Looking For Workato Alternatives? Here’s All You Should Know

Introduction

Workato is a frontrunner in the “Leader” category in the G2 Grid for iPaaS. The company has over 7,000 customers worldwide and over 200 app integrations.

Compared to Workato, Konnectify is just an up-and-coming iPaaS startup that doesn’t even feature in the G2 Grid. Konnectify has under 1000 customers and, although it's rapidly growing its integration capabilities, it has less than 100 app integrations.

Considering the huge difference between the two iPaaS players, one might wonder — is it even fair to compare Konnectify vs. Workato?

We definitely think it is, given the growing number of queries we get every week from buyers who are planning to switch from Workato — or Zapier and Make — to another, more affordable, iPaaS platform. Many of our prospects have specific queries regarding how Konnectify fares against a seasoned player like Workato.

So to answer the question of whether Workato vs. Konnectify is a valid comparison — yes, it very much is. I’m sure many people have had similar remarks when buyers were comparing Workato with Boomi, Mulesoft, or Zapier. If Workato started from nowhere to become a leader in the iPaaS domain today, there is a high likelihood that Konnectify might emerge as the category king in the coming years.

If you are someone who’s actively looking for a Workato alternative, you have come to the right place. In this post, you will find an objective, side-by-side comparison between Workato and Konnectify and how they fare against each other across four evaluation criteria.

Konnectify vs. Workato Key Differences

Before their key differences, let’s first establish how Konnectify and Workato are similar.

As an iPaaS solution provider, Workato lets its users connect and automate workflows across different apps, products, and services. The platform comes with pre-built connectors and ready-to-use integration templates that it calls recipes.

Like Workato, Konnectify is a cloud-based automation and integration platform that allows you to create and automate workflows across a wide range of products and apps — without the need to write a single line of code. Konnectify too offers pre-built connectors (called “Konnectors”) and a rich template for integration recipes. Both Konnectify and Workato have drag-and-drop interfaces for creating custom automation and integration.

Both Konnectify and Workato have two core offerings: the iPaaS and Embedded iPaaS capabilities. While their iPaaS offering includes the above-mentioned automation and integration capabilities, the embedded iPaaS platform offers the ability to build reusable native integrations and deliver them to customers as features of your product.

While there are so many overlaps between the two platforms, what distinguishes Konnectify from Workato is its focus on small and medium-sized businesses, the ease of getting started, and its transparent and affordable pricing plans.

Workato positions its iPaaS offering as “enterprise iPaaS” — which explicitly means that it wants to attract enterprise customers to the platform. And their pricing (which isn’t publicly available) reflects the choice they have made.

Key Evaluation Criteria

When you are evaluating two or more SaaS products, it’s always better to evaluate them from four critical lenses. These are criteria that most buyers use to gauge a product’s value thoroughly and objectively:

1. Ease Of Use

iPaaS and embedded iPaaS are still up-and-coming technologies. If you are considering buying an iPaaS solution for your business team, consider the ease of use of the platform in your evaluation. Ask yourself:

• Is the product easy enough for your users to figure out on their own?
• Do you need a dedicated developer to administer the tool?
• How easy are the product interface and user experience?
• Is it a low-code, no-code platform?
• Is it easy to set up the tool?

2. Product Capabilities

Different iPaaS platforms offer varying degrees of product capabilities. Some tools offer table stakes while others have highly nuanced features that fit your unique use cases. Analyze the software from all angles.

• How many apps does the platform integrate with?
• Which niche does the app primarily target?
• What features does the tool offer?
• How big is the app marketplace?
• What is the flagship feature?

3. Pricing

Pricing has a compounding effect when buying a new software — especially if you are planning to scale its usage down the line. A good iPaaS tool is affordable for your organization, pays you the highest dividends, and its subscription is worth renewing again. Evaluate the price of an iPaaS solution by asking questions like:

• Is the product reasonably priced?
• Is the pricing model easy to understand?
• Is it aimed at startups, SMBs, or enterprises?
• Do they offer free trials or a freemium subscription?
• Do they have flexible monthly and yearly annual plans?
• Are there hidden charges like platform cost, implementation cost, etc?

