I’ve been diving deep into automation lately and am in the process of transitioning quite a bit from Make/Integromat to Tadabase’s native capabilities. Running automations directly within Tadabase has proven to be far more stable than Make, which, despite being useful, has its flakiness for various reasons. While Make’s reliability might hover around 98%, that small gap can lead to significant issues, especially with daily batch jobs. Plus, there’s the added benefit of enhanced information security when keeping everything within Tadabase, as opposed to external platforms like Integromat.
However, where Make really shines is in its ability to create intricate, multi-step batch jobs that string together complex workflows. This is a feature I find somewhat lacking in Tadabase. Currently, Tadabase’s automation seems to allow only one action per automation trigger. For processes that require multiple steps (like the 5-step jobs we run), we have to set up several automations to run sequentially (5 minutes apart), which is quite cumbersome and raises concerns about potential failures in the chain.
A significant enhancement for Tadabase would be the introduction of multi-step automations. Ideally, this would include some sort of conditional logic to ‘fork’ the workflow based on specific triggers or criteria, much like Make’s functionality. Even without the forking capability, having more than one step per automation would be a massive improvement, enabling real ‘batch’ jobs to run overnight and substantially enhancing the platform’s capability.
One more request to bolster the automation feature: It’s crucial for calculated fields to update automatically when an automation modifies a related field. Alternatively, a simple ‘recalculate table’ task that can be integrated into a multi-step automation would be very useful. It’s currently frustrating to have fields like ‘today’s sales’ updated nightly without a corresponding update in related calculations, like ‘total sales for the week,’ for our nightly reports.
Overall, I’m excited about the progress in automations on Tadabase and hoping some of these enhancements are possible!