5 Best Workflow Automation Tools for small businesses to set Critical Tasks

In our dynamic and fast-moving world, Optimizing your tasks and responsibilities is crucial to enhance your business’s efficiency and productivity.

Workflow automation tools can help small business owners streamline their workload by automating repetitive tasks, improving efficiency and accuracy. From scheduling social media posts to managing email campaigns, these tools will boost your operational effectiveness, leading to higher output maximization. Automation Software has become increasingly popular among small businesses in recent years.

 As new technologies like AI, cloud computing, and machine learning become widely accessible, more small business owners are now using automation tools to boost their business efficiency. MarketsandMarkets, in its reports, notes that the workflow automation market is expected to reach $18.45 billion by 2023.

Nowadays, Workflow automation software has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes. One of the reasons experts recommend automated workflow tools to business owners is that automation tools can significantly increase the productivity of crucial tasks, thus reducing costs and removing resource constraints. 

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1. Zapier:   Best for automating workflows between different apps and services.

Price/Trial: Free trial and plans starting at $19.99/month

From lead generation to managing tasks for small businesses, the Zapier automation tool provides a sleek and seamless automated workflow between different apps and services. It is a powerful tool for small teams and streamlines the lead-generation process for business owners. 

Why We Recommend: For an automated tool, it is essential to create sophisticated workflows for a task and triggers, thus allowing for greater customization and control over the automation process. Zapier does this remarkably well and ensures that all critical jobs are handled efficiently and effectively. 

Functionality: If you are a small business owner wanting to automate tasks effectively, like sending emails, replying to forms, and updating data in your CRM, you can use Zapier’s automatic workflows— Zaps.

As an email marketer for a business, one can create a Zap and automate the email list subscription process. Every time a customer fills out a form on your website, the Zap trigger automatically adds them as new subscribers to your email list.  

The below automated Zap will create a new customer in Zoho Subscriptions when a new lead in Facebook Lead Ads is acquired.

Another feature We love is the string search in your mail inbox. You can set up a search string and look for a specific message to trigger particular tasks. 

The task manager will automatically add the emails corresponding to that exact string, and you can find it in your to-do list.

 This way, you can facilitate specific types of emails that are a priority without wasting time searching for them manually.

Integrations: Over 3,000 apps, including Slack, Gmail, Salesforce, and Trello.

Features: Multi-step workflows, conditional logic, scheduling, filters, and custom code actions.

2. Microsoft Power Automate : Best for automating business processes with Microsoft products.

Price/Trial: Free trial and plans starting at $15/user/month

Why We Recommend:  A substantive number of business owners use Microsoft productivity tools Excel, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365, so it makes it imperative that they should get familiar with an in-house automation tool from Microsoft. We appreciate the fact that small business owners can streamline repetitive tasks and business processes with many templates available for common workflows.  

Functionality: Power Automate from Microsoft simplifies automated workflows, facilitating increased efficiency and reduced costs. Due to resource constraints, small businesses often have limited resources, and we recommend automating repetitive manual tasks. With the help of pre-built connectors and AI assistance available in Power Automate, one can save extra human resources and automate processes more quickly and securely.

A business owner can send a customized email through the automatic inventory management system whenever a customer places an order. This integration with email service boosts business efficiency and optimizes services so you can react quickly.  

Integration with other applications: Email apps, CRM software, and accounting applications are some of the tools small business owners use. Managing multiple applications without sophisticated automated workflow is a daunting and time-consuming task, inadvertently affecting operational efficiency. Power Automate effectively solves this integration challenge and reduces the need for manual data entry. Now, whenever the contact form acquires a new lead,  Power Automate automatically saves the new lead and sends a customized email to the customer. 

Integrations: Over 300 apps including Salesforce, Dropbox, and Google Drive.

Features: Pre-built templates, custom workflows, approvals, AI builder, and UI flows.

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3. Integrify: Best for automating simple tasks between popular apps.

 Price/Trial: Free trial and plans starting at $15/user/month 

Why We Recommend: Integrify makes it easy for businesses to handle complex workflows. The drag-and-drop interface makes automation processes and workflows more efficient and productive. As a small business owner, you can integrate necessary applications within your company framework and personalize your workflow automation needs.