4. Scalability

Buying a software is usually an investment for the future. From the scalability perspective, ask yourself:

• Do they frequently ship new features?
• Do they offer enterprise-grade features?
• How customizable are its functionalities?
• Is it easy to add more users to the platform?
• Do you know the vendor’s product roadmap?

Workato vs. Konnectify In-Depth Comparison

Workato: In-Depth Analysis

1. Ease of use

Workato’s interface looks pretty in demos and marketing videos. It even has a high score on the “ease of use” scale in G2. There’s just one problem: it’s not really easy to set up Workato on your own.

Workato doesn’t offer a self-service, product-led user experience for you to test drive the platform for you to decide if it’s the right platform for you. You have to “schedule a demo” and talk to the sales team just to be qualified as their customers.

And there’s nothing wrong with that — Workato wants to control who signs up with their platform as their customers and that’s great. It’s just that Workato as an iPaaS platform isn’t for everyone, both adoption- and pricing-wise.

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Some of its existing customers do complain that its UI is designed with developers in mind. Therefore, you might have to be a bit technical to navigate its dashboard or find the various functionalities. The good news is — Workato has good documentation (although surface-level, according to users) of its platform and different features that can help you find the info you are looking for.

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2. Product functionality

When compared with Zapier, Workato has more advanced automation capabilities such as its conditional logic, branching, and loops — all of which allow more complex workflows. This makes Workato a slightly better option for businesses with more complex needs. Zapier, like we covered in Konnectify vs. Zapier blog, is better for simple, if/else kind of workflow scenarios.

Workato offers various features and capabilities on its platform:

‍Enterprise iPaaS

Workato’s cloud-based enterprise iPaaS offering unifies the integration and automation of apps and processes under the same roof. With its enterprise iPaaS capabilities, businesses can build integration and automation projects faster and within the same platform.

Sadly, when you visit their website, Workato spends more time talking about its standing on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Forbes’ 100 Cloud list, and ranking in Forrester Wave rather than explaining the benefits of its enterprise iPaaS offering.

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Connectors

Workato has over a thousand connectors in its platform. Ease of its connector includes authentication methods, triggers, and actions for its specific target app. Although Workato has plenty of ready-to-use connectors available, the platform doesn’t have pre-built connectors for some of the most popular apps in the platform. Users have to custom-build it on Workato.

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Recipes

Recipes in Workato are a specific set of steps that it follows to get work done between two or more apps. Users can use these recipes to manage app integrations and workflow automation scenarios such as data transformations, conditional triggers and actions, and duplicate detection.

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Common Workato Runtime

After an automation is built, a lot of time goes into administrative and operational tasks like deployment, ensuring peak provisioning, optimizing for varying workloads, dealing with version compatibility, etc. To address these issues, Workato created a unique feature called Common Workato Runtime (CWR) — a cloud-based runtime that auto-scales, deals with fault tolerance and data security, load balancing, and automatic upgrades.

‍Embedded iPaaS

Workato's embedded iPaaS is built on the back of its low-code approach to building app integrations. Users can access Workato’s integrations template library to connect and deploy ready-to-use integrations or use its drag-and-drop visual designer and recipes to build an integration from scratch.

The embedded iPaas also allows developers to build custom connectors (SDK connectors) using Ruby. Workato, however, doesn’t have a dedicated app marketplace.

All in all — Workato deserves 3.5 stars for its rich product functionalities, minus the developer-centric platform technicalities and steep learning curve.

3. Pricing

Workato positions itself as a viable solution for product-led sales use cases, it talks frequently about the importance of product-led growth, and it even has a “product-led growth” function within the company. Ironically, the rubber doesn’t meet the road when it comes to Workato offering a product-led experience to its users.

Product-led growth, and the extended component within its framework, product-led sales, is a go-to-market strategy that leverages self-serve product experiences as the primary way to acquire, convert, expand, and retain customers. And that’s barely the case with Workato — especially when it comes to its demo and pricing experience.

