Unito vs. IFTTT
There are a myriad of collaboration tools out there, from the simple Kanban boards of Trello to the complex workflows of tools like Jira. Every team — and let’s be honest, every individual — has their favorite. But when the cubicle walls came down, so did the expectation that employees would work in isolation.
This means more and more people are looking for ways to get their work management tools to play nice with each other. Unito offers you one way to do this. If This Then That (IFTTT) offers another. Why pick one over the other?
Depth vs. breadth
Let’s get one thing out of the way: if you’re trying to sync your Asana project with your smart vacuum cleaner, Unito probably isn’t the right fit. IFTTT offers a huge breadth of applets that connect apps to devices and services. You can set your smart porch lights to turn on when your Domino’s pizza is on the way. You can connect a smart trash can to your Trello board so that a card is created when you need to take out the trash. That’s variety.
Unito focuses exclusively on work management tools. It helps Trello and Asana get along. It allows developers and marketers to work together by syncing Github and Wrike. It even adds new functionality to Trello, transforming it into a more powerful tool. Unito makes work collaboration… well, work, by removing barriers between your tools. We want you to be able to choose tools based on what they can do for you, rather than what they can’t.
To be clear, IFTTT also supports integrations for work management tools like Trello and Asana. But because they support such a broad array of apps, there are limitations to how deep these integrations can go, especially compared to Unito.
Syncing vs. the Applet
“If this, then that” is an equation relying on two variables. When action A happens, result B occurs. This simple interaction means that — theoretically — any kind of two actions could be linked together. This is why IFTTT is able to operate across so many different apps and devices. That is a strength of the IFTTT model. However, this simplicity also has its drawbacks.
Let’s look at the example of a Trello-Asana integration. We’ve set up an applet so that creating a task in Asana also creates a card in Trello. There are many different uses for this functionality. Say you’re using Asana to manage a project while your Trello board is a personal tool for keeping track of what you need to do. Getting these tools to work together means you can use Trello to keep track of your to-do list in Asana.
But imagine you realize your Trello card doesn’t have a due date. No problem, you’ll just update that information in Trello. But the IFTTT applet you created only creates a card on Trello when a task is created in Asana. It doesn’t link the two in any other way; if you change something in the Trello card, it won’t have any impact on the Asana task. In order for that to be the case, you’d need to do it manually or implement another applet to make sure that updating the due date in a Trello card does the same thing for the Asana task. You need to create a new applet for every interaction you want to add between the two tools.
That’s not the case with Unito. When you sync an Asana task with a Trello card, every single action you take in one tool will be replicated in the other. Whether you’re adding a comment, changing the due date, or even just changing the name of the task, that change will happen in the other task as well.
With fewer integrations, Unito is able to provide deeper integrations. It’s easy to set up and runs in the background while you and your team get your work done. Syncing tools eliminates the hassle of trying to work across tools, ensuring that cross-team and cross-tool workflows actually help your productivity instead of hindering it.
Two-way vs. one-way integration
Here we get to the core difference between Unito and IFTTT. The strength of the IFTTT applet is its simplicity, allowing you to use the system across whatever platform you can think of. But at its core, this system is 1-way. There’s an origin point (If) and a consequence (Then That). IFTTT’s automation sets up a one-way causal link between two elements, like the Asana task and the Trello card from our example. So while this allows for a wide variety of connections, it doesn’t reflect the needs of a team using two work management tools to collaborate.
Unito integrations are two-way by default. A user on either end can affect what’s on the other side. As such, you can set up a variety of complex workflows through Unito, from reporting workflows to task triaging, all across projects, teams, and tools.
Oh, and if you really want a one-way integration? Unito can do that too.
Pricing and support
There’s another key difference between Unito and IFTTT: the price. IFTTT is free to use. Unito is free to use for two weeks before you need to sign up for one of our plans. You can find all the latest details on our pricing page here.
Why the difference? At its core, IFTTT is a self-serve platform. You create — or search through existing — applets that make your life easier. Not unlike using an app store. Unito is a business service focused on deeper integrations for company-wide workflows. We also provide a complementary onboarding session and ongoing customer support to make sure you get the most out of our service.
Workflow management
Unito, at its core, is a workflow management solution. It’s about optimizing the way work gets done no matter what tool people are working in. It’s about getting ahead of the curve and adapting to the future of work before it hits us. With Unito, you can give workers the flexibility they need while making sure leaders spend less time hunting for information and more time actually leading.
With Unito’s new workflow offering, building a workflow starts with mapping it out visually, so you know where work needs to happen. Then, in a few clicks, you can take advantage of some of the deepest integrations on the market to get things done across teams and tools.
With IFTTT, you have access to an unparalleled breadth of applets. But if you need to manage a workflow, you might want to go for a more dedicated solution.
Is Unito or IFTTT right for you?
If you’re still trying to choose between these two tools, ask yourself what you’re trying to do. If you want to automate a simple action between two platforms, IFTTT might be your best bet. But if you have workflows to manage, you probably need Unito.
Want to know more?
Here's our full breakdown of Unito features that are essential for your workflows.