Automation Studio vs Direct with Workato

Kinetic ERP
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Has anyone done the research of implementing Workato directly vs using Automation Studio?

I currently have a project that could make use of some Workato connectors, but don’t necessarily need a connector to Kinetic at this time. I haven’t been able to get a clear answer if you can access the Kinetic connector if we decided to work directly with Workato.

From my initial research, Automation Studio is charged by connector, whereas Workato has unlimited connectors with task consumption blocks. Epicor’s pricing model looks like it might make sense for a small number of connectors, but if you have a more broad spectrum of apps, I’m wondering if the consumption model makes more sense.

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I think Epicor owns the Workato connector that they wrote. So Unless i’m mistaken you can only buy it through them. However workato does support regular rest calls

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That’s what I’m thought also, but the Workato sales rep I am working with thinks you can. I’ll report back here once I get an answer.

What is the advantage of the prebuilt connector if you can just do regular REST calls?

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You didn’t have to build it?

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I get it, but as a developer, I find REST easy to use.
I feel like I’m missing something

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I don’t know if I am, they won’t let me play with it. :sob:

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Events are provided to you

“When Order changes” triggers etc you can’t do those easily with Rest without some not insignificant effort

They built those in for you. Again not an issue for you as a developer, but most people would have a hard time figuring out how to trigger a recipe when a record changes in Epicor

Also all the datasets are pre-built for you, you don’t have to generate with JSON inpput / output into the calls. Again trivial for some.

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Good to know, thanks. Looking forward to getting hands on with a demo. I’ll have to see how easy it is without the connector, if that ends up being the most cost effective option.

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I think you would also have to consider the support - when buying through epicor they support the integration, you can log in with your idp, etc. If you don’t, I would assume you have to go through workato for support and its probably a no mans land in between epicor and workato if something isn’t working.

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Automation Studio has “task” / usage limits though and if you exceed the threshold you have to buy another connector. I don’t know what exactly defines a task, but I’ve heard if your workflow has a loop in it then each iteration of the loop could count as a task.

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11

The answer is yes, you can add the Kinetic connector direct with Workato for about the same cost as what Epicor offers. As of writing this, a limitation of Application Studio is that you can’t use Workflow Apps.

Once you see the price of the Workato platform on it’s own, you’ll quickly see that Automation Studio is a great deal for most of us.

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