Given your first project is in Node + React, you might find Toolpad (https://mui.com/toolpad/) worth considering. It’s a set of components designed to build React dashboards. It's built on top of Material UI and is fully extensible. Also, it’s open source and free to use regardless of scale.
I agree that Retool and a few others are ahead in this category. Like them, we also have a drag-and-drop UI builder that makes them a competitor. But we see Toolpad as a more code-friendly alternative that can be directly imported into an existing codebase. Toolpad supports extending your existing backend functions to the canvas and ensures that a single source of business logic exists.
Retool, and others are SaaS tools that are good initially but can get pricey quickly as an org scales.
