Item: Workato
Rating: 10
Author: Eric Hansen

Overall Satisfaction with Workato

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used by some departments with intention to roll out to anyone in the organiation with a business need.

We're currently using it to empower business users / non-engineers / power users to build integrations and automations with IT Engineering oversight/guidance, but without utilizing IT Engineering headcount.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Very low learning curve to get started.
Amazing live-person tech support for more ambitious projects.
Succeeds at core mission of bringing the power of systems integrations to new personas / profiles.

Cons

Custom security roles cannot be provisioned via SAML/JIT API.
Team/User management design could better support the "citizen developer" use case.
Slightly better troubleshooting features, specifically provide the full network dump when a recipe fails at the connection level during development.

Return on Investment

During our pilot project, we were able to bootstrap our own registration and provisioning without any developer assitance.
During our initial use case, we're having success building a user lifecycle management protoype with a very small team.

Alternatives Considered

We use multiple integration platforms for various use cases. Workato did not replace anything. We believe in having the best tool for the job/persona and thus employ multiple tools with some overlapping functionality aside from the unique strengths/trade-offs of each.

Likelihood to Recommend

There's always more need for automations/integrations than there is supply of engineers/developers to build/maintain/support them. In a "desert island" scenario where if I had to pick one tool, it would be Workato. Not because it can do everything; because of the vast amount of things it's capable of, it does them exceedingly well. Making a powerful-but-approachable tool available to our workforce is key to scalaing because we are empowered to do more with less.

Workato Feature Ratings

Workato Support

Support Rating

Each page has an intercom button I use to create a chat support session and I use it all the time now that I'm pushing Workato into new areas and use cases that are more complex and need help with formulas or specific configuration patterns.

When they don't know the answer, they create a support ticket for an engineer to look at.

Workato support is one of its differentiators from similar products I've used.

Incredibly responsive 24/7 and deflects a lot of questions from our CSM.

Workato Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Bug Resolution

Yes - Yes. They had to resolve it on their end, but they did so quickly and added it to their patch queue. Small bug with aesthetic impact only, not functionality.

Exceptional Examples of Workato Support

They do it all the time, but as I ventured into writing my own custom connectors with their SDK, they provided several pieces of sample code for very specific use cases I had and their support channel was just as willing to help me with my own code as they were theirs. In my mind, my fear was thay anything custom was outside of their scope—and maybe it is contractually—but my experience was they always jumped right in and helped in any way they could.

Using Workato

Usability

Distills the complexity of intergration lifecycle management, integration development, and web services into an accessible tool for non-engineers.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Simple integrations based on a single row of data
Creating a Slack integration or bot
Anything involving Google Sheets or Google Drive
With integrated Intercom support on every page, getting support is INSANELY EASY/GREAT

Difficult Tasks

A lot of admin functions involving creating/updating/deleting users are possible, but not part of the core offering
Even though JIT provisioning is supported, giving a large volume of users is not a well-optimized use case if you need to restrict them to a custom role/folder

Comments

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My "desert island" integration tool