17 ms·

Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

745 points by eallam 4y ago

For the past few months we’ve been building Trigger.dev and can now share our beta with you: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev. Trigger.dev is an open source platform that makes it easy for developers to create event-driven background tasks directly in their code. You write workflows using our SDK, and can view all the runs in our web app. Why we built this: - We found current workflow / automation tools like Zapier and n8n are good for simple tasks, but not for more advanced use cases. - Dropping down into code in these tools is just not a great experience. We prefer using our own IDEs, version control, and having access to GitHub Copilot etc. - Sometimes, a workflow requires us to query a database or handle some sensitive information. It would be great if this data wasn’t sent to a third party. Our beta version lets you: - Trigger workflows from webhooks, custom events or schedules (CRON) - Use API integrations with Slack, GitHub, Shopify and Resend. We’re adding more of these each week. - Add delays of up to 1 year. Workflows will resume where they left off, even if your server has gone down. - Support for Fetch and subscribing to generic webhooks. - Observe every workflow run in the app (great for debugging). - Open source MIT license so anyone can self-host the platform. We’re still early so would love your feedback and opinions. Feel free to try us out for free – and if you want a specific API integrated, just let us know. Main website: https://trigger.dev https://trigger.dev Github: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev

robbiemitchell 4y ago
Speaking as a tech-forward "business user" who uses Zapier _a lot_: a key benefit of Zapier is that it enables business users to work independently. Moving triggers and actions behind "developer-friendly" (i.e., developer-required) tooling caps how fast an organization can move on anything outside the critical path for product and strategy. - Core transactional email flow? Great. - Alerting Slack for non-critical activities elsewhere? Ehh...
- aliqot 4y ago
  and suddenly at least one of us realizes why zapier costs money. the cycle continues.
  - carrja99 4y ago
    Comes up all the time. There was another tool like this (huggin?). I think what often gets missed and what gives zapier great power is the developer platform that can let devs build anything! I have a lot of custom integrations with apps that support use cases that afaik only I have. It is incredible effective.
    - bluehatbrit 4y ago
      Did you mean Huginn? (https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn)
    - eddieroger 4y ago
      I had a lot of bots in Huginn, but the amount of tending that the garden required versus and the developer experience were never good enough that I kept them going. I found myself doing all the JS editing I needed in VSCode and coping it back and forth, which is a bad experience. It definitely saved my butt a few times over the last few years, but I am anxious and excited to swap it out for this.
- lolinder 4y ago
  They already address that specifically: > We found current workflow / automation tools like Zapier and n8n are good for simple tasks, but not for more advanced use cases. This isn't intended to replace Zapier for your use case. Speaking as a developer who's been asked to set up integrations before, I'm glad to see more competition in this space with a developer focus!
  - robbiemitchell 4y ago
    The first example on the homepage is "Create an email drip feed campaign in under 2 minutes" This is not an advanced use case to be developed in house and owned by developers. This is bread and butter marketing or product engagement email flows using anything from Mailchimp to customer.io to HubSpot. The developer side would involve capturing the identities and events from your system and sending them (typically via something like Segment) to the downstream tools, where business users will manage those campaigns: flows, templates, content, integration with other flows, and reporting. The next example is "Sync GitHub issues to Linear". Again, this is a fairly simple Zapier use case, probably using built-in integrations, or falling back to Python if needed. Zapier would store the credentials to both security and use a trigger/action flow. I can see trigger.dev being more useful for things like: - Schedule-based tasks, or super high-volume tasks. (These are expensive on platforms) - That are driven primarily by code, not pre-built integrations - Using private data (such as authorization tokens) you don't want to expose in plain text Given there is undoubtedly a market of developers who want to bring things back into their standard codebase and code release practices, I suggest targeting the examples to situations to those more typically owned by developers.
    - mattaitken 4y ago
      Thanks, this is great feedback. You're right that these examples don't highlight the real advantage of our platform vs no-code tools. We're going to add some new examples to our site based on what our customers are building. The three categories of problems you identified that are best solved with a code tool are what we're seeing with our early customers. Plus a lot of notification use cases like when developers want to be notified in Slack when something important/bad happens.
- eallam 4y ago
  Zapier is great for non-developers, and as developers we've even used Zapier in the past because in some simple cases it's actually easier and more reliable than writing the code yourself! It's not easy to write code that connects even just a few services together, and handles transient errors and server interruptions, usually it takes some kind of infrastructure and maintenance, and can no longer be written in the normal way (and good luck with delays!). We wanted to bring the convenience of Zapier (you describe the request you want to do, they figure out how to do it!) back into our codebases, without having to manage a bunch of infrastructure (that's where trigger.dev comes in). While we were at it we built this as a general purpose event-driven system, complete with AWS Event Bridge like event pattern filtering, and also added the ability to listen for webhooks reliably without having to use a tunnel to your local machine when testing locally.
  - michaelmior 4y ago
    > It's not easy to write code that connects even just a few services together, and handles transient errors and server interruptions, usually it takes some kind of infrastructure and maintenance, and can no longer be written in the normal way (and good luck with delays!). Based on the example shown, it looks like Trigger.dev handles all this while allowing you to write code pretty close to what I would call "in the normal way." I haven't tried it myself, but if the examples work as advertised, it looks pretty attractive to me.
- bradgessler 4y ago
  It’s not hard to imagine a template library or code generator that sits on top of this code layer that’s more approachable to non-technical users. If done well, that would be an advantage over Zapier since a non-technical user can start something basic, then have a dev look at it if they need to get more sophisticated. This is what has made Excel and Access so successful—a biz person can get it started and have something tangible to hand off to a dev.
elonmusk11 4y ago
[flagged]
- elonmusk11 4y ago
  [flagged]
sigstoat 4y ago
i think an open source zapier alternative would be a desktop app that had a nice UI, and synthesized terraform/FaaS code/API gateway-equivalent stuff behind the scenes and then ran it against my preferred cloud provider account. not this, as convenient for some as it may be.
- farukaydin 4y ago
  There is an open source Zapier alternative (https://automatisch.io https://automatisch.io) even though it's not a desktop app. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of Automatisch
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  We do not provide a desktop app, but we provide the FaaS and instructions to self-host wherever: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
cube2222 4y ago
Looking at the long delays, do I understand correctly that this is something similar to Temporal[0] or AWS Step Functions? My first sentiment was "when I'm already writing code, why not just use Lambda", but it looks like these delays are kind of the selling feature, and it looks like the UX is better than step functions. I'd be curious about your selling points over Temporal, as I can't seem to find any comparison. Good luck! [0]: https://temporal.io https://temporal.io
- eallam 4y ago
  Yup I've done the AWS Step Functions thing in the past, and it usually was about 90% wrangling with AWS and 10% writing code... we wanted to flip that ratio around (that's the goal at least!) As for temporal, we are pretty similar to them, although I think we have more of a focus on making it easy to trigger (sorry) the workflows from third party events (webhooks, etc.) and then making reliable requests once you are in a workflow. Thanks for the feedback though, we'll try and add service comparison docs soon!
  - ElFitz 4y ago
    > Yup I've done the AWS Step Functions thing in the past, and it usually was about 90% wrangling with AWS and 10% writing code... we wanted to flip that ratio around (that's the goal at least!) That was the final straw what led a friend and me to try to do what you’ve done. We had started off using Zapier, and it’s horrendous objects & arrays handling, then moved on to Step Functions, then gave up on what we were initially doing to try and build a workable alternative. With a cumulated grand total of 6 months of experience, we had no idea what we were getting into. Anyway, the point is: thanks for making this.
    - rangledangle 4y ago
      Now that AWS App Composer is a thing is this still an issue though? I felt that pain in the beginning, but once you get the hang of Step Functions it doesn't seem so bad. I never found a good alternative. My company is using Workato and it's a nightmare.
runnr_az 4y ago
Missed an opportunity to call it Zapiest
- eallam 4y ago
  Where were you 2 months ago!
  - neogodless 4y ago
    Keeping their Zapier wit to themself.
  - vladsanchez 4y ago
    LOL Good one indeed!
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  That would probably get them in trademark troubles.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  NotIfThisThenThatButUs
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    TryThisCatchThat
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  I've spoken to many IT professionals over the years that have been frustrated with BetterCloud. I've just been waiting for someone to launch BestCloud as a competitor.
  - qup 4y ago
    Maybe BestCloud was the OG, usurped by BetterCloud.
rsstack 4y ago
