6 Best Workflow Automation Software

ClickUp stands out for its breadth of workflow automation tools available across four plans. For small teams that can use limited monthly actions, the free plan includes 100 automation and custom task statuses, 100 application programming interface (API) requests per minute, and 100 uses of reporting dashboards. These automations make it easier to manage simple tasks and collaborative projects.

After the free plan, businesses with more advanced automation needs can upgrade to Unlimited. This plan provides up to 1,000 automations with access to future recurring tasks on the calendar, column calculations, and cloud storage. Therefore, this plan is best for businesses that want to collect and analyze data on their project management goals.

The Business plan provides more access to customizable features and up to 10,000 automations with multiple actions and conditions. For example, this plan includes unlimited activity and timeline views, branding, and form customization. This ensures you can personalize and automate documents like email templates to reflect your business.

While smaller teams might not benefit from all of the features included in the Enterprise plan, it is the only plan that offers single sign-on and white labeling. With up to 250,000 automations a month plus multiple actions and conditions, conditional logic on forms, and 10,000 API requests per minute, this plan is best for businesses with a high volume of tasks and team members. Contact the sales team for more information on custom pricing.

• Custom statuses: Label the progress status of your tasks according to the terms your team uses. Save the new statuses as templates to keep them handy for other projects.
• Mind maps: Detail the steps in your workflow visually and outline specific tasks under each step. It’s easier to keep track of accomplished steps with the mind map.
• Dynamic assignees: Create more accountability in your workspace by adding watchers and assignees to tasks.

Add assignees and watchers to tasks with ClickUp’s workflow automation tools. (Source: ClickUp)

Although monday.com offers several work management plans, the two base plans do not provide workflow automation tools. Instead, the free and Basic plans are best for project management tasks, like organizing assignments and collaborating on documents using manual actions in a dashboard.

The Standard or Pro plans are the best options for small businesses interested in workflow automation. The Standard plan offers 250 integrations and automation actions, a six-month activity log, and 20GB of file storage. This plan also includes timelines and calendar views for more effective task management. The Pro plan expands on these collaborative features with time tracking, one year of activity logging, and up to 100GB of file storage.

Additionally, the Pro plan includes the dependency column to view the relationship between up to 25,000 integration and automation actions. This column is also featured in the Enterprise plan, providing up to 250,000 complex integration and automation actions. The Enterprise plan is also the only plan with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards.

Contact a sales associate to learn more about the Enterprise plan’s pricing. You can also sign up for monday.com’s 14-day free trial today to see if one of the essential plans fits your automation needs.

• Customizable boards: monday.com’s workflow boards can be configured to reflect your specific project needs. In the columns, you may add people (responsible parties for specific tasks), due dates, timelines, and priority levels to help you better oversee project progress.
• Guest access: Allow external stakeholders, like partners, vendors, and clients, to see your project roadmap. An “Invite” button at the top of the board lets users enter external contacts’ email addresses and offer guest access.
• Dependency column: Manage task dependencies to reduce the risks of project delays. The dependency column makes it easy to identify which assignments must be finished in order. You can also review status changes in your monday.com dashboard.

One status change in monday.com can automate updates in a separate item. (Source: monday.com)

Pipedrive offers five plans, from essential to enterprise-grade, each including access to artificial intelligence features. While the Essential plan does not include customizable workflow automation tools, it does provide an AI-powered sales assistant that can suggest ways to improve sales performance.

After the base plan, the advanced plan includes 30 active automations per user, three credits for using automation delay features, and access to Smart contact data and team sales reports. The Professional plan expands on these features with 60 active automations per user and 10 credits for automation delay with automatic assignments and customizable fields.

For businesses that require more hands-on support features, the Power plan includes 90 active automations per user, with phone support and custom onboarding. Although the Enterprise plan includes 180 active automations per user, this is significantly less than the automation capabilities available on enterprise plans from other providers.

However, the highest-tier plan includes unlimited reports and security alerts for businesses that require highly protected customer data acquisition and more detailed sales insights. To access these workflow automation solutions, try any of Pipedrive’s plans for 14 days free.

• Automation delay: If you want to schedule automation for later or delay automation for approval, the delay feature can create specific conditions for performing an action. You can also create multiple stages of conditions and delays for complex tasks.
• Smart contact data: A deal card provides all the information about a particular sales opportunity, including the linked contact person and organization, deal value, and deal owner. Pipedrive also uses customer data to qualify leads by automatically generating insights about how “hot” a lead is and whether they will lead to more sales.
• Automatic assignment: Let the platform assign deals to team members. Set up the rules to launch this automation: assign new deals to specific people or an existing deal to a person after it moves through the pipeline.

