I've used Zapier a fair amount and I wrote an article about Airflow so I have a fairly good understanding of that too.
I would never really consider them alternatives though? To me Zapier is a low/no code tool that offers a bazillion integrations and Airflow is a workflow orchestration tool.
So comparing to both of them confuses me and I guess choosing one would give you a more nieche audience but one that you can connect better to as well.
Very true. We really should stop overloading the term Workflow in software.
As of now these are the broad categories that abuse the term workflow.
1. State Machines
For example in Jira a bug/ticket moves through different states to reach a final stage. This type of state-machines can be found in a lot of different softwares - most CMS/bug-trackers/CRMs where the entity is different (document/bug/lead).
The motive of these systems who call themselves as workflow engines - is to provide a structure to an otherwise ad-hoc movement of entities so that a lead/manager is able to ensure a process and collect statistics.
2. Automations
For example "apple workflow" app or Zapier or Zoho Flow. These softwares define a sequence of steps that are triggered when an event occurs in the system.
The motive of these systems are to enable automation and integrations between different software components with zero code (thus, no-code).
3. Process Designers (Bad term but can't think of anything better at the moment)
For example Airflow/Camunda. These systems are not necessarily low-code but they mostly deal with arranging individual components of code such that a process can be assembled as quickly as possible. These systems usually are accompanied by a visual designer like what Zapier has, but the intentions are mostly to ease out the process, than being a complete no-code tool to create automations. However, their marketing tries to sell themselves as no-code platform for business folks.
The motive is not yet very clear to me but from my initial intuition they can be used to initiate some data-processing pipeline, I guess? If anybody can throw more clarity, please leave a reply.
Now as you can see, much like how a "Process" can mean many things in many different context, the term "Workflow" can mean a lot depending on the context. Any software that calls itself the ultimate workflow solution is just a lie. It's like calling something an "ultimate process engine" - doesn't make sense.
I'd like you to listen to this file, which is your first 'headline' read by `say`: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fanpqs8lv2d9nvl/say.m4a?dl=0 Now imagine yourself in the shoes of a vision-impaired person relying on a technology like VoiceOver. Do you understand how unbelievably frustrating that is?
What is your point? zacwest isn't asking them to completely rewrite the page—the problem they pointed out is trivial to solve and simply needed to be recognized. If you can spend 20 minutes to drastically improve the usability of your product for "dozens" of users, why wouldn't you?
"However, their marketing tries to sell themselves as no-code platform for business folks."
Huh? I've never seen Airflow described as no code or tried to sell itself that way, in fact all the pipelines are written in python and you can do some really complex orchestration.
I get you're not saying Airflow is no code but that the category you've put it in is typically low code or marketed as low code, but then I don't think Airflow belongs in that category or rather, and maybe more accurately, no/low code is not really a major defining quality of the bucket you're calling "Process Designers".
I've also been calling them "Process Schedulers" because typically it involves translating a more manual, but well defined process into it's automated phase.
The no-code is an illusion in the enterprise realm - before you know it, you are waist deep in the custom code.
No-code can really work only for small businesses imo.
I come from enterprise background and that is one of the reasons I built Titanoboa - to make something that makes it easy to rapidly prototype new integrations on the fly.
The main point I am trying to test with Titanoboa is this however:
State Machines <-> Process Designers is a spectrum and one product could handle the entire spectrum (or part of it).
Titanoboa makes it possible to pre-define workflow steps and make it "no code" while also making complex custom integrations possible from the same environment with the same concepts. Plus also distributed data handling is in the mix.
I guess now the challenge is how to market this versatility or whether it could create more confusion...
I see what you are getting at. Yes State Machines to Process Designers is a spectrum and has a quite a bit of overlappings.
For example these are the lowest common denominators I see.
#1 Graph: All of these systems allow you to visually design/represent the process as a graph. You yourself has abstracted these into graph problems and have come out with a simpler non-verbose BPMN alternative - which is great.
#3 Computability: Since the base is a definitive graph, essentially a graph that could execute is a finite-automata. That is, all of these systems put the power back to the end-users to create their own machines (without actually coding) hence the relatability with low-code. So at the end, broadly even the motive aligns from computability perspective.
But I'm still not convinced these denominators justify an all-in-one one-size-fits-all solution to this spectrum. I'm not saying one product shouldn't attack them all, but it's better to appropriately categorize them and develop unique features on top of each of them. At least that is what I feel at this point of time.
This is not true in many use cases. There are tons of ways to handle low code/no code. It is a very hard problem to solve, and vendors end up building basic "low-code" wrappers around API endpoints, and that's why it looks like a lost cause.
Done right, (we are a living proof it can be done, at Syncari), one can do a lot of stuff done without any coding
Thanks Neelesh for the link, I like the way of thinking with the focus on data.
It is similar with what I am seeing - i.e. lots of older integration systems are terrible with data simply because they force you to use some way of data modeling (e.g. their OOP data models, WSDLs/XSDs etc.) while the newer ones just rely on json which is good but can lack the (sometimes necessary) complexity. To do some data cleansing on the way then seems like an unachievable task (there is certainly such a thing as overdose on XSLT ;) ).
I also like the approach you took with centralized data dictionary - it certainly is something the industry might need, I would wonder how it impacts change management though (especially in bigger companies).
My current line of thinking is: A workflow is a workflow is a workflow. Titanoboa is built the way that pretty much everything it shuffles is data - and either it can be big (Airflow) or the steps can have side effects (iPaaS/Zapier).
The "no code" is achievable since adding more predefined steps is not that hard (there's not that many at the moment though) - see for instance https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa/wiki/Getting-Started-with... - you dont code, you just fill in properties, so it is very straightforward, pretty much like Zappier.
My aim in the iPaaS space is more at the enterprise level, where the predefined steps won't do anymore and you have to custom develop them anyway - so in that are I think Titanoboa shines since you really can rapidly prototype steps on the fly, a bit like Repl.it and Zapier together...
I agree that it might be good to pick one audience, at this stage I am just experimenting if somehow I can market to both and don't mess up and confuse both groups.
I have been experimenting with combinations of huggin, camunda, airflow and others to try and achieve an integrated workflow/state/process management.
There exists a gap in the enterprise space between all these tools.. and it has been further exacerbated by the disruption introduced to many industries by covid. There is a real opportunity for small and medium businesses to be able to access tooling that is beyond what a base line Zap, etc can accomplish.
There's also a problem with describing your product as "an alternative to". I don't know what Zapier and Airflow is, but now I want to find out, which pushes me towards the competition, rather than just explaining what your product does and have me view the competition as the alternative.
I would never really consider them alternatives though? To me Zapier is a low/no code tool that offers a bazillion integrations and Airflow is a workflow orchestration tool.
So comparing to both of them confuses me and I guess choosing one would give you a more nieche audience but one that you can connect better to as well.