Squillo vs Workato
“Speed counts, and it shouldn’t wreck your budget.”
Squillo is dedicated to Speed, Reliability, and Maintainability. In this short contrast document, Squillo will demonstrate how Workato’s mission of “one-size-fits-all” is an inferior choice for Enterprise requirements where it counts.
Workflow Automation vs Process Automation
“Squillo is process automation AND workflow automation”
The primary difference between Workato and Squillo is that Workato is “workflow automation” provided via a User Interface and Squillo is both “process automation” and “workflow automation” provided through Platform Engineering. ?The fundamental difference between these two is that process automation is a containerized process while workflow automation is reactionary tasks. A simple mental model for this difference is “Workflow is a Waterfall” and “Process is an Automation Contract”. Automation Contracts allow for multiple services to work together seamlessly and in parallel while providing unique observability into their purpose.
Another tremendous advantage to an Automation Contract is that its cost is deterministic to both develop and deploy. Unlike Workato that charges customers per-task that is run, Squillo provides the platform for the cost of the automation contracts. We call these automation contracts “Snapps” — a micro-middleware that blurs the lines between data and software. This means businesses can achieve high-performance process automations at a fraction of the cost of using Workato, all without dragging-and-dropping a single widget.
Design flaws of Workflow Automation
“Automation is only automation when it always works.”
Workato, and workflow automation in general, have several distinct problems which makes it unsuitable for a variety of automations and applications. ?For example, a client triggers a workflow automation, that triggers another automation, that then triggers the original workflow. This creates a potentially dangerous cyclic automation that is difficult to detect. By contrast, Squillo’s Process Automation, or “Automation Contract”, can detect these anti-patterns and prevent them from occurring.
Workato automations are also unsuitable for a variety of product facing applications which require high-throughput or long running operations. Part of the reason that workflow automation, or “Waterfalls”, are operationally slow is because they require serial operations to complete a task, and since these reactions are not transactions, tasks must remain small to mitigate damage during failure. Squillo by contrast is able to perform synchronization between data points inside of transactions and can perform several tasks in parallel, allowing it to scale where workflows simply can’t. Additionally, Squillo’s technology builds the data contract ahead-of-time between all the services and data providers, which provides data validation and security while enhancing speed even during long running tasks.
As an example, an organization is ingesting a large amount of backordered and new inventory in which they need to trigger several automations to prepare warehouses, staff resources, print labels and inform customers that items are in stock. In Workato, hi-volume tasks become extremely expensive and this workflow typically becomes several different independent tasks so they can short circuit when things inevitably go wrong. In complete candor, few consultants would even suggest Workato for this type of automation and would recommend custom programming. By contrast, Squillo allows all these workflows to be unified as processes and run them in parallel by synchronizing between the different data endpoints. This gives the organization end-to-end optics of a single process versus dozens of interdependent workflows that are in different stages of execution. ? ?
Workato Requires Cloud
?“...all the benefits of Workato’s output, but you always own your data.”
Workato requires On-Prem agent software to connect to the Workato Cloud. This fundamentally means that customers are handing over their data to the Workato Cloud for processing. ?While Enterprises have the option of running Workato on their own AWS and other cloud platforms, the Enterprise is still unable to independently verify how their data is being accessed by Workato or other actors. By contrast, Squillo can be deployed fully On-Premises, Multi-Cloud, and Hybrid, allowing Enterprises to keep their data within their security footprint.
“Citizen Developers” create “Citizen Catastrophes”
“Professional-grade native-integrations are faster, safer, and now cheaper.”
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Workato’s approach is to allow less technical users to create workflows through a one-size-fits-all User Interface. This is an attractive boon for businesses hoping to save on IT. However, this can lead to data leaks, wasted resources, security breaches and worse, because most citizen developers are not trained to identify these types of vulnerabilities. ?As a result, “Guardrails” become mandatory to be set up and maintained by IT. Within Enterprises with dozens to hundreds of siloed technical teams, the coordination to ensure the guardrails are applicable can often be an impossible task. This often negates many of the benefits of having citizen developers. By contrast, the Platform Engineering approach of Squillo is native to IT. It allows them to have an adaptable and custom platform without the cost.
For example, an organization has a process for handling returned inventory where refunds are issued when the item is delivered back to the warehouse and notifications are sent through the customer ticketing system. While this is a process, businesses that are using Workato might try to set this up as workflows to reduce the IT integration burden. A guardrail oversight allowed a citizen developer at the organization to change the order of operations, and suddenly, the refund is not being triggered, but the refund email is. By the time enough customers complain about missing refunds, hundreds or thousands of refunds must now be identified and manually issued in a resource depleting manner. In contrast with Squillo, the automation contract prevents this type of error and can track the automations’ touch points for quality control.
Squillo’s Best-of-breed integrations
“Simple things that work, build complex things that work.”
Creating custom connectors for APIs in Workato requires using their Connecter SDK. While this allows many APIs to be made accessible to Workato workflows, developers are actually developing the integration, the mapping, actions & triggers, the UI, and then the very limited logical flow. Often, the permissions and security requirements of bespoke APIs and internal APIs can not be handled by Workato and custom ingress & egress API endpoints have to be developed as public APIs or through Workato’s on-prem agents, increasing the security footprint of an organization.
By contrast, creating a Squillo Snapp for a bespoke API can often be done automatically. Snapps can create extraordinarily intricate processes and automations in a simple to read format that is instantly adaptable to other Snapps where mapping and bi-directional transformations can often be generated. Snapps are fully versioned controlled, and changes are crystalized as a story. In addition, since Squillo doesn’t require a Cloud and can sit behind the security enclave of an enterprise firewall, it can pass along the security and permissions of even internal APIs without reaching out to a Cloud — performing automations where Workato simply can’t.
Squillo’s World-Class Transactions, ETL and EDI
“World class software engineering patterns without the cost.”
Squillo’s built-in bi-directional data transformation, native database integrations, and complete SAGA pattern implementation allow for extremely robust Extract Transform and Load operations as well as Electronic Document Interchange. ?Since Squillo can work in parallel, where Workato can’t, Squillo can create transactional contracts between multiple services at a time and reverse transactional data when another service fails.
For example, an Enterprise is using Freshworks to manage CX and CRM with their bespoke application. ?A Customer Representative then processes a refund for a customer’s order that has not yet shipped. Suddenly, a processing error occurs with either the shipping provider to cancel the order or the payment processor to issue the refund through the bespoke enterprise API. ?In a workflow automation environment such as Workato, a tangled web of automations would need to be deeply integrated into the enterprise while creating dozens of workflow automations to reverse the issue. On the other hand with Squillo’s Process Automations and SAGA transactions, the successful operations can be rolled-back and re-attempted automatically within a single process without costing the Enterprise hundreds of hours of work and headache.
Squillo Features that Workato can not achieve
One last thought
Squillo Snapps are made to grow and evolve with the business processes they represent. They can be implemented in places that would be inappropriate for workflow automation and they can intelligently respond to and trigger workflow automations across hundreds of other platforms.
When speed, reliability, and maintainability count, choose Squillo.