Use Pipedrive to automate each stage of the sales process. (Source: Pipedrive)

Like many other providers, Zapier offers a free forever plan with unlimited zaps, automation workflows, copy-and-paste automation steps, and two-step automation flows. In contrast, the Professional plan provides multistep workflow automation for more complex workflows, expanded access to premium apps, version rollback, custom logic with paths, and duplicate and reorder paths.

Zapier Team is the highest tier of the essential plans, offering a shared workspace, export features for all Zaps, and a six-month audit log useful for collaborative workspace management. After the essential plans, the Enterprise plan provides more advanced administrative features, like observability and permissions to supervise tasks.

You can contact a sales representative to learn more about the features and pricing for the enterprise plans. Consider a 14-day free trial of Zapier’s workflow automation solutions to learn more about the essential plans.

• Drafts: Edit existing workflows without disabling them in the platform, letting them run while you adjust. Zapier automatically saves drafts, ensuring work is recovered and used.
• Copy and paste steps: If you want to put the same triggers, action steps, or paths in other automated workflows, copy and paste those elements to save time. These functions are available in the Zap editor.
• Zapier paths: Use conditional logic to automate workflows along custom pathways. This feature makes it easier to customize automation for different situations and outcomes.

Create automated paths with the Zap editor. (Source: Zapier)

HubSpot CRM provides free, essential, and enterprise plans to meet various business needs. The free plan includes standard marketing automation tools, such as one automated email per form, one email automation action, and up to three reporting dashboards with ten reports each. However, the templates include HubSpot branding, which makes them less personalized to your business.

After the free plan, HubSpot CRM offers two starter plans: Marketing Hub Starter and Starter Customer Platform. These plans remove the HubSpot branding and include additional tools unavailable on the free plan. Each plan has slight differences because Marketing Hub Starter only includes simple marketing automation tools. In contrast, the Starter Customer Platform includes additional sales tools and operation software for seamless content creation and improved customer experience.

The next tier is the Professional plan, which includes three seats and provides workflow automations for up to ten teams. This plan also offers omnichannel marketing automation and unlimited actions and workflows. However, while the Starter plans have monthly and annual pricing, the Professional plan requires a $3,000 onboarding fee and a $45 monthly charge for additional seats.

Like the Professional plan, the Enterprise plan includes tools for large-scale marketing campaigns and teams, such as predictive lead scoring and workflow health monitoring. However, the startup and subscription fees would be prohibitive to most small business owners.

• Live chat: Respond to website visitors instantly through real-time chat. You’re more likely to turn curious visitors into customers by answering questions and providing relevant information.
• Channel switching: Chat representatives can move from one communication channel to another without losing the context of the conversation. Channel switching also offers visibility on messages from other communication platforms.
• Visual editor: Create workflows in the visual editor to visualize all the necessary steps for various projects more clearly. This feature has an if-then branch that makes it easy to determine triggers and corresponding actions.

Use the visual editor to create automated workflows. (Source: HubSpot)

Zoho Creator includes four plans with scalable growth from one tier to the other. Small businesses with simple automation needs can benefit from the built-in approvals, custom schedules, and workflow actions for creating and managing tasks.

Specifically, the Standard plan includes 1GB of file storage per user, 90 custom schedules per user, and Blueprint stages, transition, and analytics. Blueprints are visual representations of a particular business process that can be replicated to automate workflows.

Access to the Blueprints feature is also available on the Professional and Enterprise plans. The Professional plan stands out for its 100 custom AI models and 250 ready-to-use AI models, which can be deployed without extensive software development skills. The Enterprise plan also offers business intelligence and analytics tools for more in-depth reporting.

In addition to the essential and enterprise plans, Zoho Creator offers a Flex plan with unlimited scalability and custom pricing for businesses that need a tailored plan. However, you must contact a sales associate to create a customized plan.

• Form workflows: With Zoho Creator, you can create a workflow for an event using forms. Simply choose a form and select which actions you want, such as editing, creating, or deleting records.
• Schedules and notifications: Set a specific date and time for running workflows. Or launch them when a variable in any of your forms is satisfied, for example, by notifying users about a meeting a few minutes before it begins.
• Approval process automation: The platform’s criteria-based approval triggers and automated alerts make approving key documents more efficient. Zoho Creator allows decision-makers to respond easily to approval notifications on their mobile devices.

Execute automated approvals in the Zoho Creator dashboard. (Source: Zoho)