IBM’s App Connect is a cloud-based data integration platform with data mapping and transformation capabilities within connectors between high-volume systems. App Connect also offers near-real time data synchronization and an API builder that is adaptable to the user’s coding skill level.
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Workato
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Workato is a cloud or on-premise automation and integration platform with enterprise-grade
capabilities and no coding required. Workato provides pre-built connectors to integrate with over 300
business applications and enables task automation across apps.
- great when you need to integrate applications without any message lost or duplicated and when transnationality is important - if you need the highest throughput possible and not much (or not at all) mapping is required, a system like Kafka is more appropriate
Workato is brilliant to make separate applications work together without much effort or specialists being needed. When specific events on software A should trigger actions on B (or more) and you want that to happen without any development or big budgets, that's where Workato comes into play. It's a great help if you want tasks automated, communications flowing and data synced between different applications.
The Workato product interface is brilliantly thought through and designed. The learning curve for first timers is easy enough to get started and build useful things, and Workato really shines in their ability to handle complex triggers and interactions. Workato allows people to build software apps so much faster than by coding each functionality.
Workato has fantastic documentation, making things accessible without any holes in the product. The product just works, never has any bugs, never lags, and just generally allows us to see and change exactly what we need to.
Workato has an absolutely amazing support team. We tried the free version for a while, then realized it was the single most important software tool we have, and we upgraded. The support at the paid tier is A+, seriously the best from any company we've worked with. Feels more like a good friend then a support rep.
The development and the transformation capability is not so great. I believe IBM is looking to incorporate some of features of IBM APP Connect into API Connect.
The authentications features are no way close to CA API Management (f.k.a Laye r7).
The development experience is not as good as Apigee's.
The GUI should be improved. Maybe the product team should see the other API management tools in their offering.
Customer support - responsive, but often not equipped to help efficiently identify root cause of issue. Need to improve escalation to technical resources and turnaround time
Recipe organization and sharing. Can be challenging to copy recipes, or grab recipes from publicly available site. There are often dependencies and errors that have vague descriptions.
It is the best on-premise application to cloud integration in the market. I guess IBM is planning to integrate IBM App Connect with the IBM API Connect solution.
You can do some really powerful things with this system. The overall design is an attempt to make configurable some of the routine tasks/common functionality, but allow for development/customization of the core of the application.
Due to prebuilt recipes, Workato is easy to learn and use for non-technical users if their use case fits the existing recipes. It is not easy for non-technical users to create, modify, debug or maintain complex integrations that are outside the prebuilt recipes.
They employ an extremely knowledgeable team of problem solvers. I've never had a disappointing interaction or one that has left me still searching for answers. I know that when I ask for help, they'll partner with me until we find a solution together
We discovered that we could not use Workato for our more complex, large enterprise integrations. It was useful for simple workflows that matched the prebuilt recipes.
We did not select Cast Iron as our iPaaS solution, it was the weakest competitor in the field that we evaluated. Our experience was that it was not nearly as easy to learn, without in-depth training and guidance, and the developer UI was extremely buggy. We subjected each of the vendors to a battery of integrations, from simple to challenging, and it fell short on each one. One of the most simple integrations was grabbing a CSV file from an FTP source, parsing the data, doing a small amount of transformation, then inserting that data into an Azure MSSQL DB. After 2 hours on the phone with the Cast Iron support team, we were still unable to get this working.
We already used Zapier, but since it doesn't support NetSuite we had to choose another automation platform. Now that we've been using Workato for a few months, we have plans to move the stuff we're going through Zapier to Workato. We set up a trial account with all the other platforms, and they were all more expensive and A LOT more complicated than Workato.
As business consultants, Workato has greatly improved our offerings to our clients as well as improved the time frame to implement automated workflows and integrations.
For our clients, the return on investment is almost immediate. Once a Workato recipe is up and running (which can be done very fast), data is integrating, duplicate data entry and user errors are eliminated, and cross-company KPI metrics are easier to report than ever.
