Workato Pricing: How Much Does the Integration Software Cost?

Workato is a modern, low-code platform that, like many of its competitors, allows for the connection of various business applications and systems such as CRM, ERP, and marketing. Workato's promise is to make it easy for IT and business teams to collaborate, as well as to empower non-technical users to automate their tasks without creating unnecessary overhead for IT. The speed is meant to be achieved in part through pre-built workflows (Workato refers to them as recipes) and the use of connectors for several hundreds of SaaS applications.

Workato offers its customers an integration middleware that facilitates connecting various cloud-based applications and web systems. This helps users save time and development resources, since they don’t need to hire expensive developers to write code for custom integrations and can automate many business processes with minimal costs.

In addition to the pure iPaaS functionality which is common to many of its competitors, Workato also offers community-built integration recipes. Essentially, these are pre-built workflow automations for two or more fixed applications; for example, for Greenhouse + Slack to receive a notification in Slack for each new job application in Greenhouse. The integration recipes seem to be provided exclusively by the community of Workato customers (i.e. not by Workato itself), but they can be easily cloned and adjusted to one’s own needs.

Using a combination of API-based and UI-based automation, Workato positions its platform as a tool to support Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is in essence automation of manual tasks such as document processing or setting up new accounts. Although Workato’s website lacks concrete description of the platform’s elements and features that make RPA possible, it does say that it is API-led and can be achieved with the help of Workato bots.

In addition to that, Workato offers the Workbot platform for developers to build and use bots with specific applications. These bots act as a conversational interface to a company’s business processes and help automate some of the common workflows such as assigning tickets, approving expenses, updating lead status, and so on. Currently, Workato offers its Workbot platform for Slack, MS Teams or Facebook Workplace.

Workato provides two different price options on its website: "Workato for your Business" and "Workato for your Product." In addition to that, “Workato for your Business” plan is split into two categories: “Required” and “As needed”.

The way you can understand it is that you can begin with the “required” part of the business plan, which gives you your own workspace including unlimited apps, connections, and users. To beef up this plan, you can buy pre-built recipes, available either individually or in packs of 10, 25, 50, or 100.

On its pricing page, Workato claims to have over 400,000 recipes available. However, during our research we were able to find an inconsistency with this claim. The platform overview on the website is talking about not 400,000 but even “500,000+ ready-to-use recipes for common business processes” shared by community members. Yet if you sign up for a free trial and go to “Community library” or access the recipes from the website (which still requires a trial account, though), you’ll see the number “1,991 recipes built”.

Another claim that needs to be carefully scrutinized is the number of applications that Workato provides connectors for. The website refers to “pre-built connectors for 1000+ SaaS, on-prem databases, ERP and more”, but after signing up for a free trial, we were only able to count 201 triggers, 251 actions, and 263 community apps. Since most of the time, an application has both actions and triggers, we can assume that Workato provides roughly 250-300 proprietary connectors + 263 community connectors, making it slightly under 600 connectors available in total. This being said, Workato, just like many of its competitors, does also provide a few generic connectors that allow developers to easily code a connection to an application’s API.

The "Workato for your Product" plan is aimed at SaaS vendors and allows them to embed the Workato offering into their own product to help their customers build the required integrations faster.

SaaS vendors can use this option to add business process automations to their own products with little to no technical knowledge. At this time, there is no price range and you can only request a quote.

So, what are the costs of these two pricing options? Unlike many of its competitors, Workato does not inform us of this any longer. The pricing was concealed somewhen around October 2020, and instead, Workato displays the option "Get a Quote”, inviting you to schedule a demo to discuss your expectations and requirements.

However, despite the lack of clear pricing information on Workato's website, we conducted our own investigation and discovered several client testimonials. On the software forum Capiche, a number of Workato clients have revealed how much they paid.

This seems to be in line with their updated pricing strategy from 2019 called “Unlimited pricing”, when all tiers were replaced by one price for everyone – $10K per workspace to start with; the required number of recipes to be added at extra price.

In addition to that, there are some user reviews suggesting that the Workato’s pricing strategy to charge per active recipe can result in a pretty heavy annual bill or otherwise put the IT in an uncomfortable position of constantly switching the recipes on and off.

To sum it up, based on its pricing strategy, the Workato's target market appears to be rather mid-size to large organizations with enough IT budget. It seems doubtful that smaller businesses, or in fact, non-profits are able to use it, even though Workato pricing apparently includes a discount for non-profits:

Even though non-transparent pricing has the advantage of appearing to be open to negotiation, Workato seems to be one of the more expensive alternatives on the market; especially, considering that training/onboarding and some add-ons that are particularly valuable for enterprises, such as advanced security and compliance, seem to come with an extra price tag on top of the regular license costs.

By contrast, elastic.io’s pricing approach is a combination of transparency and readiness to negotiation depending on a company’s requirements. You can start at as low as $2633 per year, all available connectors and platform functionalities included. Additionally, elastic.io offers a 14-day free trial, with or without pre-trial demo, which grants full access to the product and can be extended upon request free of charge.

The main difference between the price tiers is the availability as well as the number of developer workspaces (production workspaces are available at all tiers by default), the real-time flows and the access to the on-prem VPN agent that enables integration of legacy systems. With its several tiers, elastic.io aims to meet the requirements of all businesses, regardless of their size and budget.

Workato is a powerful yet expensive integration solution that is best suited to large organizations. While its fair use policy based on the number of recipes does sound like a good deal, it might rack up bills of ten of thousands of dollars every year if you decide to use Workato as your go-to enterprise integration platform to connect dozens of business applications.

elastic.io is a more affordable alternative to Workato, with many of the same features at a more reasonable price.

elastic.io was designed to provide integration developers with an easy to use yet powerful tool to integrate with virtually any business application in the cloud or on-premises. In addition to that, it offers sophisticated logging and monitoring systems that alert developers of any sudden errors coming from their integrations and allow them to pinpoint the cause quickly and with minimum effort.

elastic.io's offerings include both an enterprise integration platform for businesses that would like to unburden their own development teams and enable faster integrations delivery for internal purposes, as well as an embedded integration platform – what we call "an iPaaS for SaaS" – for business software vendors who seek to meet their customers' integration needs without compromising on their own core product(-s).