Would love this self-hosted. The license says "All content that resides under any "ee/" directory of this repository, if such directories exists, are licensed under the license defined in "ee/LICENSE".", but there's no folder named ee? What is this referring to?
- eallam 4y ago
  We haven't done any ee features yet, which is why we stuck that "if such directories exists" line in there. We're following the playbook from some other OSS companies such as PostHog and Cal.com. Features that will go in ee (off the top of my head) are the teams and billing features of our hosted option. We'll be working on self-hosting instructions soon as well :)
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    A little while back, I was working with a startup that built an AI note taking app. They offered several integrations for their customers, and at the time I wished that there was a Zapier alternative that allowed for a multi-tenant approach (i.e. build a pipeline that each customer could independently hook into with their own external accounts). I haven't had a chance to go through your site yet, but that would be a killer feature to have.
    - eallam 4y ago
      Indeed we've had a few people who've requested this type of thing (they want to make requests authenticated as their customers, not as theirselves). Currently we only support making requests as yourself (e.g. post into your own slack channel), but our architecture will support making requests as your customers, and something we are very interested in doing eventually
  - martinkivi 4y ago
    When you look at self-hosting instructions then it would be great if it would be one that does not require Docker in your stack. Installation shell script would be even better.
yewenjie 4y ago
How does this compare to Pipedream and Windmill, both of which are also open-source?
- d-k-p 4y ago
  In Trigger.dev workflows are created completely in your code rather than in a node-based UI (which to be fair does allow you to write code sometimes). We found developers could actually put together workflows faster if the whole thing was code rather than a hybrid of UI / code (because you get to use your own IDE + Copilot).
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  Founder of Windmill here, and d-k-p answer is spot-on. If you want to manage your entire workflows as a typescript code, then trigger.dev would be preferable. Windmill supports typescript, python, go and bash, and handle all the advanced features such as retries, approval steps, pre-made integrations to hundreds of API at the workflow level in a UI-based editor. Then for the steps, themselves. you would use either your IDE and sync to Windmill, or use our web IDE.
nirga 4y ago
At first I thought that a code alternative for a no-code solution like zapier was counterintuitive. But as an engineer using Zapier (for the first time) these past few months I got so frustrated by the lack of an option to just write some "if" or just 2 lines of code to make things work the way I want them. I think trigger.dev nails it. This is exactly what I needed.
- mike31fr 4y ago
  You should try make.com. It is great!
  - freen 4y ago
    Last time I tried make.com, they couldn’t run scenarios in parallel: every subsequent run had to wait for the prior one to finish. Was a dealbreaker for me.
- Jiger104 4y ago
  Zapier has a python / JS code step (basically a AWS lambda) you can use to do something like this. Downside is that it has a timeout of 10s
  - nirga 4y ago
    Huh cool thanks I didn’t know that! I guess it’s just another action and not something “native” to Zapier (so if you want to later connect it to some off-the-shelf action you can’t).
    - robbiemitchell 4y ago
      You can connect code steps to other actions. For example, every Python code step has a reserved `output` variable which allows you to pass a list out to the next steps. It gets passed as stringified JSON: if it contains dicts, those values are made available automatically as inputs to other steps. You can also pass more complex, nested JSON and just json.loads it later.
  - 4y ago
eallam 4y ago
I forgot to mention in the original post we've built a bunch of example workflows here: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev-examples https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev-examples
- e28eta 4y ago
  Is there a brief description of what each example is? After following that link, I was just looking for one or two sentences, without having to look through each script.
  - d-k-p 4y ago
    We have a few examples with descriptions in the docs here: https://docs.trigger.dev/examples/examples https://docs.trigger.dev/examples/examples The example repo eallam shared has more though, we will be moving all of them to the docs soon!
jonny_eh 4y ago
Are you hosting or am I? The marketing implies that I’m hosting but your FAQ, at the bottom, says you are. Can you please clear up?
- eallam 4y ago
  Currently we are hosting, but we are going to be documenting how to self host in the near future so you can host it yourself.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    In the meantime, maybe remove "Your workflows run on your servers, not ours. We only receive the data you choose to send to us." from your front page marketing?
    - mattaitken 4y ago
      The website is correct, it's just a bit confusing so I'll explain more here: The workflow code is in your codebase and runs on your servers, we don't host that. We host the service that triggers your code (using events like scheduled, webhooks, customEvents) and that you can call using our SDK to do requests, logging and delays inside the workflow (e.g. using our Slack integration or using our fetch that auto-retries with exponential back-off). We also host the web app that you use to authenticate with APIs, show all of your runs with associated data and any errors. Soon we will add a self-hosted guide so that you can also choose to host the Trigger.dev service yourself too. It's a bit hard to explain, hopefully this clears things up!
      - jonny_eh 4y ago
        lol, I need a diagram.
vhanda 4y ago
This is fascinating. It checks a lot of my boxes. I was recently looking at ActionsFlow [0] which is similar but runs on GitHub Actions. My thoughts - 1. I don't see proper secret storage being handled. You typically don't want your API keys in your code. What would you recommend instead? 2. "OAuth" based secrets. Many integrations require giving access to an App via OAuth, which involves a flow. I think that's being handled internally from the video [1] and from this project [2], but it's not clear. How is that handled? A common use case I'd automated once is that when a GitHub project gets starred, the developers public information is scrapped and they are then followed on Twitter, if their twitter handle is found. With Trigger.dev, the twitter part isn't clear. 3. Error Handling - What about when some job fails to run? I understand there is a delay mechanism. But what about injecting custom error handling? Sending a message on slack, for example. 4. Dashboards - They look awesome. And I get the impression that each "action" in the code is mapped to individual blocks in the dashboard. I'd love to be able to see a proper graph of the flow. I love that I can see the json request / response for each. It'll make debugging easier when some API changes or fails. 5. No Code solutions - In the long run, I can easily picture writing the integration I want in plain text, and having Github CoPilot or ChatGPT generate the code for me, and then I can quickly modify it. 6. Incentive for integrations - As with most automation tools, entering the market is challenging as you're lacking integrations. The awesome thing about ActionsFlow [0] was that it was re-using an existing community of GitHub Actions, and therefore you don't start from scratch. Have you thought about reusing workflows from n8n or other projects? 7. Integrating with existing Automations - I think a bit more focus should be made on integrating with IFTTT / Zapier / n8n. I see you provide webhooks, but I think some easy wrappers + documentation would be better. This way, I can try out newer workflows in Trigger, and easily just extend my existing system. And then if Trigger.dev works for me, I can think about migrating away from my existing automation solution. 8. Open Source Longevity - Trigger.dev is MIT licensed. Could you please explain the rationale? How do you plan to combat someone launching a competitor using your code? N8n is deliberately "Soure Code Available" and not "Open source", which I thought was a decent compromise. Will you be following a more Open Core model similar to GitLab (which is also MIT licensed)? 9. De-coupling runners and the dashboard - I'd love to not have the pain of maintaining the dashboard / event listeners, but being able to control the running of the jobs. Similar to a CI or Airflow. 10. Support for other languages - This is something that Dagger CI [3] now allows. Letting you use whatever programming language. With Github Actions, I can just package it as a container. Do you plan to support anything else? After moving from using HCL to Typescript for my Terraform code, the advantage is so great, that I can't seem myself going back to using a custom language such as Dagger's CUE [4]. Trigger.dev targeting Typescript is already a big win. However, I do have a number of automations in Python. Overall, I'm super optimistic. Congratulations on the launch. [0] - https://actionsflow.github.io/ https://actionsflow.github.io/ [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFlwD0frvnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFlwD0frvnQ [2] - https://github.com/triggerdotdev/Pizzly https://github.com/triggerdotdev/Pizzly [3] - https://dagger.io/ https://dagger.io/ [4] - https://docs.dagger.io/1215/what-is-cue/ https://docs.dagger.io/1215/what-is-cue/
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Fiahil 4y ago
For once, I'd love to have a nice UI around this so I don't need to search docs and write code for simple stuff like "await ctx.waitFor({ hours: 3 });". That would improve discoverability as well !
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Jumping from free to $50/mo feels like there's a 4.99/9.99 plan missing somewhere. Just because you have 3 people on your team doesn't mean you can casually spare $50 a month, that's a lot of money to the vast majority =( Especially since a project going from one to three, and in the rare case four or five, folks is pretty common, but hitting 10 team members is a serious project milestone. At 10, you're probably also starting to look at funding. These plans are missing a tier =S (people seem to be falling over themselves trying to read this as someone who works for a company that can afford this service complaining there should be a plan that lets them pay less for it. Instead, take a moment and remember there's an entire unpaid open source ecosystem out there, with devs who can't afford Zapier, don't have 50/mo to spend on automation for a project that gets used, sometimes by billion dollar copmanies, but no one is paying them for, and who might still want to pay for a service like this at a tier above "free". Does that mean "trigger.dev must add a tier"? no of course not, but it would be great to understand why there's nothing between free and business plan pricing)