Like we mentioned earlier, there’s no option to demo Workato on your own. You can only choose to “contact sales” or “schedule a demo” — both of which require manual sales touches.

For a company that talks about enabling PLG for its customer companies, Workato doesn’t even have a free trial offering — or a free version — in its pricing tiers.

Secondly, you can’t find Workato’s pricing information published on the website. This is a huge let-down for businesses that are evaluating between multiple iPaaS vendors and want to take Workato for a spin — regardless of how good they say their platform is.

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As per our research, Workato can cost you anywhere from $15K to $50K — depending on your integration and connector usages and the platform configuration complexities. “Expensive” is an understatement for the money Workato charges its users for the set of functionalities it provides — especially in comparison to rivals like Konnectify or Zapier.

4. Scalability

As a platform with enterprise iPaaS and embedded iPaaS, there’s no doubt that Workato is a fairly scalable product. But from the user adoption point of view, it can be challenging for businesses to scale Workato rapidly across their non-technical business users due to its complex interface and high-level in-app documentation — especially related to APIs.

Workato’s sky-high pricing is its biggest roadblock to scalability. For fast-growing startups and scaleups, Workato’s pricing doesn’t justify the ROI (return on investment) because it usually takes a few months to see results after implementing an iPaaS platform.

Konnectify: In-Depth Evaluation

1. Ease of Use

Konnectify has an edge over Workato because its interface is dead simple and intuitive. Since Konnectify is a pretty young product, it doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of buttons or banners in its interface.

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Konnectify’s UI is less noisy and has only four choices in the left panel sidebar: Konnectors, Apps, Event Logs, and Billing.

Konnectify is a truly no-code platform that offers a simple drag-and-drop, click-and-done design that is easy for even non-technical users to understand. It has Freshworks’ Freshchat right within the app in case you need technical support.

Konnectify offers a 7-day free trial with three pricing tiers: Free Forever, Starter, and Growth. You can sign up using your Google, Microsoft, or email address — no restrictions against your personal email.

2. Product Functionality

Konnectify is an up-and-coming integration platform with plenty of useful features in its arsenal, including an embedded iPaaS offering. Konnectify’s product team has added a lot of firepower to its existing capabilities since its launch.

In the past couple of years, Konnectify has already delivered more than 500 public and custom integration applications and acquired over 200+ customers worldwide — including big brands like Freshworks, Zee5, TCS, and ATAG.

As an integration solution provider, Konnectify is segmented into two main categories: iPaaS and KOEMP (short for Konnectify Embedded Marketplace).

As an iPaaS provider, Konnectify offers six core features:

‍Pre-defined Templates

Konnectify has “Konnector” — the functionality that enables you to create automated workflows. To make it easy for you to build automated processes, Konnectify offers an exhaustive list of ready-to-use and pre-defined templates that you can choose from or modify to suit your use cases.

Of course, you can also use Konnector to create customer workflows from scratch.

‍Rule Engine

Konnectify's Rule Engine lets you create conditional logic and build custom protocols for handling data between two or more workflows. It lets you implement factors, filters, and transformations passing through your automation.

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Konnectify’s UI is less noisy and has only four choices in the left panel sidebar: Konnectors, Apps, Event Logs, and Billing.

Konnectify is a truly no-code platform that offers a simple drag-and-drop, click-and-done design that is easy for even non-technical users to understand. It has Freshworks’ Freshchat right within the app in case you need technical support.

Konnectify offers a 7-day free trial with three pricing tiers: Free Forever, Starter, and Growth. You can sign up using your Google, Microsoft, or email address — no restrictions against your personal email.

‍Smart Forms

This is a functionality where Konnectify outshines Workato. Konnectify’s drag-and-drop Smart Forms lets you build custom forms from a wide range of elements like text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, file uploads, etc.

Once the form is ready, you can embed it in your CRM, CMS, or other customer-facing touchpoint to improve your lead generation or customer support experience. No need to buy a new form builder at an additional cost.

