Top 3 Automation Tools for Your Business

Zapier

Zapier is a simple platform for automation that can be used by any company to save time and money while improving productivity. This is about as straightforward as it comes to automation, enabling you to create automated actions between important applications that companies use in every industry.

Want to save attachments to Google Drive automatically in Gmail? Or how about Tweeting all of your blog posts to Twitter as soon as you hit the publish button? Perhaps you want to save all new Google Docs files to OneDrive and then back them up in Dropbox.

With Zapier you can set up thousands of such automation to cut down on tedious manual tasks, allowing you to spend time on more productive acts.

Zoho

Zoho provides a robust business solutions platform, providing quality tools for everything from accounting and social media marketing to point-of-sale (POS) systems. In this stable, Zoho CRM is one of the most mature products and probably its flagship. Zoho is a must-see, or at least a must-consider, for those looking for full functionality customer relationship management (CRM) with an intuitive interface and useful integrations at a reasonable price. It shares the classification of our Editors' Preference to Apptivo CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional.

Under the hood of Zoho CRM, you'll find useful capabilities like lead management (LM), detailed reporting, and advanced features such as gamification, as well as built-in connectivity with business-grade telephony tools including live chat, web, and social media.

But even with all that, Zoho holds the price tag to an amount that is accessible to small to medium-sized (SMBs) companies. Nonetheless, be mindful that you will give up some of the in-depth coverage and thorough LM that supports the price of Salesforce. Zoho CRM is especially useful for organizations that already use other products from the company, such as Zoho Projects or Zoho Books. The deep integration into the Google G Suite also makes it a natural choice if your company uses such email and calendar resources. And with the Zoho One licensing option, corporations may choose to give their employees access to the entire software portfolio of the business for around $1 per day.

IFTTT

IFTTT is very similar to Zapier and that is the same general idea. To save you jumping between different platforms so perform the same menial tasks, you'll use this to build simple automation between different apps.

The key difference here is that IFTTT provides a much better free edition than Zapier. The main downside is that you can only have one account, which means that teams are not particularly suited to this. The key difference is that, as soon as the trigger action happens, IFTTT automation runs instantly. Whereas, depending on which version of the software you are using, Zaps either run every 15 minutes or five minutes.

The main advantage of Zapier is that you can use any of the paid versions to set up Multi-Step Zaps. It allows you to set multiple automation from the same trigger action-something you can't do with any IFTTT edition.