- armatav 4y ago
  Honestly it just sounds like you don’t need it that bad
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    What a weird reaction to someone voicing the question that open source devs will have, for a project that literally says it's dev-first.
    - armatav 4y ago
      Not really - three teammates and the issue is paying $50 a month?
- HatchedLake721 4y ago
  ^ this here is the reason why I never want to build SaaS products for developers. If you use and benefit from a product that saves time for 3 (usually the most highest paid) employees in the business (developers), you either need re-evaluate how much value this product provides or re-evaluate your business plan.
debarshri 4y ago
For people who are building durable workflows. You should definitely checkout temporal [1]. It is production ready, you can implement pretty much same using the original SDK of the underline services. [1] https://temporal.io/ https://temporal.io/
- revskill 4y ago
  This is complicated with too many terminologies :(
- verdverm 4y ago
  Their pricing model is much preferred: https://temporal.io/cloud https://temporal.io/cloud i.e. pay for what resources you use instead of how many users you have. This is how we pay for AWS/GCP/Azure. I think a lot of dev SaaS could / should go this way.
  - vpol 4y ago
    And if you don't store much inside the workflows themselves - it's quite cheap even if you have hundreds of thousands invocations.
    - verdverm 4y ago
      1M invocations looks like $25, which is really cheap
      - vpol 4y ago
        I meant daily, but it's still cheap.
        verdverm 4y ago
        I was saying 1,000,000 requests, which is the same for any time period
  - johtso 4y ago
r3trohack3r 4y ago
If you're looking for competitors in your space, it's worth checking out Autocode too: https://autocode.com https://autocode.com They have a full in-browser editor that handles many-to-many API integrations with autocomplete and helpers. They also have a CLI that lets you work with your favorite editors.
bambam24 4y ago
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gpuhacker 4y ago
I'm very unfamiliar with this family of tools, but if anyone knows a tool like this that can monitor arxiv or Google scholar for new papers matching a particular query, I'm very interested. I checked Zapier recently but I didn't see these among the support apps.
- daveguy 4y ago
  In Google Scholar, after your search there will be a button at the end of the page (on mobile, maybe somewhere else on desktop). The button is "Create alert" with an email icon by it. Select this and there will be a form for where to send the alert and the query. Click "Create alert" to get automatically notified of new results.
- stevekrouse 4y ago
  This is definitely something you could build in https://val.town https://val.town. Someone made a little daily query that checks for new citations on a particular paper: https://www.val.town/ernest.newCitationNotification https://www.val.town/ernest.newCitationNotification I'm the founder of val.town, so email me if you'd like help setting this up. I'd be more than happy to pair program with you on it. My email is steve @ val.town
revskill 4y ago
Please make curl example on how to send custom event , instead of using nodejs sdk ?
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  Yes, the best API documentation includes curl examples regardless of any other examples. With SDK examples you have to set up a code project, install the SDK, add some boilerplate code, make the API call, and figure out out to display/use the output. Ugh. With curl examples you can run the example with no set up, just a little customization. You just run a single command. Easy-peasy.
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gsanderson 4y ago
I was recently looking for a simpler alternative to Temporal (https://temporal.io/ https://temporal.io/) so this could be ideal. If you could add instructions for self-hosting it (_sounds_ like you just need an Express server, but I would guess some backend persistent store/database/queue too) that would be great. The Webhook catalog only lists Github: I think integrating with Stripe would be neat. Like, when someone pays an invoice, Stripe calls a webhook. That could trigger an action.
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  We do this at windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, including self-hosting instructions and pre-made integrations with stripe
  - gsanderson 4y ago
    Ah, ok. Thanks. I'll take a look at that too.
  - sisve 4y ago
    Does windmill have any way of going into code, without it basically becoming "code in a input box". The developer first solution trigger.dev have here is really scratching a real problem. But as they say they are not for the easiest workflows. I'm really looking for something that is gui first but as a drop down to code when you want. But inline code editor, let me save it to a git repo or similar. And don't have globals aka zapiers inputData and output.
    - rubenfiszel 4y ago
      > I'm really looking for something that is gui first but as a drop down to code when you want. But inline code editor, let me save it to a git repo or similar. That's like, exactly what we are, take a look at this screenshot for instance: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/imgs/windmill.png https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/imgs/win... As for syncing code to git, we do it as well through our CLI and Github Actions: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example
patchorang 4y ago
Why are there so many "Zapier alternatives"?
- dreadlordbone 4y ago
  Zapier's UI is a hot mess. If you breathe on a zap it turns off. Default names for zaps are "Untitled Zap". Pricing is very high for any sort of serious traffic. The webapp runs very slow. But most important, no one knows how to say "Zapier". Is it ZAHpier or ZAYpier?
  - debarshri 4y ago
    Zapier's UI might be a hot mess but their revenues indicate that the people are will to go with it and use it as is. All the points you mention, can be fixed by zapier. Then the alternatives do have a moat.
  - sgarland 4y ago
    Rhymes with happier.
    - justin_oaks 4y ago
      Then it should have been spelled Zappier.
    - johtso 4y ago
      In my mind it will always rhyme with tapir..
- debarshri 4y ago
  Because Zapier is an established business and showcases that there is market for automation tools. It is a safe bet to make by creating an alternative. What people are missing is the fact that executing a GTM the way zapier did is more that just building the product and is actually very hard.
- Moto7451 4y ago
  My experience is that for some types of integrations you see about a 70% success rate. Eventually you need something that is more reliable. Maybe you need an all in one solution that has some ETL capabilities. Maybe it’s a cost thing. Zapier seems to be the best way to get stuff done quickly and cheaply but not the best for long term high volume use as an integration platform. At my old job we migrated a from Zapier to Integrator.io, which fixed the reliability issues but broke the low barrier to entry.
ArcaneMoose 4y ago
This looks great, congrats on the launch! I am interested in a platform that bundles many pre-built integrations to various services that I could wire up through code and execute on my customers' behalf. Essentially, a way for me to present my customers with a plethora of integrations out of the box without having to build them all myself. This seems like it's moving in that direction and I saw another comment where you mentioned workflow execution on customers' behalf in the future which is great! How does this compare to something like Prefect? If there are any other tools folks would suggest to achieve what I'm looking for, I'd love to hear about them!
- ashrafsam 4y ago
  We do this at Activepieces (activepieces.com).
  - ArcaneMoose 4y ago
    Is there an API or SDK for creating/managing flows? I want the flexibility to programmatically wire these integrations together rather than a nocode UI Additionally, this seems to rely on you inputting your credentials. How would that work for a usecase where my customers are the ones who provide the credentials?
    - ashrafsam 4y ago
      Not yet, we're probably on the way there as we're exposing all our pieces (connectors) as typesafe npm packages. But for now, flows are built with the no-code UI. The workaround is to write all your code in one main Code step in any flow. Our web IDE is VS Code so it's not too much different, and we can be self-hosted. On the UI, you can customize the credentials with a connection variable which is what enables in-app product integrations. We have users who are doing this. Shoot me an email if you'd like to explore our approach: ash@activepieces.com
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  We also do this at windmill: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
UncleSam 4y ago
Either "trigger" is a blacklisted word or your domain is on a list somewhere, because my company has this url blocked under the "weapons" category. That's unfortunate.
- imachine1980_ 4y ago
  I'm not see the site blacklisted, I'm outside of usa btw, but inability asume is probably internal policy
- Meph504 4y ago
  Would be willing to bet your connection has an over aggressive blocking system going on
  - swyx 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- mattaitken 4y ago
  Ugh that sucks, sorry. We love the name but the only thing holding us back was the association with guns.
paul1664 4y ago
Is this any way related to the Nango & Pizzly projects? I see they're mentioned in the docker-compose file. https://www.nango.dev/ https://www.nango.dev/ for reference. [Edit: Added link to Nango website]
- mattaitken 4y ago
  We are using Nango (formerly called Pizzly) for our OAuth integrations. It's a fantastic way of making it easier to do OAuth!
cpursley 4y ago
Neat! This seems like it work be great paired with a low/no-code backend like Hasura or Supabase.
collyw 4y ago
Nice, Zapier is a pretty interesting solution but the pricing model is not.
Benjamin_Dobell 4y ago
