Fortra’s Automate vs. Import.io

It's great for repetitive or regularly scheduled activities like reports or file transfers. However, it's not so good for on-demand activities. It doesn't support task shortcuts to run specific tasks. If it did it would be perfect.

Incentivized

We used Connotate as a data mining tool for web research as a teaching assistant for the College of Information Sciences and Technology. You could train agents to automatically gather data in a variety of ways, which I used in my own research. Connotate's analysis was not as useful to me as the data itself, because we were using it to inform us of trends rather than make decisions.

Incentivized

• Very detailed task builder. Easy to read step by step a task's operation even if you don't have much programming knowledge.
• Scheduling for automation jobs is very flexible. Allows us to create all kinds of job schedules as needed.
• Organization of jobs, tasks, conditions is done well. Allows us to easily manage our items.

Incentivized

• Scrapes specific parts of webpages
• Crawls pages and scrapes based on patterns you specify via examples
• Very effective and accurate when it comes to scraping data of large URL lists

Incentivized

• A reporting capability on tasks: enabled, disabled, by folder, by trigger, etc. Currently there is none.
• An "OR" in their conditional statements - currently there is only "AND".
• Some kind of temporary backup when changing a task - separate from the current back up/restore functionality (which works well).

Incentivized

• Stability. software frequently crashed previously.
• Training. Students had a had time understanding how to use the tool, and then where to use it.

Incentivized

I do not think I would have the budget to use it currently. When using it previously, was working with the developers to improve the product and was given accounts at no cost

Incentivized

It's just very easy to use, extremely versatile, and very reliable. It's hard to find use cases where it won't work.

Incentivized

Support is very helpful and responsive, although using the tool is very user-friendly, so I hardly use the service.

Incentivized

Incentivized

[We selected Import.io because] They were top ranking in SEO. I will never work with them again though.

• It's been a net positive as AutoMate requires less eyes on specific tasks so that people can focus attention elsewhere and do more analysis.
• Less manual work also decreases the chances of mistakes and/or missed jobs. Since Automate can schedule everything, send email notifications, etc., there is less time wasted.

Incentivized

• It really helped to collect large chunks of data from the web.
• When compared to writing a script from scratch, it is very simple to use for creating a web agent.

Incentivized