[HN Gopher] Show HN: Automatisch - Open source workflow automati...
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Show HN: Automatisch - Open source workflow automation, an
alternative to Zapier
Hey, HN community, We're so excited to share Automatisch with HN
finally. Automatisch is an open-source workflow automation tool, an
alternative to Zapier. Together with my co-founder (@barinali), we
have been working on it for about 15 months and have started
getting early adopters. Automatisch is a workflow automation tool
that lets you connect different web services like Slack, Github,
Twitter, and more to automate your business processes. For example,
you can build automation that gets all new tweets, including the
"open source" phrase, and post them to the Slack channel you
specified. You can adjust the services and steps depending on what
you actually need to automate in your business. Even though some
existing cloud solutions do the job well enough, we still wanted to
build an open-source and self-hosted alternative to those. Because
it allows you to store your data on your own servers, which is
essential for businesses that handle sensitive user information and
cannot risk sharing it with external cloud services. This is
especially relevant for industries such as healthcare and finance,
as well as for European companies that must comply with the General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You can see the available
integrations here (https://automatisch.io/docs/guide/available-
apps). We currently have limited integrations but are constantly
working on adding more and enhancing the existing ones. You can
also request a new integration by using GitHub discussions:
(https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch/discussions/categ...).
You can use the following links to check it out: Website:
https://automatisch.io Docs: https://automatisch.io/docs GitHub:
https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch Please give it a try
and let us know if you have any feedback, and if you like what we
are doing with Automatisch, please give us a star on GitHub.
Cheers!
Author : farukaydin
Score : 202 points
Date : 2023-01-25 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (automatisch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (automatisch.io)
| bberenberg wrote:
| I currently use n8n, but always great to see more alternatives in
| this space.
|
| One thing that has surprised me is that no one has tried to
| standardize on the Zapier or IFTTT APIs / SDK implementation to
| allow for faster deployment of integrations. Seems like there
| could be a movement here that is akin to how many services use S3
| compatible APIs.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| We noticed that too and thought scripts with simple main
| functions and their parameters could be the universal layer for
| integrations, so we (Windmill) built an open-source hub for it
| https://hub.windmill.dev
|
| Pipedream (which is probably Automatisch main competitor) also
| has a repo full of integrations:
| https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream. Their format is a bit
| more specific than Windmill.
|
| Hopefully, we all agree on a format and differentiate ourselves
| on the quality of the orchestration, flow capabilities,
| performance etc ...
| sneak wrote:
| n8n is not open source.
|
| There is an argument (that I agree with) that the AGPL (used by
| this project) is not a free software license either, for
| similar reasons, but this does not seem to have consensus yet.
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| ah the ole xkcd 927 strikes again :)
| bartkappenburg wrote:
| Nice! Automatisch is dutch (and german) for automatic, what a
| cool name!
| farukaydin wrote:
| Thanks. We're Berlin based software engineers :)
|
| We hesitated to use non-english word but so far people liked
| it.
| neoecos wrote:
| It's funny that n8n is also in Germany. I moved from Zappier to
| selft hosted n8n, because the low code possibilities, to create
| more complex flows, for example connecting to Kafka events
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| What do you have generating Kafka events?
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| For a German company, there is a surprising lack of legal
| information on the website.
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| m00dy wrote:
| Well, good news first of all. I feel not really ok with zapper's
| closed circle
| farukaydin wrote:
| Thanks! That's also the concerns of companies with compliance
| policy, which can not share the data easily with external
| systems.
| number6 wrote:
| I never knew what to do with happier, seems interesting though
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| This looks great. I really want a way to plug in to (in my case)
| Xero, and do some automation. I'm perfectly happy writing code
| but it seems painfully complicated to do all the oauth
| authentication stuff and hosting an interface and whatnot. All I
| want to do is trigger an event on something happening. Is adding
| oauth services relatively easy?