This looks interesting. Recently I needed some really infrequently executed background workers. Basically just generate a CSV from our DB, email it somewhere. Historically I'd setup a Redis backed worker queue for background jobs. However, right now the aforementioned job is my only background processing requirement and it's massively overkill since serverless is supposed to take care of the infra headache for me. What I found was a surprising amount of BS to get serverless runners doing what you want - there's execution limits, trigger limits, terrible developer experiences (depending on the platform) etc. If you're already invested in a serverless ecosystem, this isn't a huge deal, but for the odd one-off task, the current options are kind of terrible. Supabase edge workers for example are way too limited for this use case. Cloudflare Workers (with the queuing stuff in beta) are probably the best option. But your batteries included approach seems super appealing for this kind of stuff. That said, I think you're in for a hard time marketing this. It requires devs to have "learnt the hard way" before they understand your value proposition.
- eallam 4y ago
  That's a good point regarding the marketing, although we're hoping to save a few poor souls from ever know the painful bits you so eloquently wrote about!
ryan_jiang 4y ago
+1 to this problem space. Resonate a lot with the gaps with Zapier, particularly around the need for escape hatches/conditional logic when needed––one of the reasons we built Retool Workflows! https://retool.com/products/workflows/ https://retool.com/products/workflows/
cssanchez 4y ago
This sounds great and very much needed! If you need a contributor, I’m interested (currently looking for a good project to get into).
- eallam 4y ago
  Contributions welcome! Hop in our Discord and we can chat: https://discord.gg/nkqV9xBYWy https://discord.gg/nkqV9xBYWy
moltar 4y ago
I’ve been waiting for this for years. Love!
mmcclure 4y ago
Just reiterating what a lot of other folks have said in this thread already, but this scratches a pretty real itch for some stuff we (and our customers) have been thinking about at Mux. Zapier (and similar) is just a little too high level for a lot of our needs, but Temporal feels like overkill. Extremely excited to play around, congrats on the launch!
- d-k-p 4y ago
  Thank you, really appreciate that comment. That's the bracket we see ourselves in, and for the same reasons (as product builders).
tonyhb 4y ago
Looks like you signed up to us last year at https://www.inngest.com https://www.inngest.com and took... a lot of inspiration! Good luck with the release - nice to see you adding features like keys, sleeps, etc.
- mattaitken 4y ago
  Hey, Inngest looks impressive, congrats! We're tackling similar problems. Our actual inspiration to build this was Interval back in November. They make it easy to create internal dashboards inside your own codebase by using their SDK. We wanted to offer the same great developer experience but for creating workflows.
kats 4y ago
Hey just giving you guys feedback. The emojis are a bit of an issue. NocoDB has this issue as well. If I want to use this at work it's a lot harder sell because of the emojis and statements like "it's blazing fast!!" For some businesses, it has to look super straight and serious, and give the impression that it's secure (which doesn't necessarily mean writing "we're secure!") Like copying the style of Microsoft Office would be the best. Google Docs or Zoho would be ok too. Of course it's great that you got through YCombinator and pitched, etc. But giving the impression of "Woo! We're a startup!" makes it seem like the company may be gone soon. It could be an issue because the company may not want to change their workflow if it won't stay stable for at least 5 years. To sell to a more generic established business, it might be better to look like a company that has been around and isn't going anywhere. Like for Microsoft Office, the assumption is that it's secure and your data never leaves your PC.
mfrye0 4y ago
This looks great. I'll have to play around with it. Related, we built a developer oriented Zapier clone for event scale automations awhile back for our internal product. We've since pivoted and have been debating on potentially open sourcing the engine as well. We built ours using Rust with a DSL for all the triggers, actions, and action inputs/outputs. The actions themselves are defined as APIs, which makes it easy to add functionality in any language. Most of our actions have been built in Typescript. Is there interest from anyone in potentially using it?
- Ataraxy 4y ago
  I'm always interested in seeing alternative solutions to this problem.
- no1youknowz 4y ago
  Yes, definitely. Put it on github, create a discord and see if a community forms around it.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Would love it if there was an email list I can subscribe to so I can keep up to date with development. I don't have a use for Trigger right now, but it seems like a cool tool that I want to keep up with.
- samejr 4y ago
  We don’t have a newsletter at the moment so the best way to stay up to date is via Discord where we’ll be posting all our updates: https://discord.gg/hYmCPJRDcb https://discord.gg/hYmCPJRDcb
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    I can't accept the invite. Has it expired?
johtso 4y ago
All the example use cases seem to be for non business critical stuff. Is this being sold as a tool that I could use for.. say.. persistent workflows for customer payments? Say I needed to take payment, and make sure that a ticket is reserved using a 3rd party api once the payment is successfully processed, refund the payment if there's some kind of problem, and then I need to send a confirmation email. Can I store and query state on the workflow? In my code can I `await` the completion of a workflow and get a result?
ezekg 4y ago
If I could easily port my business’s Zapier integration [0] to this (or any other Zapier competitor), I absolutely would. But after writing and maintaining the Zapier integration, it’d be too much effort unless the ROI was really high. [0]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-zapier https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-zapier
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  Hey there! I really like your service. What's your tech stack?
  - ezekg 4y ago
    Mainly Rails. Some Go.
    - EMIRELADERO 4y ago
      Cool. What did you use Go for that rails couldn't do (or do well/scale), if you mind me asking?
      - ezekg 4y ago
        First version of the distribution API was a Go microservice. But that microservice is now deprecated and its replacement was rolled into the main Rails app. That microservice streamed large files (so I went with Go), but I nixed the streaming and Go was no longer needed. The CLI is also written in Go.
        EMIRELADERO 4y ago
        Thanks! Have you contemplated making the backend open source or at least source-available ("Look but don't touch", you may only use the hosted service, etc)? Would love to take a look at the implementation
        4y ago
urbandw311er 4y ago
So am I allowed to clone and self-host this free of charge? Or does it somehow phone home and tie me into an account / pricing plan.
hndamien 4y ago
I would really love an easy way to cron job a collab worksheet.
thornewolf 4y ago
This sounds a lot like https://docs.windmill.dev/ https://docs.windmill.dev/ another open source solution. Additionally, if I want to run the code locally I can just self host it.
dmak 4y ago
This being open source changes my entire perception of it. Appreciate all the work you've put in and how you are willing to share with the world!
djangelic 4y ago
How does this compare to n8n.io? Seems like you need to be a bit more knowledgeable to use this than a true low code solution.
csomar 4y ago
As someone who got burned by past "Open Source" projects, yours raises all redflags: - Advertised as "Open Source", yet this is actually a paid product with a pricing page. - You don't even have a guide on how to install this thing... euh, I mean what's the point of this if I can't use it? - You have a complicated license: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/blob/main/LICEN.... You might have an "open" source as anyone can see the source but it's not as open as say an MIT license for the whole project. - Your pricing conflicts with your open source users. You need them to build and improve the product but you also want them to have a worse experience otherwise your cloud-hosted solution will not prevail.
- dachryn 4y ago
  self hosting feels like an afterthought. That's a red flag, it means they actually don't have any open source users or ecosystem.
  - csomar 4y ago
    Right? They advertise as an "Open-Source", MIT and self-host. But then they make it difficult (you need to figure out how to install this thing, lol). That would be understandable if this was done pro-bono (the paid service didn't exist). But they have a team and a paid service behind me. It's not the model that bothers me (if you want to mix OS with SaaS/Paid, then it's all good) but the false and dark-pattern advertising.
  - mattaitken 4y ago
    Really sorry about this – we are working on a guide and it will be released soon.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  I always check the license first and this is not too nice. These mixed licenses are a real nightmare for companies and their lawyers. Keep it clean & simple or there won't be a lot of adoption really.
wraptile 4y ago
Automation in Javascript isn't what I'd call developer friendly. I'm constantly perplexed by javascript presence outside of web environment.
brokebroadbeat 4y ago
‘Developer-first Zapier alternative’ is an odd positioning, I think the point of Zapier is that it’s for non-developers mainly. Looking at the comments, though, it seems like there’s a need for something like this. Keen to see how you iterate and improve your positioning. Good luck!
- benjaminsky2 4y ago
  My experience with Zapier is that you quickly hit a point where you’re building an ultra complex expression or manipulating json in a less than ideal editor. Also your zap is basically the ast of the code you would have written and grows quickly. Code is far more terse. That said, long running durable workflow tools that are targeted at devs all have challenges. There’s room for a Goldilocks solution. I’d imagine temporal will win though.
wlonkly 4y ago
I just want Yahoo Pipes back. Is that so much to ask?
hajrice 4y ago
Zapier is very easy to use - everything you want to do/learn is in the no-code interface page, no need for reading documentation. This (as a developer myself) seems very complex to use. I have to read each integration's library, and also use Typescript (why not JS or something more popular?), at which point, I may aswell just write code and use an API.
- mattaitken 4y ago
  We think Zapier is a fantastic product and we've used it ourselves many times. But it's more focused on simpler use cases and we found ourselves hitting the wall and then being frustrated that there wasn't a good alternative that could live in our code. You can use JavaScript and will have a great experience – all of our code is in TypeScript which means you get a really nice experience as either a JS or TS developer.
microsaasapps 4y ago
Looks amazing. Thanks for puting this accross. If you can add no code version.

