Alooma vs. Zoho Flow

Very appropriate for managing an ELT stack -- Alooma handles the 'E' and 'L' pieces very well. Due to the way transformation is setup, it is more on the lightweight side of things and thus works for this kind of stack. For more traditional ETL stacks, Alooma would probably not be the right fit.

Incentivized

Zoho Flow helps us greatly in connecting other Zoho apps. We use Flow to connect Zoho Creator with Zoho Books so an invoice is created when a record is entered into Zoho Creator. We use Zoho Flow when certain fields containing data in Zoho CRM to send that data over to the Zoho Creator record. We use it to add a contact from the Zoho Creator record to a list in Zoho Campaigns. Zoho Flow has proved very worthwhile.

Incentivized

• Transformation of data before entering the data warehouse -- allows for a consistent/understandable schema for analytics teams.
• Adding of additional data sources: Alooma has a large library of pre-built, common 3rd party vendors for which data is often needed to be ETL-ed.

Incentivized

• Works with all other Zoho apps to connect them together and share data
• User interface and dashboard are nice. Gives you a detailed look into flow history and/or audit of your flows
• The ability to set logic responses and incorporate custom functions makes the app even more powerful

Incentivized

• More tools on managing the data warehouse itself. Although great on the ingest and transformation of data, more help provided by the tool on managing the outputs would be welcome.
• Increase possibilities in the transformation step, rather than single event transformations.

Incentivized

• A deeper resources section, with more "how-to" videos
• More user functionality to tell you when an app fails, and not just after failing 3 or 5 times in a row.
• Maybe add some scenario flows connecting two apps with examples of how the flow works and benefits a user.

Incentivized

I've reached out to the support team several times with assistance requests in Zoho Flow. Each time the team has answered my questions promptly and accurately. And because we are mainly integrating other Zoho apps their teams are perfectly positioned to solve our problems.

Incentivized

Haven't used the alternatives, since Alooma was one of the earlier ones to the market. From a cursory viewing, however, the features seem to match relatively similarly.

Incentivized

I've used Zapier and both programs are similar. Zapier has deeper integrations or more apps to integrate with but considering Flow's association with other Zoho apps this does it for us!

Incentivized

• Allowing for additional data sources to more automation capability around monitoring the business is a huge ROI

Incentivized

• It's part of our Zoho One package, so it's hard to comment on this one.
• Assuming we did pay full price, I would say the ROI would be justified. For our example of sending invoices to Books from Creator saves us a great deal of time.
• It takes a bit of time to configure each Flow but once you get the hang of it the flows really do save time and ensure data quality.

Incentivized