Workato integrates with a handful of form builders like Google Forms, Gravity Forms, and Typeform — but it doesn’t have a form builder feature of its own. You either have to use free form builders like Google Forms with limited capabilities or pay extra to embed a third-party form builder app.

‍Parse Engine

Konnectify’s Parse Engine helps you retrieve specific data such as email, SMS, or web form submissions from a massive database in an application.

Once you enter the data that you want to retrieve from an app, the Parse Engine runs a query within the app and extracts the information in no time. You can use the parsed data in your workflows to trigger events or perform specific actions.

Lookups

In the array of data integration features offered by Konnectify, the "Lookups" function stands out as a vital component. This functionality facilitates the precise exploration of designated data elements within both source and target applications, based on specific criteria. Beyond its search capabilities, Lookups play a pivotal role in Konnectify by enabling the seamless integration of the extracted data. This integrated data can subsequently be harnessed to execute targeted actions through the platform's Konnectors.

Webhooks

Konnectify's robust engine possesses the advanced capability to both send and receive webhook requests. This empowers you to seamlessly gather real-time data from any application you opt for. Furthermore, the engine enables you to dispatch outbound webhook post requests effortlessly.

3. Pricing

Konnectify wins the pricing round hands-down. And not just because it’s priced more reasonably but also because it packs a lot of punch in its value offerings.

Konnectify has three pricing plans: Free, Startup, and Growth. It’s a lot less information to process and much less intimidating to upgrade.

Konnectify’s pricing chart: simple yet value-packed.

The free forever plan allows you to work with 2000 tasks a month — a basic functionality that Workato doesn't offer for free. Konnectify's Free plan also offers many other functionalities such as email support, event logs, lookups, and conditional workflows — most things you won’t get in Workato at a reasonable price.

Konnectify's Startup plan is priced at $14.99 a month and the Growth plan is priced at $39.99 a month respectively. You can also trial the Startup and Growth plan free for seven days.

The paid plans are fairly priced to reflect the value offering that you would get out of them. For instance, the Startup plan gives you 7500 tasks a month while the Growth plan offers 25K tasks a month — with an option to buy more tasks at an extra cost. All things considered, it’s a no-brainer for you to choose Konnectify as your long-term app integration partner.

4. Scalability

Unlike other platforms like Workato, where product companies are required to independently develop their applications to be listed on the marketplace, Konnectify streamlines this process significantly. In the case of Konnectify, the responsibility of listing an app within their app ecosystem is handled entirely by their team.

This eliminates the need for product companies or customers to engage in the intricate development process. All that is necessary is for the concerned parties to send an email to Konnectify, and from that point onward, Konnectify takes on the complete task of managing the process.

Despite its small size and still-emerging product capabilities, Konnectify offers a lot of scalability potential. To start with, scaling the tasks per month is not an issue with Konnectify.

If your business needs to automate 80000 tasks a month, it would still cost you under $129.98. This makes it easy (and affordable) for you to add new seats/users to a plan without breaking the bank.

In theory, Konnectify doesn’t offer an enterprise plan. But the value it packs in its paid plans, the customizations it offers for the end users, and the rate at which they are building new apps and capabilities — all make Konnectify a reliable enterprise-ready iPaaS vendor.

If you were to chart a Value Matrix based on pricing and features, Workato pales in comparison to Konnectify. And it shows in how customers talk about Konnectify.

The Verdict

Workato is a great iPaaS tool with rich functionalities, albeit expensive. It’s categorically built for enterprise buyers with deep pockets and plenty of developer resources at hand. If you fall in that category, perhaps you should schedule a demo with them and take it for a spin.

Konnectify is a promising two-in-one platform with solid iPaaS and embedded iPaaS capabilities. Best of all, it comes at an affordable cost that pays for itself in a matter of weeks.

If you want to justify your software investment and find an integration platform that scales with your business needs, choose Konnectify over Workato. Sign up today for a free trial.

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