Tired of juggling between 42 different applications? Tired of copying and pasting data from one department to another like a parliamentary assistant in Excel?
Well I have excellent news for you!
An open source solution is shaking up the world of task automation, which has until now been dominated by proprietary services like Zapier or IFTTT. His nickname? Automatically.
This direct competitor to n8n will allow you to create automated workflows between your favorite applications, while maintaining total control over your data. No more cloud services that pass your sensitive information through servers you know nothing about. With Automaticallyeverything stays at home, safe.
But before diving into the deep end of the possibilities, let's start by installing this marvel. The good news is that it's super simple thanks to Docker. Here is the procedure to follow:
# On clone le dépôt git clone https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch.git # On se place dans le bon dossier cd automatisch # Et on lance tout ça avec Docker Compose docker compose up Once the installation is complete, go to http://localhost:3000 to access the interface. For your first test, you can use the default credentials: [email protected] / sample. But be careful, remember to change them afterwards in the settings!
Now that we have our instance running, let's see what we can do with it. The possibilities are truly numerous since Automatically currently supports more than 50 different applications, from the most classic like Twitter, Slack or GitHub to the most specialized like Carbone or SignalWire.
To fully understand how it works, let's take a few concrete examples that will save you a lot of time:
- Automated monitoring : Set up a feed that monitors new articles from an RSS feed and sends them directly to your favorite Slack channel. No need to manually check your information sources!
- L’assistant social media : Create a feed that automatically posts your new blog posts to Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. A single article, maximum distribution!
- The super notifier : Set up personalized alerts by connecting your monitoring tools to Telegram or Discord. You will never miss an important event again!
- The Zealous Archivist : Automatically back up your important Gmail attachments to Google Drive or Dropbox. No more documents lost in the twists and turns of your mailbox!
Creating a flow (or flow for anglicists) is done in a few clicks. Start by choosing your trigger (trigger), that is to say the event which will initiate the automation. For example, 'new tweet containing #tech'. Next, define one or more actions to do in response, such as 'send the tweet to a Slack channel'.
A particularly interesting aspect ofAutomaticallythis is its native consideration of the GDPR. By hosting the solution on your own servers, you maintain full control over the processing of your data. This is a major asset for European companies or those handling sensitive data.
The connection system to the different services is also very well thought out. For each application you want to integrate, Automatically guides you step-by-step through configuring the necessary APIs. And once a connection is established, you can use it in as many streams as you want.
A little tip for beginners: start with simple flows before diving into complex automations. For example, first create a flow that sends a message on Slack when a new file arrives in a Google Drive folder. Once you have a good grasp of the concept, you can tackle more elaborate scenarios.
For the more technical among you, Automatically also offers advanced features such as:
- Conditional filtering of events
- Data transformation between stages
- Handling errors and retries
- Monitoring of executions
The community around the project is very active on GitHub, and new integrations are regularly added. If you can't find the application you need, there's nothing stopping you from contributing to the project – that's the whole point of open source!
Of course, like any tool, Automatically has its limits. The number of supported applications is even lower than that of commercial solutions, and some advanced features are reserved for the enterprise edition. But for a large majority of automation needs, the community version does the job perfectly.
In terms of performance, allow around 15 minutes between each trigger check, which is more than enough for most uses. If you need greater responsiveness, the enterprise edition offers finer configuration options.
Many thanks to Letsar for sharing this great solution! To learn more about Automatically and explore all its possibilities, go to the official website.
Related News :