Functionality: This automation management tool is highly customizable and has enterprise-grade features. Automatic order approvals, invoice processing, and HR automation tasks can be easily automated using Integrify. Integrify helps streamline the processes of small businesses that have limited resource constraints. Integrify facilitates efficiency by reducing the time and effort required to complete tasks, thus enabling small business owners to achieve their goals effectively and accurately.

For example, Financial reports like Budget approval, purchase requests, expense requests, invoice reconciliation, and other financial processes are time-consuming and need consistent audits and compliances. These critical and time-consuming processes need a timely lookout due to their core functionality to run an organization. 

Automating these tasks with an automatic workflow process eliminates the need for manual assessment and ensures consistency and compliance. 

Whether you want to increase your business’s efficiency or manage deadlines and tasks to optimize your team workflows, Integrify team collaboration and remote worker tools ensure adequate oversight and management of teams in real time. Team leaders can easily give feedback on reaching milestones and completing critical projects. 

Team leaders can use the Integrify workflow tool to automate marketing campaigns with different team members, each assigned another task. From tracking working hours to supervising teams, the Integrify workflow tool boosts the efficiency of small teams and makes workforce collaboration much more seamless and productive.

The below screenshot shows how you can create an automatic vacation workflow for a business workforce with minimal effort. From the start button, following a form submission to a Manager approval request, the process is seamless and can be customized according to a company policy.

The below screenshot shows that, Paid Time Off info is filled and submitted, automatically passed through the workflow pertaining to the manager’s decision, which triggers the Notification task completing the workflow process.

Integrations: Over 100 apps including Salesforce, Slack, and QuickBooks. 

Features: Drag-and-drop interface, custom workflows, form builder, API integrations, and reporting.

4. Workato: Best for automating complex workflows with enterprise-grade features.

Price/Trial: Free trial and custom pricing for enterprise-grade features

Why We Recommend It: Workato is a powerful Ai automation tool that helps build complex automated workflows across a small organization. It has enterprise-grade features like Elastic Scaling, Automated error handling, data loss prevention, IAM provisioning, and other marketing attributions. All these integration tools from Workato facilitate small business needs, making integration much easier and faster.

Functionality: One of this platform’s best uses is its all-in-one enterprise productivity features. Workato’s iPaaS platform provides a complete solution for businesses to integrate their applications seamlessly without needing any external hardware or additional resources. 

Workato’s iPaaS platform has a native cloud architecture, so the scaling and efficiency of business applications and processes are faster, improving productivity. 

One can easily automate tasks like syncing data between apps, debugging apps, automating supply, and other operational and development workflows by creating automated workflows.    

Automating Sales Processes: Workato allows you to create customized triggers to achieve business goals. As a small business owner, you can integrate your email and CRM platforms to automate your marketing campaigns. You can create an automated workflow task to add new leads and send a customized reply without manual review.  

Streamlining Accounting: Another use is integrating your e-commerce business platform with accounting software. Workato Embedded Integrations allow automatically creating invoices and updating inventory in real-time, drastically increasing productivity and thus helping lower costs.

Integrations: Over 1,000 apps, including Workday, SAP, and Oracle.

Features: Multi-step workflows, AI-powered automation, custom connectors, API management, and real-time data processing.

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5. N8n: Best for automating workflows with open-source and self-hosted options.

Price/Trial: Free and open source

Why We Recommend It: n8n workflow automation tool is a perfect fit for small businesses that need a balance between building a robust workflow and giving self-sufficiency to business teams. Using triggers and events, one can fetch data across your app stack, saving your business time and increasing the team’s efficiency.   

Functionality: n8n automation platform makes it easy for small businesses to handle processes like simple debugging, creating complex workflows between apps, error handling, and Automating administrative tasks. 

For example, you can create a Twitter workflow that searches for account mentions – filters the data – and then posts it in a Slack channel. You can also add constraints like; when to run the trigger? How many tweets do you want to search? 

Small businesses can customize complex automated workflows according to their business needs. Creating custom notifications, managing social media, and scraping comments and likes can also be controlled using n8n workflows.

Streamlining sales and marketing workflows: n8n is also beneficial for automating sales outreach and lead generation. Using lead generation or social outreach workflows available on the n8n platform, a business owner can automatically add a new lead to the CRM and send an ultra-personalized email to the customer. You can also automate the process of lead acquisition when a new customer is added to the CRM.  

Integrations: Over 200 apps including Google Sheets, Slack, and Trello.

Features: Customizable workflows with code, webhook support, support for self-hosting, multi-step workflows, and scheduling.