745 points by eallam 4y ago

robbiemitchell 4y ago

Speaking as a tech-forward "business user" who uses Zapier _a lot_: a key benefit of Zapier is that it enables business users to work independently. Moving triggers and actions behind "developer-friendly" (i.e., developer-required) tooling caps how fast an organization can move on anything outside the critical path for product and strategy. - Core transactional email flow? Great. - Alerting Slack for non-critical activities elsewhere? Ehh...

aliqot 4y ago
and suddenly at least one of us realizes why zapier costs money. the cycle continues.
- carrja99 4y ago
  Comes up all the time. There was another tool like this (huggin?). I think what often gets missed and what gives zapier great power is the developer platform that can let devs build anything! I have a lot of custom integrations with apps that support use cases that afaik only I have. It is incredible effective.
  - bluehatbrit 4y ago
    Did you mean Huginn? (https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn)
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    I had a lot of bots in Huginn, but the amount of tending that the garden required versus and the developer experience were never good enough that I kept them going. I found myself doing all the JS editing I needed in VSCode and coping it back and forth, which is a bad experience. It definitely saved my butt a few times over the last few years, but I am anxious and excited to swap it out for this.
lolinder 4y ago
They already address that specifically: > We found current workflow / automation tools like Zapier and n8n are good for simple tasks, but not for more advanced use cases. This isn't intended to replace Zapier for your use case. Speaking as a developer who's been asked to set up integrations before, I'm glad to see more competition in this space with a developer focus!
- robbiemitchell 4y ago
  The first example on the homepage is "Create an email drip feed campaign in under 2 minutes" This is not an advanced use case to be developed in house and owned by developers. This is bread and butter marketing or product engagement email flows using anything from Mailchimp to customer.io to HubSpot. The developer side would involve capturing the identities and events from your system and sending them (typically via something like Segment) to the downstream tools, where business users will manage those campaigns: flows, templates, content, integration with other flows, and reporting. The next example is "Sync GitHub issues to Linear". Again, this is a fairly simple Zapier use case, probably using built-in integrations, or falling back to Python if needed. Zapier would store the credentials to both security and use a trigger/action flow. I can see trigger.dev being more useful for things like: - Schedule-based tasks, or super high-volume tasks. (These are expensive on platforms) - That are driven primarily by code, not pre-built integrations - Using private data (such as authorization tokens) you don't want to expose in plain text Given there is undoubtedly a market of developers who want to bring things back into their standard codebase and code release practices, I suggest targeting the examples to situations to those more typically owned by developers.
  - mattaitken 4y ago
    Thanks, this is great feedback. You're right that these examples don't highlight the real advantage of our platform vs no-code tools. We're going to add some new examples to our site based on what our customers are building. The three categories of problems you identified that are best solved with a code tool are what we're seeing with our early customers. Plus a lot of notification use cases like when developers want to be notified in Slack when something important/bad happens.
eallam 4y ago
Zapier is great for non-developers, and as developers we've even used Zapier in the past because in some simple cases it's actually easier and more reliable than writing the code yourself! It's not easy to write code that connects even just a few services together, and handles transient errors and server interruptions, usually it takes some kind of infrastructure and maintenance, and can no longer be written in the normal way (and good luck with delays!). We wanted to bring the convenience of Zapier (you describe the request you want to do, they figure out how to do it!) back into our codebases, without having to manage a bunch of infrastructure (that's where trigger.dev comes in). While we were at it we built this as a general purpose event-driven system, complete with AWS Event Bridge like event pattern filtering, and also added the ability to listen for webhooks reliably without having to use a tunnel to your local machine when testing locally.
- michaelmior 4y ago
  > It's not easy to write code that connects even just a few services together, and handles transient errors and server interruptions, usually it takes some kind of infrastructure and maintenance, and can no longer be written in the normal way (and good luck with delays!). Based on the example shown, it looks like Trigger.dev handles all this while allowing you to write code pretty close to what I would call "in the normal way." I haven't tried it myself, but if the examples work as advertised, it looks pretty attractive to me.
bradgessler 4y ago
It’s not hard to imagine a template library or code generator that sits on top of this code layer that’s more approachable to non-technical users. If done well, that would be an advantage over Zapier since a non-technical user can start something basic, then have a dev look at it if they need to get more sophisticated. This is what has made Excel and Access so successful—a biz person can get it started and have something tangible to hand off to a dev.

elonmusk11 4y ago

[flagged]

elonmusk11 4y ago
[flagged]

sigstoat 4y ago

i think an open source zapier alternative would be a desktop app that had a nice UI, and synthesized terraform/FaaS code/API gateway-equivalent stuff behind the scenes and then ran it against my preferred cloud provider account. not this, as convenient for some as it may be.

farukaydin 4y ago
There is an open source Zapier alternative (https://automatisch.io https://automatisch.io) even though it's not a desktop app. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of Automatisch
rubenfiszel 4y ago
We do not provide a desktop app, but we provide the FaaS and instructions to self-host wherever: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

cube2222 4y ago

Looking at the long delays, do I understand correctly that this is something similar to Temporal[0] or AWS Step Functions? My first sentiment was "when I'm already writing code, why not just use Lambda", but it looks like these delays are kind of the selling feature, and it looks like the UX is better than step functions. I'd be curious about your selling points over Temporal, as I can't seem to find any comparison. Good luck! [0]: https://temporal.io https://temporal.io

eallam 4y ago
Yup I've done the AWS Step Functions thing in the past, and it usually was about 90% wrangling with AWS and 10% writing code... we wanted to flip that ratio around (that's the goal at least!) As for temporal, we are pretty similar to them, although I think we have more of a focus on making it easy to trigger (sorry) the workflows from third party events (webhooks, etc.) and then making reliable requests once you are in a workflow. Thanks for the feedback though, we'll try and add service comparison docs soon!
- ElFitz 4y ago
  > Yup I've done the AWS Step Functions thing in the past, and it usually was about 90% wrangling with AWS and 10% writing code... we wanted to flip that ratio around (that's the goal at least!) That was the final straw what led a friend and me to try to do what you’ve done. We had started off using Zapier, and it’s horrendous objects & arrays handling, then moved on to Step Functions, then gave up on what we were initially doing to try and build a workable alternative. With a cumulated grand total of 6 months of experience, we had no idea what we were getting into. Anyway, the point is: thanks for making this.
  - rangledangle 4y ago
    Now that AWS App Composer is a thing is this still an issue though? I felt that pain in the beginning, but once you get the hang of Step Functions it doesn't seem so bad. I never found a good alternative. My company is using Workato and it's a nightmare.

