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farukaydin

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Show HN: Automatisch – Open source workflow automation, an alternative to Zapier

automatisch.io
317 points·by farukaydin·há 3 anos·58 comments

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farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
There is an open source Zapier alternative (https://automatisch.io) even though it's not a desktop app.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of Automatisch
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Render is not needed actually. It's one of the requested installation types from our users, so if you want to deploy to Render you can use 1-click install button.

The other installation methods are docker (https://automatisch.io/docs/guide/installation#docker) and docker compose. (https://automatisch.io/docs/guide/installation#docker-compos...) You can choose one of them. I think most of our users are using Docker setup atm.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Thanks! We might build a code step or something similar to write a basic JS function to have a custom action/trigger but not sure when it will happen because our main focus is to allow our users to build automation without writing any code at the moment.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Thanks! That's also the concerns of companies with compliance policy, which can not share the data easily with external systems.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
It's good to hear that you moved to a self-hosted solution. I can tell the differences between n8n and Automatisch so that you can compare them better.

- Automatisch is an open-source software where n8n is fair-code licensed. Therefore, it especially differs from the licensing perspective.

- n8n has a canvas-based flow editor, while Automatisch has an editor like Zapier's.

- From the UX perspective, we try our best to keep it so that anyone with and without technical knowledge can easily build workflow automation.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Thanks for the comment!

We have Telegram integration that sends messages to a channel. For others, we're planning to implement them eventually. We gather all integration requests from GitHub discussions (https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch/discussions/categ...) and prioritize the most requested ones.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Thanks! It's not planned for the near future but we might do it because it's a good place to demonstrate what Automatisch is capable of without installing it anywhere.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
We spent some time to research about licenses. AGPL allows us to keep it open source and also build a business around it as you said.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Thanks a lot!

- It may not differ in the sense of integrations and general functionality. However, the most significant difference is that we aim not only for developers but also general users who may not have programming knowledge.

- At the moment, it's only possible if we merge the integration into the source code, but we're thinking about possible ways to have external integrations and also private integrations.

- We would like to build a business around it without limiting the open-source version in terms of integrations and core functionality. It's still in the plan, but I can say that only the enterprise feature set will require payment.

- We focused on mostly business use cases, but we also have home users, and we're happy to support them.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Thank you so much!

We have actually put so much effort into developer experience, especially for building new integrations. You can check examples using oauth authentication: https://automatisch.io/docs/build-integrations/examples

If you want to check out all documentation for building integrations, you can use this page: https://automatisch.io/docs/build-integrations/folder-struct...

My suggestion would be that you can copy an app folder that uses oauth and iterate it to cover your integration. Please let me know if you have any questions!
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Thanks. We're Berlin based software engineers :)

We hesitated to use non-english word but so far people liked it.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
I think you can start with what you would like to automate. It might be difficult for individuals to come up with an idea, but companies tend to have manual/recurring tasks which they spend time and money. So those tasks are the potential pain points that needs to be automated.
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Imho we need to separate the customer base here to think about the adoption. If anyone (people/company) would like to have automation but is also okay with using cloud solutions, it would be too difficult to convince them to use Automatisch rather than Zapier, Integromat, or any other. But if they don't have the option to use cloud solutions with the compliance policy of their company or just because of the sensitive user data, they need to check open source solutions. So those customers will be our main target. While we're doing that, we don't limit the open source version in terms of integrations but create another license to separate the feature set that will be only required by corporate companies.

We wrote one of the actions in our integrations by using ChatGPT. So action was easy to build, but still, we would like to utilize AI for those tasks.

Thanks for the comment!
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
Yes, we plan to sell enterprise licenses, but we also have other services, like prioritizing the integrations, as you suggested. The integrations prioritized will be available to all other users, but the companies don't have to wait until it's becoming most-requested integrations in the community.

Tesekkurler!
farukaydin
·há 3 anos·discuss
We checked their abstraction, but it was not a good match with what we have in our minds. Apart from that, it also differs for architectural reasons because they don't have to make it self-hostable, which also affects how they build/run the integrations.