Workflow automation

Workflow automation platforms connect the apps a business already uses: when something happens in one app (a form is submitted, a payment arrives, a webhook fires), they run a chain of actions in others, with branches, code and AI steps in between. Operations, marketing, support and engineering teams use them to move data and remove manual steps without building integrations themselves. They differ in how they count usage (per action, per module, per workflow run, per user), which plan carries webhooks, code and team features, and where the data is hosted.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, trust, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price, can be bought online and month to month, whether usage beyond the plan has a price, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan, whether it runs multi-step workflows and webhook triggers, and how much of a reference workload it covers; otherwise the length of the trial and whether it needs a card.
• Price for 2,000 runs: the monthly cost of 2,000 runs of a webhook trigger plus 4 actions for one builder, billed annually, converted into each vendor's unit with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Workflow building blocks: the size of the app directory, branching, code steps, version history, error handling and AI steps, and on which plan each one sits.
• Compliance and data residency: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a HIPAA agreement, and storing data in the EU.
• Admin, team and exit: single sign-on, an audit log, team roles, exporting your workflows as files, a self-hosted edition and a management API.

How fast a workflow runs depends on the workflow and the apps it calls, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.