runnr_az 4y ago

Missed an opportunity to call it Zapiest

eallam 4y ago
Where were you 2 months ago!
- neogodless 4y ago
  Keeping their Zapier wit to themself.
- vladsanchez 4y ago
  LOL Good one indeed!
wizzwizz4 4y ago
That would probably get them in trademark troubles.
robertlagrant 4y ago
NotIfThisThenThatButUs
- ethbr0 4y ago
  TryThisCatchThat
CSMastermind 4y ago
I've spoken to many IT professionals over the years that have been frustrated with BetterCloud. I've just been waiting for someone to launch BestCloud as a competitor.
- qup 4y ago
  Maybe BestCloud was the OG, usurped by BetterCloud.

rsstack 4y ago

Would love this self-hosted. The license says "All content that resides under any "ee/" directory of this repository, if such directories exists, are licensed under the license defined in "ee/LICENSE".", but there's no folder named ee? What is this referring to?

eallam 4y ago
We haven't done any ee features yet, which is why we stuck that "if such directories exists" line in there. We're following the playbook from some other OSS companies such as PostHog and Cal.com. Features that will go in ee (off the top of my head) are the teams and billing features of our hosted option. We'll be working on self-hosting instructions soon as well :)
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  A little while back, I was working with a startup that built an AI note taking app. They offered several integrations for their customers, and at the time I wished that there was a Zapier alternative that allowed for a multi-tenant approach (i.e. build a pipeline that each customer could independently hook into with their own external accounts). I haven't had a chance to go through your site yet, but that would be a killer feature to have.
  - eallam 4y ago
    Indeed we've had a few people who've requested this type of thing (they want to make requests authenticated as their customers, not as theirselves). Currently we only support making requests as yourself (e.g. post into your own slack channel), but our architecture will support making requests as your customers, and something we are very interested in doing eventually
- martinkivi 4y ago
  When you look at self-hosting instructions then it would be great if it would be one that does not require Docker in your stack. Installation shell script would be even better.

yewenjie 4y ago

How does this compare to Pipedream and Windmill, both of which are also open-source?

d-k-p 4y ago
In Trigger.dev workflows are created completely in your code rather than in a node-based UI (which to be fair does allow you to write code sometimes). We found developers could actually put together workflows faster if the whole thing was code rather than a hybrid of UI / code (because you get to use your own IDE + Copilot).
rubenfiszel 4y ago
Founder of Windmill here, and d-k-p answer is spot-on. If you want to manage your entire workflows as a typescript code, then trigger.dev would be preferable. Windmill supports typescript, python, go and bash, and handle all the advanced features such as retries, approval steps, pre-made integrations to hundreds of API at the workflow level in a UI-based editor. Then for the steps, themselves. you would use either your IDE and sync to Windmill, or use our web IDE.

nirga 4y ago

At first I thought that a code alternative for a no-code solution like zapier was counterintuitive. But as an engineer using Zapier (for the first time) these past few months I got so frustrated by the lack of an option to just write some "if" or just 2 lines of code to make things work the way I want them. I think trigger.dev nails it. This is exactly what I needed.

mike31fr 4y ago
You should try make.com. It is great!
- freen 4y ago
  Last time I tried make.com, they couldn’t run scenarios in parallel: every subsequent run had to wait for the prior one to finish. Was a dealbreaker for me.
Jiger104 4y ago
Zapier has a python / JS code step (basically a AWS lambda) you can use to do something like this. Downside is that it has a timeout of 10s
- nirga 4y ago
  Huh cool thanks I didn’t know that! I guess it’s just another action and not something “native” to Zapier (so if you want to later connect it to some off-the-shelf action you can’t).
  - robbiemitchell 4y ago
    You can connect code steps to other actions. For example, every Python code step has a reserved `output` variable which allows you to pass a list out to the next steps. It gets passed as stringified JSON: if it contains dicts, those values are made available automatically as inputs to other steps. You can also pass more complex, nested JSON and just json.loads it later.
- 4y ago

eallam 4y ago

I forgot to mention in the original post we've built a bunch of example workflows here: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev-examples https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev-examples

e28eta 4y ago
Is there a brief description of what each example is? After following that link, I was just looking for one or two sentences, without having to look through each script.
- d-k-p 4y ago
  We have a few examples with descriptions in the docs here: https://docs.trigger.dev/examples/examples https://docs.trigger.dev/examples/examples The example repo eallam shared has more though, we will be moving all of them to the docs soon!

jonny_eh 4y ago

Are you hosting or am I? The marketing implies that I’m hosting but your FAQ, at the bottom, says you are. Can you please clear up?

eallam 4y ago
Currently we are hosting, but we are going to be documenting how to self host in the near future so you can host it yourself.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  In the meantime, maybe remove "Your workflows run on your servers, not ours. We only receive the data you choose to send to us." from your front page marketing?
  - mattaitken 4y ago
    The website is correct, it's just a bit confusing so I'll explain more here: The workflow code is in your codebase and runs on your servers, we don't host that. We host the service that triggers your code (using events like scheduled, webhooks, customEvents) and that you can call using our SDK to do requests, logging and delays inside the workflow (e.g. using our Slack integration or using our fetch that auto-retries with exponential back-off). We also host the web app that you use to authenticate with APIs, show all of your runs with associated data and any errors. Soon we will add a self-hosted guide so that you can also choose to host the Trigger.dev service yourself too. It's a bit hard to explain, hopefully this clears things up!
    - jonny_eh 4y ago
      lol, I need a diagram.

vhanda 4y ago

This is fascinating. It checks a lot of my boxes. I was recently looking at ActionsFlow [0] which is similar but runs on GitHub Actions. My thoughts - 1. I don't see proper secret storage being handled. You typically don't want your API keys in your code. What would you recommend instead? 2. "OAuth" based secrets. Many integrations require giving access to an App via OAuth, which involves a flow. I think that's being handled internally from the video [1] and from this project [2], but it's not clear. How is that handled? A common use case I'd automated once is that when a GitHub project gets starred, the developers public information is scrapped and they are then followed on Twitter, if their twitter handle is found. With Trigger.dev, the twitter part isn't clear. 3. Error Handling - What about when some job fails to run? I understand there is a delay mechanism. But what about injecting custom error handling? Sending a message on slack, for example. 4. Dashboards - They look awesome. And I get the impression that each "action" in the code is mapped to individual blocks in the dashboard. I'd love to be able to see a proper graph of the flow. I love that I can see the json request / response for each. It'll make debugging easier when some API changes or fails. 5. No Code solutions - In the long run, I can easily picture writing the integration I want in plain text, and having Github CoPilot or ChatGPT generate the code for me, and then I can quickly modify it. 6. Incentive for integrations - As with most automation tools, entering the market is challenging as you're lacking integrations. The awesome thing about ActionsFlow [0] was that it was re-using an existing community of GitHub Actions, and therefore you don't start from scratch. Have you thought about reusing workflows from n8n or other projects? 7. Integrating with existing Automations - I think a bit more focus should be made on integrating with IFTTT / Zapier / n8n. I see you provide webhooks, but I think some easy wrappers + documentation would be better. This way, I can try out newer workflows in Trigger, and easily just extend my existing system. And then if Trigger.dev works for me, I can think about migrating away from my existing automation solution. 8. Open Source Longevity - Trigger.dev is MIT licensed. Could you please explain the rationale? How do you plan to combat someone launching a competitor using your code? N8n is deliberately "Soure Code Available" and not "Open source", which I thought was a decent compromise. Will you be following a more Open Core model similar to GitLab (which is also MIT licensed)? 9. De-coupling runners and the dashboard - I'd love to not have the pain of maintaining the dashboard / event listeners, but being able to control the running of the jobs. Similar to a CI or Airflow. 10. Support for other languages - This is something that Dagger CI [3] now allows. Letting you use whatever programming language. With Github Actions, I can just package it as a container. Do you plan to support anything else? After moving from using HCL to Typescript for my Terraform code, the advantage is so great, that I can't seem myself going back to using a custom language such as Dagger's CUE [4]. Trigger.dev targeting Typescript is already a big win. However, I do have a number of automations in Python. Overall, I'm super optimistic. Congratulations on the launch. [0] - https://actionsflow.github.io/ https://actionsflow.github.io/ [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFlwD0frvnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFlwD0frvnQ [2] - https://github.com/triggerdotdev/Pizzly https://github.com/triggerdotdev/Pizzly [3] - https://dagger.io/ https://dagger.io/ [4] - https://docs.dagger.io/1215/what-is-cue/ https://docs.dagger.io/1215/what-is-cue/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Fiahil 4y ago

For once, I'd love to have a nice UI around this so I don't need to search docs and write code for simple stuff like "await ctx.waitFor({ hours: 3 });". That would improve discoverability as well !

