The free plan paused the same build about four minutes in with “Your work paused because you were out of credits”, showing a sidebar and a dashboard, and offered the upgrade to Pro at $25 a month.

We asked Lovable to fix it. We sent Lovable’s own suggestion, “Sync data across devices”, as a follow-up prompt. Lovable asked two questions, how people should sign in and what to do with the existing data (we chose email sign-in and the sample data), then added a sign-in screen and moved the data into its Cloud backend, about six minutes and roughly 3 credits (about $0.80) later. In Lovable’s own summary: “everything is saved to your account. Each new account starts with the sample data.” The database migration Lovable wrote confirms it: a row-level security rule (auth.uid() = user_id) limits every row to the account that wrote it. We checked this in the generated code rather than with two live accounts. That covers one person’s devices, not a team: each colleague who signs up gets a separate copy, so a vendor added by one property manager still never reaches another. Lovable also said it had not tested signing in. A shared team database is possible on Lovable, but you have to know to ask for it, and pay for more prompts. ToolJet’s builds had one from the first prompt.

The sync cost is an estimate: our balance reading spanned Lovable’s daily credit top-up.

Each screenshot is the app exactly as the AI left it, with no hand edits, labelled with the plan or model, what the build cost and how long it took.

Lovable’s screens are polished. What a screenshot cannot show is where the data goes: every ToolJet app here writes to one shared database, while Lovable’s property manager kept its records in one browser, and after the sync follow-up, in one account.

Lovable made both edits in about 90 seconds each and finished every part of them; ToolJet took 7 to 11 minutes, cost less on GPT-6 Luna and more on GPT-6.1 Sol.

Edit	Build	Time	Cost	Result
Reports page, chart, table, CSV export, costs on past jobs	ToolJet, GPT-6 Luna	10m 26s	$0.08	Page and export built; spend read from existing cost estimates, past jobs not filled in
	ToolJet, GPT-6.1 Sol	8m 1s	$0.65	Page and export built; past costs left behind a one-click fill button
	Lovable Pro	About 1.5 min	$0.53	Page and export built; filled made-up costs into the 7 completed jobs and said so
Navy theme, whole dollars, days-to-lease-end column	ToolJet, GPT-6 Luna	11m 13s	$0.09	All three changes
	ToolJet, GPT-6.1 Sol	7m 25s	$0.61	All three changes
	Lovable Pro	About 1.5 min	$0.38	All three; money already showed whole dollars
Sync data across devices (Lovable’s own suggestion)	Lovable Pro	About 6 min after 2 questions	About $0.80 (estimate)	Sign-in added; each account gets its own copy of the data; sign-in not tested by Lovable

Both edits ran before the sync follow-up, so they still wrote into browser storage, and the costs Lovable filled in existed only on the machine that ran the edit.

Both products built a working dashboard on live Databricks data; Lovable’s was the more finished on open, and ToolJet’s cost $0.11 with GPT-6 Luna and $0.87 with GPT-6.1 Sol, against Lovable’s $1.75.

We connected the same Databricks workspace to both, using Databricks’ sample Bakehouse sales tables, and asked for a three-page sales analytics dashboard: KPIs with period-over-period change, revenue by day with a 7-day moving average, hour and weekday patterns, a franchise scatter chart, filters on every page and a full design brief, all queried live with no seeded data.

Build	Time	Cost	Stops	Result
ToolJet, GPT-6 Luna	12m 49s	$0.11	0	All 3 pages on live data; each page queries when you click Load
Lovable Pro	About 8 min of building, 20.6 min in all	$1.75 (7 credits)	2: link the connection to the project, then allow Lovable to query Databricks	All 3 pages on live data, queried on open, first franchise preselected
ToolJet, GPT-6.1 Sol	9m 13s	$0.87	0	All 3 pages on live data, queried on open, first franchise preselected; default date range a day early

Every app read the warehouse correctly: ToolJet’s GPT-6 Luna build and Lovable’s showed the same figures, $66,471 of revenue from 3,333 transactions across 48 franchises. Lovable’s and ToolJet’s GPT-6.1 Sol builds query as soon as they open; the GPT-6 Luna build used ToolJet’s load-on-click option for warehouse queries, so opening it spends no Databricks compute until someone asks for the data. Each ToolJet build had one flaw: GPT-6 Luna drew a selected franchise’s revenue by day unsorted, and GPT-6.1 Sol set its default date range a day early, so its Overview left out May 17 until the range was changed.

