Note it’s not a criticism . It’s sort of a bunch of notes verbatim from mark drake on linkedin:
Two minutes with Umbraco Automate:
- No "error state" escapes anywhere.
- The while loop has no exit node. How do you wire the next thing to run after the while loop?
- Parallel makes sense, until you realize there's no way to return to the main loop again. (Same issue as while.)
- Not obvious (I read the docs) how your trigger and actions reveal their "bindings". I discovered that looking at Umbraco Forms Automate package.
- Bindings leaves a lot to be desired from a regular user.
- The text area isn't going to suffice for HTML emails, even though someone did think about setting a boolean for "this is an HTML email".
- No way to audit a "run", see the steps it took, the values that were returned.
- Missing OOTB triggers and actions.
- No OOTB Zapier or n8n integrations. They serve as a proxy to open up 100s of other integrations automatically.
What I do like:
- Finally thinking about no-code approaches.
- Democratize and empower editors to create their own workflows and automations to aid their unique workflows. (Repeating my first bullet here because it's important.)
- You can retry runs!
- You can limit which automations users can access/edit, and give them their own workspaces ("playgrounds").
Fundamentally though, what's the intent here? I didn't see an API layer (in C#) to run a specific Automation with a specific context. Is this slated for only specific types of jobs, or do you think people will begin replacing all of their manual workflows?
Example: a user submits a "create account" form → kicks off an Automation to create the account → client waits for finalization → logs member in.
Is this something I'd expect Umbraco Automate to do in the future? It seems to lack the required underlying API to take advantage of during a synchronous request. Though I'm not the most experienced C# developer, I did take a look around. Nothing stood out.
Free thoughts.