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Jumping from free to $50/mo feels like there's a 4.99/9.99 plan missing somewhere. Just because you have 3 people on your team doesn't mean you can casually spare $50 a month, that's a lot of money to the vast majority =( Especially since a project going from one to three, and in the rare case four or five, folks is pretty common, but hitting 10 team members is a serious project milestone. At 10, you're probably also starting to look at funding. These plans are missing a tier =S (people seem to be falling over themselves trying to read this as someone who works for a company that can afford this service complaining there should be a plan that lets them pay less for it. Instead, take a moment and remember there's an entire unpaid open source ecosystem out there, with devs who can't afford Zapier, don't have 50/mo to spend on automation for a project that gets used, sometimes by billion dollar copmanies, but no one is paying them for, and who might still want to pay for a service like this at a tier above "free". Does that mean "trigger.dev must add a tier"? no of course not, but it would be great to understand why there's nothing between free and business plan pricing)

armatav 4y ago
Honestly it just sounds like you don’t need it that bad
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  What a weird reaction to someone voicing the question that open source devs will have, for a project that literally says it's dev-first.
  - armatav 4y ago
    Not really - three teammates and the issue is paying $50 a month?
HatchedLake721 4y ago
^ this here is the reason why I never want to build SaaS products for developers. If you use and benefit from a product that saves time for 3 (usually the most highest paid) employees in the business (developers), you either need re-evaluate how much value this product provides or re-evaluate your business plan.

debarshri 4y ago

For people who are building durable workflows. You should definitely checkout temporal [1]. It is production ready, you can implement pretty much same using the original SDK of the underline services. [1] https://temporal.io/ https://temporal.io/

revskill 4y ago
This is complicated with too many terminologies :(
verdverm 4y ago
Their pricing model is much preferred: https://temporal.io/cloud https://temporal.io/cloud i.e. pay for what resources you use instead of how many users you have. This is how we pay for AWS/GCP/Azure. I think a lot of dev SaaS could / should go this way.
- vpol 4y ago
  And if you don't store much inside the workflows themselves - it's quite cheap even if you have hundreds of thousands invocations.
  - verdverm 4y ago
    1M invocations looks like $25, which is really cheap
    - vpol 4y ago
      I meant daily, but it's still cheap.
      - verdverm 4y ago
        I was saying 1,000,000 requests, which is the same for any time period
- johtso 4y ago

r3trohack3r 4y ago

If you're looking for competitors in your space, it's worth checking out Autocode too: https://autocode.com https://autocode.com They have a full in-browser editor that handles many-to-many API integrations with autocomplete and helpers. They also have a CLI that lets you work with your favorite editors.

bambam24 4y ago

[dead]

gpuhacker 4y ago

I'm very unfamiliar with this family of tools, but if anyone knows a tool like this that can monitor arxiv or Google scholar for new papers matching a particular query, I'm very interested. I checked Zapier recently but I didn't see these among the support apps.

daveguy 4y ago
In Google Scholar, after your search there will be a button at the end of the page (on mobile, maybe somewhere else on desktop). The button is "Create alert" with an email icon by it. Select this and there will be a form for where to send the alert and the query. Click "Create alert" to get automatically notified of new results.
stevekrouse 4y ago
This is definitely something you could build in https://val.town https://val.town. Someone made a little daily query that checks for new citations on a particular paper: https://www.val.town/ernest.newCitationNotification https://www.val.town/ernest.newCitationNotification I'm the founder of val.town, so email me if you'd like help setting this up. I'd be more than happy to pair program with you on it. My email is steve @ val.town

revskill 4y ago

Please make curl example on how to send custom event , instead of using nodejs sdk ?

justin_oaks 4y ago
Yes, the best API documentation includes curl examples regardless of any other examples. With SDK examples you have to set up a code project, install the SDK, add some boilerplate code, make the API call, and figure out out to display/use the output. Ugh. With curl examples you can run the example with no set up, just a little customization. You just run a single command. Easy-peasy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gsanderson 4y ago

I was recently looking for a simpler alternative to Temporal (https://temporal.io/ https://temporal.io/) so this could be ideal. If you could add instructions for self-hosting it (_sounds_ like you just need an Express server, but I would guess some backend persistent store/database/queue too) that would be great. The Webhook catalog only lists Github: I think integrating with Stripe would be neat. Like, when someone pays an invoice, Stripe calls a webhook. That could trigger an action.

rubenfiszel 4y ago
We do this at windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, including self-hosting instructions and pre-made integrations with stripe
- gsanderson 4y ago
  Ah, ok. Thanks. I'll take a look at that too.
- sisve 4y ago
  Does windmill have any way of going into code, without it basically becoming "code in a input box". The developer first solution trigger.dev have here is really scratching a real problem. But as they say they are not for the easiest workflows. I'm really looking for something that is gui first but as a drop down to code when you want. But inline code editor, let me save it to a git repo or similar. And don't have globals aka zapiers inputData and output.
  - rubenfiszel 4y ago
    > I'm really looking for something that is gui first but as a drop down to code when you want. But inline code editor, let me save it to a git repo or similar. That's like, exactly what we are, take a look at this screenshot for instance: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/imgs/windmill.png https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/imgs/win... As for syncing code to git, we do it as well through our CLI and Github Actions: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example

patchorang 4y ago

Why are there so many "Zapier alternatives"?

dreadlordbone 4y ago
Zapier's UI is a hot mess. If you breathe on a zap it turns off. Default names for zaps are "Untitled Zap". Pricing is very high for any sort of serious traffic. The webapp runs very slow. But most important, no one knows how to say "Zapier". Is it ZAHpier or ZAYpier?
- debarshri 4y ago
  Zapier's UI might be a hot mess but their revenues indicate that the people are will to go with it and use it as is. All the points you mention, can be fixed by zapier. Then the alternatives do have a moat.
- sgarland 4y ago
  Rhymes with happier.
  - justin_oaks 4y ago
    Then it should have been spelled Zappier.
  - johtso 4y ago
    In my mind it will always rhyme with tapir..
debarshri 4y ago
Because Zapier is an established business and showcases that there is market for automation tools. It is a safe bet to make by creating an alternative. What people are missing is the fact that executing a GTM the way zapier did is more that just building the product and is actually very hard.
Moto7451 4y ago
My experience is that for some types of integrations you see about a 70% success rate. Eventually you need something that is more reliable. Maybe you need an all in one solution that has some ETL capabilities. Maybe it’s a cost thing. Zapier seems to be the best way to get stuff done quickly and cheaply but not the best for long term high volume use as an integration platform. At my old job we migrated a from Zapier to Integrator.io, which fixed the reliability issues but broke the low barrier to entry.

