Top 11 Open-source Automation Solutions and Zapier/IFTTT alternatives
Many question in the automation world comes, the most question that comes up a lot more than any question is which tool should I use to automate my processes?
The answer depends on what you are trying to do? But in general IFTTT is more for personal stuff and Zapier is more for business.
With IFTTT, we have got the Alexa devices, speakers, and light bulbs fully automated.
However, Zapier's helps you to connect your apps and automate workflows and data exchange among these apps. As an example, automate your posts to Twitter and Facebook or even automate your Instagram process (posts, likes, comments).
Zapier vs IFTTT
Zapier is mainly aiming for business. It has 1500+ partners which mean there are 1500 apps that you can integrate and create automations and workflows with.
The other piece here that you can have multiple accounts for apps; this is a super important if you have a team or if you are working with personal and business use cases and automations. For example if you have a Google sheets account for personal use also one for business you are going to be able to authenticate both accounts.
IFTTT focused on personal use, it has 600+ partners or what they call services, you can have only one account that focussed on the individual personal use.
Benefits of using open-source automation
- Cost-effective; It saves you a lot of time, resources, and money of using a SaaS service. However, it requires customization and fixes.
- Highly customizable; you can shape it as you require
- Privacy; Because you have the system self-hosted on your server, you own your data, and take care of security
- Avoid vendor lock-in or data lock-in; as everything is installed at your machines.
10 open-source Zapier/IFTTT alternatives for workflow automation
1- Huginn
We can say that Huginn is a hackable free self-hosted version of IFTTT or Zapier on your server that allows you to know who has your data.
Huginn is a completely free and open-source system that is used to create agents that monitor and act on your behalf.
The features of Huginn come in creating, consuming events, and propagating them with a directed graph.
Built with Ruby language, and it was released under the MIT license.
2- n8n.io
n8n.io is an open-source workflow automation tool, that allows you to have your free automation node.
It's used with in-house and internal tools, it can be self-hosted, extended, you can sync data between more than 200 apps, design powerful workflows, create custom integrations.
It offers a simple visual builder with service and trigger panel which makes it easy to use and run without education.
You can install it with NPM or with docker, and be licensed under “Commons Clause” License Condition v1.0.
3- Beehive
Beehive is a free open-source modular, flexible, extendable and automation, and event agents management system.
It is a really effortless to use system that allows you to retrieve information from Twitter, Tumblr, Email, IRC, Jabber, RSS, Jenkins and integrate them back in your workflow seamlessly.
It also offers many useful features such as Re-post tweets, Forward incoming chat messages to your email account, run your own IRC bot, control your Hue lighting system, and more.
Beehive is written with Go language and released under AGPL-3.0 License.
4- Flogo
Flogo is yet another free, another alternative for Zapier/IFTTT. However, it is a complete ecosystem for event-driven apps.
This system has many features such as it is lightweight, provide action chaining, a Common contribution model, Extensible, which has integration capabilities.
It is a good choice for developers because it is enabling them to enrich, transform and connect incoming events to apps, databases, and APIs using the thousands of activities within the Ecosystem!
Flogo is released under the BSD-3-Clause License
5- Syndesis
Syndesis is an open-source integration platform that connects with any service you use.
It is a no-code system which means Syndesis allows anyone to create integrations, it also has a beautiful dashboard, it is flexible, customizable, and more.
The system is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License and written with java.
6- MESG
MESG is an open source decentralized event-driven system for advanced applications.
MESG helps you to create and maintain applications that connect any technology, it helps you to manage the interaction of all connected services, it's lightweight, has a highly scalable infrastructure.
It is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License and written with Go language.
7- matterbridge
matterbridge is an open-source simple chat bridge between Telegram, RocketChat, Twitch, SSH-chat, Zulip, WhatsApp, and more with REST API.
matterbridge support bridging between any protocols, it also supports multiple gateways(bridges) for your protocols, message edits and deletes, preserves threading when possible, Attachment/files handling, username, and avatar spoofing, private groups, API.
It is the ideal automation tool for support teams who use multiple messaging channels at the sametime.
matterbridge is released under the Apache-2.0 License and written with Go language.
8- kibitzr
kibitzr is a self-hosted personal web assistant that runs everywhere on Windows, Linux, and macOS both desktop and server.
It is integrated with powerful services like Slack and MailGun.
It is licensed under the MIT license and written with python.
9- Triggerhappy
Triggerhappy is an open-source hotkey daemon developed with a small and embedded system.
It has the ability to attaches to the input device files and interprets the event data to receive.
10- Node-RED
Node-RED is an open-source low code programming tool and IDE for event-driven applications.
You can use it to connect hardware devices, it provides a browser-based editor. It runs locally, on Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, Interacting with Arduino, Android or in the IBM Cloud, SenseTecnic FRED, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure.
It is built on Node.js and licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.
11- Activepieces
Hamza Mousa
Conclusion
you will learn 10 of the top alternatives to Zapier and IFTTT that will help you with workflow automation.
There are usually two reasons people are looking for an alternative, one is maybe it's too expensive and two, they can't achieve what they want in Zapier or IFTTT.
If you know of any other open-source automation solution that should be added to this list, please let us know.
