Unito vs. Automate.io
Your teams have had it with copying and pasting information from one tool to another. Projects are screeching to a halt because people are stuck waiting for updates. Forcing everyone into the same tool isn’t an option, so you need an integration. But with so many options on the market, which one should you choose?
Unito and Automate.io are two popular integration solutions, but they differ in a few key areas. Find features, pricing, and more below.
Depth vs. breadth
Automate.io boasts more than 200 applications on their integrations page, from Trello to Mailchimp and PayPal. You can set up a bot to automatically send you a text when a payment comes in, feed information from your email directly into your work management tool, and more. With hundreds of integrations, you can set up automations for almost any tool your team needs. That said, there are other solutions that offer more.
Unito doesn’t have 200 integrations. That’s because Unito focuses on building some of the deepest integrations for the market’s most popular work tools. The goal of each Unito integration is to create deep, two-way relationships between the tools in your stack so your teams can overcome tool barriers. With Unito, you get fewer integrations but an enhanced focus on the tools that power your workflows. You could use Unito to build a daily scrum in Airtable that’s automatically fed updates from other tools, enhance open-source repository management with Asana, or sync important updates from Jira to a dedicated Trello board.
Integration vs. automation
At the core of Automate.io’s offering — and its name — is automation. “Bots” are how you automate a recurring task between two apps, and you can even set up multi-action bots to carry simple automations between tools. An automation is a one-way action that handles a bite-sized interaction between two tools. Usually, this involves creating a new item in the destination tool. The two items aren’t usually kept up to date.
Unito creates flows between your tools which are two-way interactions by default. Say you connect a Trello board to a Jira project with a Unito flow. Every time a new Trello card gets created, an equivalent issue can be created in Jira, and vice-versa. The added bonus? Any changes you make, in either tool, is synced to the other. All with just a single Unito flow. But you’re not stuck with this behavior. Only want issue creation in Jira? Make your flow one-way. Boom. Just like that, you’ve completely transformed your workflow in just a few clicks.
If you wanted to replicate that in Automate.io, you’d need several bots to try and make it work.
Case study: the two-way factor
Erica Hawkins is a student who was looking to create her own custom tool stack to supercharge her projects. She wanted the ability to pick tools for their strengths and use some kind of integration solution to shore up their weaknesses. She settled on a stack that includes Trello, ClickUp, Asana, and Airtable.
While looking for an integration solution to make it all work, Erica first turned to Automate.io. With four tools in her stack, she would have needed at least four bots just to make information flow from Trello all the way to Airtable. And if she wanted to send any information back? She was looking at double the bots, at least. Without two-way updates as a default, she was looking at a ton of extra work to get things working.
That’s why Erica turned to Unito. With just a few flows, she’s able to keep all her tools in sync and customize her tool stack to her needs. Want to know more about this use case? Check out the case study here.
Pricing
Automate.io has a free plan, but you’ll need at least their $9.99/month Personal plan if you want to set up multi action bots. From there, plans scale up to $159/month for the top-tier Business plan, adding features like premium apps — which probably included the tools in your stack — and live updates along the way.
Unito has a free 14-day trial, but no free plan. You can find all the latest details on our pricing information right here.
Should you be using Unito or Automate.io?
Ask yourself what your workflow needs. Do you just need to push recurring, bulk updates from one tool to another? Then Automate.io might be the better option for you. But if you need your work to cross tool barriers — and stay updated along the way — you need Unito.
Need to know more?
Here's our full breakdown of the differences between Unito and Automate.io, including pricing, onboarding time, and more.