Item: Workato
Rating: 10
Author: Michael Sprague

Overall Satisfaction with Workato

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Workato is being used by our IT staff to set up integrations for departments across the college. It provides a simple way to connect a variety of endpoints and move data between systems. It also provides a central location to house all of our integration jobs, rather than having direct system-to-system jobs and programming scattered about. It fits nicely with our effort to govern our data and data flow because it is all running through the one integration service.

Pros and Cons

Pros

No code integrations
Simple user interface
Organization of jobs/recipes
Growing/Developing new features and making improvements

Cons

Formulas and Transformations
Pricing Structure

Most Important Features

JSON data handling
Snowflake Connector
On-premise agent

Return on Investment

Much more rapid integration setup and efficiency
Ability to have less advanced programmers setting up integrations

Alternatives Considered

Jitterbit and SnapLogic

Both products were much more complicated to configure and get started with. With Workato, we had simple integrations set up and running without a couple of hours. With Jitterbit and SnapLogic it required some training just to evaluate it, and also required a lot of configuration steps. You just can't beat Workato for ease of use and rapid deployment.

Key Insights

Do you think Workato delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Workato's feature set?

Yes

Did Workato live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Workato go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Workato again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Snowflake, Metabase, Tableau Server, Dataiku DSS

Likelihood to Recommend

Workato is well suited for integrations involving APIs (web services), cloud data sources and direct database connections. Their on-premise agent for connecting to internal databases from outside your network works extremely well.

Despite the way Workato is marketed, it really requires someone with programming knowledge and a good understanding of programming/data flow to operate it. A general office user does not understand lists/arrays, functions and other data concepts. Unless it is an incredibly simple data job, this will require an IT person.

Workato Feature Ratings

Evaluating Workato and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - We replaced Lingk, as it required too much programming time and did not have fully developed connectors.

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability

Usability, particularly for the connectors, was a major factor in our decision. With previous products, there were extensive configuration requirements that involved multiple programming languages and specialized knowledge. Workato connectors all work through simple Web forms with parameters that you fill in.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I am confident that we made the right decision, so I would not change the evaluation process. We got demo accounts with all of the products we evaluated, and we tried to set up integrations with them. Workato was the clear leader.

Comments

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Rapid deployment integration product with a short learning curve