Setup. ToolJet’s Databricks data source takes the warehouse details and a personal access token, and its connection test passed first time. Lovable’s Databricks connector needs an OAuth service principal: creating one in Databricks, generating its secret and granting it the SQL warehouse, then linking the connection to each project and allowing Lovable to use it when it first queries.

Lovable turns every prompt into a React codebase. Our property manager runs on TanStack Start, with more than 40 npm packages listed in its package.json and their exact versions locked in a lockfile (bun.lock). That gives developers full control, and it also means each app carries its own dependencies: a security fix in one of them reaches an app only when that app’s dependencies are updated and it is published again. The same is true of any tool that generates a codebase per app.

ToolJet apps are definitions the platform runs, with no package list of their own. A fix to ToolJet’s shared runtime or components reaches every app with the platform: automatically on ToolJet Cloud, and with one upgrade on a self-hosted server. Custom code inside an app, and the databases and APIs it connects to, still need their own maintenance. Changes after launch happen in the visual builder, by anyone on the team, without touching code.

Internal tools hold company data, so who can see what matters more than how fast the first version appears. ToolJet’s Enterprise plan controls access inside each app, page by page and component by component; Lovable’s Business and Enterprise plans control who can open a published app (the workspace, groups or invited outsiders), but not what each person sees inside it.

	ToolJet	Lovable
Access for the people using an app	Enterprise plan: page- and component-level permissions set in the builder, so a group can be kept off a page or a button	Business and Enterprise: limit a published app to the workspace, groups or invited people; access inside the app lives in the generated code
Groups	Custom user groups on Team	Groups and SCIM group mapping on Enterprise
Builder roles	Admin, builder and end-user roles	Workspace roles (owner, admin, editor, viewer) on paid plans
SSO	Team plan: Google, GitHub, OIDC, LDAP, SAML	Business plan
Audit logs	Team plan	Enterprise plan
Where data lives	ToolJet Database or your own databases and APIs (100+ sources)	Lovable Cloud, or the browser if the agent chooses it, as in our test
Self-hosting	Free open-source edition; paid plans self-host too	Builder: not offered; a generated app can be self-hosted from its code

Lovable’s Enterprise plan adds strong controls of its own: SAML and OIDC SSO, SCIM, 13 weeks of audit logs, PII checks before publishing, and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification.

Sources: ToolJet access control, ToolJet pricing, Lovable people and roles, Lovable for enterprise, read on 4 October 2026.

For one builder the entry prices are close, $23 a month on ToolJet Basic against $21 on Lovable Pro, both billed annually; ToolJet’s credits go about ten times further per app, with no daily cap.

• Lovable charges per workspace, not per person. Every plan allows unlimited members: Pro starts at $25 a month billed monthly ($21 billed annually) and Business, which adds SSO, at $50 ($42 annually), each with 100 monthly credits plus 5 daily credits, and larger credit tiers cost more. ToolJet charges per builder ($23 a month on Basic for up to two builders, $79 on Pro, $199 on Team, billed annually), with end users included up to the plan’s limit.
• ToolJet includes far more AI usage. Each ToolJet Basic or Pro builder adds 2,000 credits a month to the workspace’s shared pool, enough for about 95 of our eight-page apps on GPT-6 Luna at $0.21 each. Lovable Pro’s 100 monthly credits cover about 12 of them at $2.08 each, before its 5 daily credits.
• Hosting and data draw on the same credits on Lovable. After a monthly Cloud grant of 20 credits, hosting and the built-in database draw on the same balance as building; ToolJet Database is included in each plan, within its limits.

For a small team building a few apps a month, Lovable’s flat workspace price of $25 to $50 is hard to beat. For a team that builds and changes internal tools every week, or needs a database every user shares, ToolJet does more per dollar.

For internal tools, pick ToolJet. Its builds stored data the whole team shares from the first prompt, passed every save check, cost $0.21 against Lovable’s $2.08 for the eight-page app, and offer access rules down to the page and component on Enterprise, with no per-app codebase to keep patched.

• Choose ToolJet when the app will hold company data many people use, when different groups need different access inside one app, when you want to connect your own databases, or when you need to self-host.
• Choose Lovable for a quick prototype or a single-person tool, or when you are building websites and consumer web apps as well, and you can check where each build keeps its data.

Lovable was faster and its edits were more complete, and for a prototype that is worth a lot. For a tool a team runs on every day, shared data, access control and lower measured AI build costs matter more, and those are ToolJet’s strengths.

Explore ToolJet AI App Builder, integrations, and enterprise security and deployment options.

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.

• Lovable plans and credits
• Lovable subscription plans
• Lovable people and roles
• Lovable for enterprise
• ToolJet pricing
• ToolJet access control

All read on 4 October 2026.