Top Workflow Automation Tools

Top Workflow Automation Tools

The popularity of workflow automation tools has made it easier than ever to create applications and automate business processes without needing engineers. Today's workflow automation solutions enable non-engineers to build apps without needing to write code, or with just a minimal amount of technical knowledge of concepts like SQL and APIs. There tools typically feature a drag-and-drop UI dashboard. They can help automate business processes and operational workflows such as:

  • Automated customer outreach
  • Data processing
  • Moving data between applications
  • Scheduling events
  • Assigning tasks for your team
  • Tracking employee productivity
  • Metrics reporting
  • Setting rules to alert agents on any business process errors
  • Syncing tasks
  • Monitoring and observability

In this article, we are going to dive into the top tools to help you automate business workflows and make it easy to manage manual processes. These tools come with pre-built integrations that allow you to streamline complex business process across various software platforms, saving you a ton of time and money on tedious labor. In today's competitive landscape, workflow automation tools enable companies to focus on their core product and speed up operational scale without needing expensive developers. They also enable founders and business owners without a coding background to build apps and processes more quickly than traditional development. It's no surprise that the low-code automation industry is valued at billions of dollars and poised to grow quickly in the next decade.

Let's take a look at some popular picks:

LogicLoop

LogicLoop is a popular low-code software tool that allows you to automate your operations by writing rules using SQL to query your data and triggering downstream actions. You can connect popular data sources like Postgres, MySQL, Redshift, Snowflake, and MongoDB. You can then use LogicLoop's SQL editor to analyze and query the data that you need. For users who don't know SQL, LogicLoop also features visual drag-and-drop filters to help you select the data you need. You can set your rule run on a schedule e.g. every minute, every hour, every day, every week and automatically trigger downstream actions like Slack, Email, Google Sheets, PagerDuty, Asana, and more when certain conditions are met.

Some of the most popular use cases include:

  • Flagging a transaction for fraud e.g. select all payments > $10,000 and create an alert for manual review
  • Alert on improper data e.g. select all rows from a table where a column that should not be NULL is NULL
  • Alert on operational needs e.g. select all inventory whose total count is low in order to order more units
  • Maintain systems observability e.g. alert if a service is down for more than 5 minutes
  • Set up an onboarding workflow e.g. select all new users who have not yet activated on your platform and send them a reminder alert

Click here to view pre-built alerting templates gathered from top companies in the industry. LogicLoop help your company save a ton of time by enabling non-engineers to create both revenue-generating and cost-savings touch points without needing to be backlogged on engineering teams.

Airtable

Airtable is a more powerful version of a spreadsheet that can also act like a database. It features a friendly easy to use interface and can help you organize spreadsheet-based business workflows. On top of all the functionalities you would expect from a spreadsheet, Airtable also integrates with different applications to automate your workflows such as Slack, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. However, Airtable cannot express the level of complexity and scale as you would be able to with a traditional database and SQL, so depending on how large your dataset is and how complex your logic is, you will want to consider other options available to you. Airtable also comes with a variety of templates for issue tracking, forms, simple applications and more. Airtable is also very team friendly and comes with collaborative tools to edit and sync sheets together. IFTTT

IFTTT

If this then that is a tool that allows you to connect across various software applications to create integrated workflows. With IFTTT, you can connect a wide range of tools like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Dropbox, Youtube, and more. Instead of having to manually check on an application when something has happened, IFTTT can automatically trigger an action in another application when the first application is activated. IFTTT is fun to use for both business and personal use cases. For example, you can have your Amazon Alexa at home automatically create change the color of a smart lightbulb in your home when you gave it a certain command.

Microsoft Power Apps

If you are a large enterprise company in the Microsoft ecosystem, you can take a look at Microsoft Power Apps. Their Power Automate product is a workflow process manager that helps you stitch together various processes. You can build applications by connecting business logic across various Microsoft databases and software tools. Power Apps features a drag-and-drop interface with easy to click buttons sand actions. The tool is also teamwork friendly and intended to be used in a collaborative environment. And of course, it features a rich integration with Microsoft Suite products like Excel, Sharepoint, Teams, and Azure. If you are a smaller company and need something up a running quickly, you may want to look into other more lightweight options instead.

Tray

Tray is another platform that allows you to drag-and-drop multi-step business workflows in order to automate your business needs. You can use Tray to express conditional logic and connect various applications like Salesforce, Slack, Email and Google Sheets. Tray seeks to help your business move faster at greater scale. Tray features a collaborative low-code user experience, various governance controls in case something goes wrong with your workflows, and can also help you with custom integrations if necessary. Tray is customer-centric and has an active community of members asking questions. n8n

n8n

The final tool we are going over today is n8n. n8n helps you design custom application diagrams. They offer both a SaaS solution and an on-premises deployment option. They feature a drag-and-drop user interface and over 200 connected applications. You can also add conditional logic in between your flows, which makes n8n more flexible than a tool like IFTTTT.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are tons of low-code products on the market today to help your quickly scale your operations. The main benefits of low-code tools are:

  • Faster development: With low-code tools, you can build apps and workflows much faster than with traditional engineering. Instead of re-writing a ton of boilerplate code, low-code tools do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and allow you to specify the customizations you need where they're need.
  • Less tedious work: Low-code tools can automate processes that previously might have been done manually.
  • No need for engineers: Developers can be costly and recruit and train, and many companies often have a long backlog of tasks on their developers' plates. Low-code tools can allow business users to bypass the lengthy development prioritization process and ship business value faster without being blocked.
  • Focus on your core product: All of these cost savings allow companies to focus on product developments that help differentiate their company in this competitive environment, rather than on internal business workflows or cookie-cutter applications.

Low-code tools can be an integral value-add to any business organization and we hope you are able to reap the benefits.

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