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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!
| hgomersall wrote:
| Great stuff! FWIW I've been looking for a "some code"
| platform, that removes the overhead and plumbing requirements
| for automation, but still allows arbitrary code to run in the
| automations. Basically, I can code, but there are loads of
| things about web development I have no interest in or want to
| think about. What would be amazing to me would be a way in
| which APIs can be abstracted away and a low code API for
| various languages is provided. It could just be JSON or
| something, but without any crappy hosting or oauth concerns.
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| This looks very cool and I'm excited to try it out later today.
| In the past I've tried Huginn but I have always found Ruby to be
| particularly unapproachable and the first integration I tried was
| broken (the weather integration) and despite submitting a PR to
| fix it, the PR has languished for years.
|
| Here's some questions:
|
| - How does this differ from Huginn?
|
| - How easy is it to install integrations from outside the main
| source tree? In other words, can I create an integration and
| publish it on my own Github profile and have others use it with
| ease?
|
| - Is Automatisch a purely OSS project, or are you planning to
| build a business around it? What type of business model?
|
| - Is Automatisch primarily focused at home users or business use
| cases? The integrations listed in the docs seem primarily home-
| focused.
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| auggierose wrote:
| From gleaning at the repo's license, they use AGPL. So that
| seems tailored towards building a business around it. I find
| that quite exciting, because I have been thinking about which
| license to use for a project of mine as well, so that a) it is
| open-source, and b) I can build a business on top of it. AGPL
| seems to fit the bill perfectly, as long as you are careful
| about the license of contributions.
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| dalys wrote:
| Neat! Do you plan to actively sell enterprise licenses to
| mentioned industries, like healthcare and finance? Is that how
| you'll make money?
|
| Random idea: Maybe sell integration building as well? Instead of
| just being able to request a integration. For example, if I would
| want to run this as a marketer and self host (for whatever
| reason), I would need integrations such as Facebook Lead Ads,
| TikTok Lead Ads, Gmail, etcetera. But instead of requesting them
| being built, I can imagine some people would rather pay $1000 to
| have them built _guaranteed_ within let's say 1 month. Because if
| there's some integration missing that is essential for my
| business, requesting and waiting 12 months until it's _maybe_
| build is probably not an option. At least mentioning this service
| on the landing page and docs will cost 5 minutes of your time and
| maybe get some business. :)
|
| Iyi sanslar!
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What do you believe your biggest challenges to adoption are?
| Also, Zapier's value is in the long tail of integrations and
| their staff who keep those integrations working for their non
| technical user base when there are breaking changes (expected and
| otherwise). How will you solve for that? (Recently I thought
| ChatGPT might be a fun possible solution when Sentry gets the
| exception from an integration runner, and it could propose a code
| fix for the on call SRE or platform engineer, something to
| consider)
|
| Best of luck, big market with a lot of dollars to go around.
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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!
| sneak wrote:
| License: AGPL-3
|
| Language: Typescript
|
| Code: https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch
| shafyy wrote:
| Awesome. Do you plan on offering a paid hosted version? Would be
| great, especially if you would host it in Germany (or EU). Grusse
| von Hamburg!
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| Your integrations logo wall has the postgres elephant, but I
| don't see Postgres in the list.
|
| A mastodon/activitypub output action (or input trigger) would be
| cool.
| barinali wrote:
| Thanks for the comment.
|
| We have initially thought of developing that integration
| already. However, circumstances had us postpone it for a while.
| We already have an integration request for postgres on
| https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch/discussions/858.
|
| I'd appreciate it if you could give an upvote to that
| discussion so we can prioritize the integrations accordingly.
| rexreed wrote:
| The installation instructions mention Render but doesn't say what
| it's needed for, or if it's needed. Is only the Docker needed?
| Can you provide more details on the installation page?
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
| jacooper wrote:
| Great product !
|
| Personally my main use case is automating social media posts from
| RSS/webhooks So adding these platforms is needed for me: -
| LinkedIn - Facebook - mastodon - Telegram - (nice to have) Matrix
|
| I know its a lot to ask, but maybe that's possible in your
| roadmap, because I'm really interested in using it!
| farukaydin wrote:
| 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.
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