IBM Streams (discontinued) vs. Workato

Like the name says, it is good for streaming data and analyzing. It is great to look at tuples at a fast rate, filtering, calling other sources to enrich data, can call APIs, etc. Could do better for ingest use cases, can do better with guaranteed delivery, etc.

Incentivized

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.

• IBM Streams is well suited for providing wire-speed real-time end-to-end processing with sub-millisecond latency.
• Streams is amazingly computationally efficient. In other words, you can typically do much more processing with a given amount of hardware than other technologies. In a recent linear-road benchmark Streams based application was able to provide greater capability than the Hadoop-based implementation using 10x less hardware. So even when latency isn't critical, using Streams might still make sense for reducing operational cost.
• Streams comes out of the box with a large and comprehensive set of tested and optimized toolkits. Leveraging these toolkits not only reduces the development time and cost but also helps reduce project risk by eliminating the need for custom code which likely has not seen as much time in test or production.
• In addition to the out of the box toolkits, there is an active developer community contributing additional specialized packages.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Documentation could be more extensive, with more examples, although overall this is not too bad compared to some of the alternative solutions.
• Seems expensive to use in production.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We need to develop Enterprise Application Integrations and Workato was not designed for this

The sheer work Workato eliminates from people's daily jobs is simply a great contribution to people's productivity and a boost to capability. It actually strikes the balance between business and tech teams. It also reduces dependency on developers, and speeds up their delivery too. The only reason it's not a full 10/10 is for the price - it's a bit expensive for what we'd like, and their batch or high data volume processing can be improved.

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

Incentivized

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.

There are well explained tutorials to get the user started. If you are looking for business application ideas, the user community offers a diversity of applications. It is very easy to launch applications on the cloud and can integrate with other analytic tools available on Watson Studio. It takes away the burden of the technology so that users can focus on business innovations.

Incentivized

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.

• Ability to do more with less
• Admins and data analyst can now focus on more thinking tasks
• No negative impacts yet

Incentivized

• 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.