Top 3 Workato Alternatives and Competitors [Updated - 2024]

Looking for Workato alternatives or competitors can be overwhelming, there are so many automation tools in the market and you need to look at them from different angles to know which one is made for you.

We went through them in depth and wrote this article about the top Workato competitors to give you the full picture on what to do when it comes to choosing the best Workato alternative for your case.

Short Answer: If you're searching for a Workato alternative with higher flexibility, more affordable pricing and a very simple user interface, you're then looking for Activepieces, an open source no-code business automation tool that can do it all for you.

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Workato alternatives and competitors

Many of their users look for alternative software to Workato. There are reasons behind that and there are different categories for Workato competitors, some that fit the needs of smaller companies better and others that can scale with your organization's work. This article will dig deeper into these different reasons and categories of Workato competitors.

Reasons to look for a Workato alternative

I'm not saying that Workato is a bad software, it's actually loved by many users for its clean user interface, especially very big companies who want to offer a simple automation tool to their employees. However, there are common reasons why users decide to say good bye and find a better alternative to Workato. Some of these reasons are:

• Workato has a high learning curve: Users complain frequently about the huge learning curve to getting started with Workato. It looks like Workato has its own way to do things. For example, can you guess what a Recipe is? If you think it's a prebuilt template, you didn't guess it right, a Recipe is just a flow that you build by yourself. You have to learn the Workato ecosystem in order to become productive with it.
• You can't write code in Workato: You will most likely get stuck trying to achieve something with your favorite automation software, if you can't extend its functionality, that means they don't care if your full potential gets unlocked. With today's ChatGPT and Bard world, writing code is not only for developers. You can't add a Code step in Workato to write your own function.
• Workato's pricing is insane: It's mainly designed for the whales who can pay a big lot of money for software. There is no pure pay as you go model or simple plans for companies that are just getting started with automating their work.
• You can't track tasks easily on Workato: Some users are confused as to where to find their task consumption on Workato. Since their pricing gives you a specific allotment of tasks, you need a way to track these tasks so you don't suddenly run out of credits.
• It's up to Workato when to support a new app: If you realized that you need to use a specific app that doesn't exist on Workato after paying your subscription, all what you can do is to hope for Workato team to add it as soon as you need it.

Best Workato alternatives / competitors in 2023 (ranked)

#1 - Activepieces 🥇

Activepieces is an open source no-code business automation software. The user interface is built in a very simple way so that teams can cut days off manual work in a couple of hours. You should consider Activepieces if you are a serious automator looking for the best option in the market.

Activepieces Strength

• Activepieces is super simple: While so powerful, Activepieces is designed for users who don't wish to think twice while building their automation flows. Everything on the interface is simplified compared to any other automation software in the market.
• Activepieces is privacy focused: Anyone on the internet can read the code behind Activepieces because it's open source. This means if there is any security or privacy issue, there will be someone who reported it before you can get affected by it.
• Community loves Activepieces: There is a community edition of Activepieces that anyone can install on their machines. This built a great hype around Activepieces and made it loved by community.
• Fast development: Activepieces team ships developments to the product insanely fast. There are several new features every week and they're all inspire by requests from users.
• Cost efficient automation software: Activepieces is more affordable than most of the other automation software in the market. It all started as open source and the team believes that everyone should be able to automate their work.

Activepieces Weakness

• Number of apps on Activepieces: Activepieces is newer to the market than Workato so the number of apps offered on it are a bit fewer. However, the speed of development and the kind of support offered is enough to cover most of the needed use cases.
• No Single Sign On: Some companies want their employees to be able to log into their automation software using their company's email account, Activepieces doesn't yet offer this feature.

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#2 - Zapier

Zapier can be considered as a Workato competitor. However, it's overall focus was always on smaller teams and with its new direction into enterprise, its complexity is increasing.

Zapier Strength

• Public pricing: Unlike Workato, Zapier lists the majority of their pricing on public. So you can understand your position before getting started with Zapier and make your mind upon it.
• Zapier has many apps: Since it's a very old software, it allowed Zapier to build so many apps that cover many use cases. This is the most loved feature about Zapier.

Zapier Weakness

• Zapier support is weak: Users say it takes them weeks to resolve a simple issue in their flow because Zapier's support answers with basic responses rather than understanding the issue and solving it. Workato is much stronger with its support.
• Complex automations are impossible: If you try to build a complex flow on Zapier it will be your entry to hell. For example, try to use a Path inside another Path. You'll never understand your flow again.
• Increasing complexity of Zapier: Zapier is adding a huge number of features outside automation, so the complexity of the software is increasing and requiring more effort and time to grasp.
• Linear editor is limiting: Zapier's editor will look attractive at a first glance because it's focused in the middle and goes from the top to the bottom, aka linear. But when you use it for serious automations, you'll realize that you fell for the trap. It's limited that you can't branch out easily and you're limited to this bounded line.

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#3 - Tray

Tray is similar to Workato

Tray Strength

• Full flow builder: Unlike Zapier and Workato's linear flow editor, Tray offers a full flow builder that can branch out and loop through items, offering higher flexibility to design more complex flows than basic ones.
• Active development: Tray seems to be active at shipping new features and improving to the software which makes it better as time passes. They're also good at support since they focus on big companies.

Tray Weakness

• Blind flow design: You can't test the steps you add to your flow as you go, so you'll be designing your flow blindly until you test it as whole to realise many things are going wrong which makes debugging harder. When you design automations, they need to be robust to let you automate your organization in the best way possible.
• Complex interface while debugging: When you start debugging your flows, there will be many sidebars to the left and a lot of options out of sudden. So it gets complicated to get your flow to production.
• Technical language: You need to learn what an Authentication is and what a JSON path is, for example, in order to use Tray. It looks like it was built by developers for developers in the first place, but shipped to business users which makes some conflict in its terminology.
• Hidden pricing: For some reason, Tray hides their pricing from their official website, so you'll have to go through a sales process to learn about their pricing and whether it fits your needs or not. Many users say Tray is expensive but I can't personally confirm that.