Automation apps are great for improving your quality of life, and there are plenty of cool platforms that let you create trigger-action workflows. On the smart home front, you’ve got Home Assistant and Node-RED, which can pull events from your sensors and microcontrollers before using them to execute certain actions. Meanwhile, the home lab department is dominated by the likes of Ansible playbooks and Terraform configuration files.

While smart homes and servers are still a niche hobby, software-based automation is something pretty much every user can integrate into their setup, regardless of whether you’re a business owner in charge of managing your CRM records or a casual worker who just wants to link their favorite platforms together. What’s more, you’ve got the option to choose between n8n, Zapier, Tines, and several other services to define automation workflows for your apps. Having tinkered with the three platforms, I can confirm that they’ve got their quirks and are worth checking out if you’re into software-based automation.

Starting with the industry standard for automations, Zapier is a no-code platform that lets you build complex workflows by linking different functionalities of your favorite apps. Speaking of applications, Zapier supports over 6K services, ranging from the more casual Google suite, Telegram, and Discord to the more professional utilities like Monday, Buffer, and Jotform. Zapier has the easiest UI for creating workflows, though you can also integrate JavaScript and Python code into your Zaps.