ArcaneMoose 4y ago

This looks great, congrats on the launch! I am interested in a platform that bundles many pre-built integrations to various services that I could wire up through code and execute on my customers' behalf. Essentially, a way for me to present my customers with a plethora of integrations out of the box without having to build them all myself. This seems like it's moving in that direction and I saw another comment where you mentioned workflow execution on customers' behalf in the future which is great! How does this compare to something like Prefect? If there are any other tools folks would suggest to achieve what I'm looking for, I'd love to hear about them!

ashrafsam 4y ago
We do this at Activepieces (activepieces.com).
- ArcaneMoose 4y ago
  Is there an API or SDK for creating/managing flows? I want the flexibility to programmatically wire these integrations together rather than a nocode UI Additionally, this seems to rely on you inputting your credentials. How would that work for a usecase where my customers are the ones who provide the credentials?
  - ashrafsam 4y ago
    Not yet, we're probably on the way there as we're exposing all our pieces (connectors) as typesafe npm packages. But for now, flows are built with the no-code UI. The workaround is to write all your code in one main Code step in any flow. Our web IDE is VS Code so it's not too much different, and we can be self-hosted. On the UI, you can customize the credentials with a connection variable which is what enables in-app product integrations. We have users who are doing this. Shoot me an email if you'd like to explore our approach: ash@activepieces.com
rubenfiszel 4y ago
We also do this at windmill: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

UncleSam 4y ago

Either "trigger" is a blacklisted word or your domain is on a list somewhere, because my company has this url blocked under the "weapons" category. That's unfortunate.

imachine1980_ 4y ago
I'm not see the site blacklisted, I'm outside of usa btw, but inability asume is probably internal policy
Meph504 4y ago
Would be willing to bet your connection has an over aggressive blocking system going on
- swyx 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
mattaitken 4y ago
Ugh that sucks, sorry. We love the name but the only thing holding us back was the association with guns.

paul1664 4y ago

Is this any way related to the Nango & Pizzly projects? I see they're mentioned in the docker-compose file. https://www.nango.dev/ https://www.nango.dev/ for reference. [Edit: Added link to Nango website]

mattaitken 4y ago
We are using Nango (formerly called Pizzly) for our OAuth integrations. It's a fantastic way of making it easier to do OAuth!

cpursley 4y ago

Neat! This seems like it work be great paired with a low/no-code backend like Hasura or Supabase.

collyw 4y ago

Nice, Zapier is a pretty interesting solution but the pricing model is not.

Benjamin_Dobell 4y ago

This looks interesting. Recently I needed some really infrequently executed background workers. Basically just generate a CSV from our DB, email it somewhere. Historically I'd setup a Redis backed worker queue for background jobs. However, right now the aforementioned job is my only background processing requirement and it's massively overkill since serverless is supposed to take care of the infra headache for me. What I found was a surprising amount of BS to get serverless runners doing what you want - there's execution limits, trigger limits, terrible developer experiences (depending on the platform) etc. If you're already invested in a serverless ecosystem, this isn't a huge deal, but for the odd one-off task, the current options are kind of terrible. Supabase edge workers for example are way too limited for this use case. Cloudflare Workers (with the queuing stuff in beta) are probably the best option. But your batteries included approach seems super appealing for this kind of stuff. That said, I think you're in for a hard time marketing this. It requires devs to have "learnt the hard way" before they understand your value proposition.

eallam 4y ago
That's a good point regarding the marketing, although we're hoping to save a few poor souls from ever know the painful bits you so eloquently wrote about!

ryan_jiang 4y ago

+1 to this problem space. Resonate a lot with the gaps with Zapier, particularly around the need for escape hatches/conditional logic when needed––one of the reasons we built Retool Workflows! https://retool.com/products/workflows/ https://retool.com/products/workflows/

cssanchez 4y ago

This sounds great and very much needed! If you need a contributor, I’m interested (currently looking for a good project to get into).

eallam 4y ago
Contributions welcome! Hop in our Discord and we can chat: https://discord.gg/nkqV9xBYWy https://discord.gg/nkqV9xBYWy

moltar 4y ago

I’ve been waiting for this for years. Love!

mmcclure 4y ago

Just reiterating what a lot of other folks have said in this thread already, but this scratches a pretty real itch for some stuff we (and our customers) have been thinking about at Mux. Zapier (and similar) is just a little too high level for a lot of our needs, but Temporal feels like overkill. Extremely excited to play around, congrats on the launch!

d-k-p 4y ago
Thank you, really appreciate that comment. That's the bracket we see ourselves in, and for the same reasons (as product builders).

tonyhb 4y ago

Looks like you signed up to us last year at https://www.inngest.com https://www.inngest.com and took... a lot of inspiration! Good luck with the release - nice to see you adding features like keys, sleeps, etc.

mattaitken 4y ago
Hey, Inngest looks impressive, congrats! We're tackling similar problems. Our actual inspiration to build this was Interval back in November. They make it easy to create internal dashboards inside your own codebase by using their SDK. We wanted to offer the same great developer experience but for creating workflows.

kats 4y ago

Hey just giving you guys feedback. The emojis are a bit of an issue. NocoDB has this issue as well. If I want to use this at work it's a lot harder sell because of the emojis and statements like "it's blazing fast!!" For some businesses, it has to look super straight and serious, and give the impression that it's secure (which doesn't necessarily mean writing "we're secure!") Like copying the style of Microsoft Office would be the best. Google Docs or Zoho would be ok too. Of course it's great that you got through YCombinator and pitched, etc. But giving the impression of "Woo! We're a startup!" makes it seem like the company may be gone soon. It could be an issue because the company may not want to change their workflow if it won't stay stable for at least 5 years. To sell to a more generic established business, it might be better to look like a company that has been around and isn't going anywhere. Like for Microsoft Office, the assumption is that it's secure and your data never leaves your PC.

mfrye0 4y ago

This looks great. I'll have to play around with it. Related, we built a developer oriented Zapier clone for event scale automations awhile back for our internal product. We've since pivoted and have been debating on potentially open sourcing the engine as well. We built ours using Rust with a DSL for all the triggers, actions, and action inputs/outputs. The actions themselves are defined as APIs, which makes it easy to add functionality in any language. Most of our actions have been built in Typescript. Is there interest from anyone in potentially using it?

Ataraxy 4y ago
I'm always interested in seeing alternative solutions to this problem.
no1youknowz 4y ago
Yes, definitely. Put it on github, create a discord and see if a community forms around it.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Would love it if there was an email list I can subscribe to so I can keep up to date with development. I don't have a use for Trigger right now, but it seems like a cool tool that I want to keep up with.

samejr 4y ago
We don’t have a newsletter at the moment so the best way to stay up to date is via Discord where we’ll be posting all our updates: https://discord.gg/hYmCPJRDcb https://discord.gg/hYmCPJRDcb
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  I can't accept the invite. Has it expired?

johtso 4y ago

All the example use cases seem to be for non business critical stuff. Is this being sold as a tool that I could use for.. say.. persistent workflows for customer payments? Say I needed to take payment, and make sure that a ticket is reserved using a 3rd party api once the payment is successfully processed, refund the payment if there's some kind of problem, and then I need to send a confirmation email. Can I store and query state on the workflow? In my code can I `await` the completion of a workflow and get a result?

ezekg 4y ago

If I could easily port my business’s Zapier integration [0] to this (or any other Zapier competitor), I absolutely would. But after writing and maintaining the Zapier integration, it’d be too much effort unless the ROI was really high. [0]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-zapier https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-zapier

EMIRELADERO 4y ago
Hey there! I really like your service. What's your tech stack?
- ezekg 4y ago
  Mainly Rails. Some Go.
  - EMIRELADERO 4y ago
    Cool. What did you use Go for that rails couldn't do (or do well/scale), if you mind me asking?
    - ezekg 4y ago
      First version of the distribution API was a Go microservice. But that microservice is now deprecated and its replacement was rolled into the main Rails app. That microservice streamed large files (so I went with Go), but I nixed the streaming and Go was no longer needed. The CLI is also written in Go.
      - EMIRELADERO 4y ago
        Thanks! Have you contemplated making the backend open source or at least source-available ("Look but don't touch", you may only use the hosted service, etc)? Would love to take a look at the implementation
        4y ago

urbandw311er 4y ago

So am I allowed to clone and self-host this free of charge? Or does it somehow phone home and tie me into an account / pricing plan.

hndamien 4y ago

I would really love an easy way to cron job a collab worksheet.

thornewolf 4y ago

This sounds a lot like https://docs.windmill.dev/ https://docs.windmill.dev/ another open source solution. Additionally, if I want to run the code locally I can just self host it.

dmak 4y ago

This being open source changes my entire perception of it. Appreciate all the work you've put in and how you are willing to share with the world!

djangelic 4y ago

How does this compare to n8n.io? Seems like you need to be a bit more knowledgeable to use this than a true low code solution.

csomar 4y ago

As someone who got burned by past "Open Source" projects, yours raises all redflags: - Advertised as "Open Source", yet this is actually a paid product with a pricing page. - You don't even have a guide on how to install this thing... euh, I mean what's the point of this if I can't use it? - You have a complicated license: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/blob/main/LICEN.... You might have an "open" source as anyone can see the source but it's not as open as say an MIT license for the whole project. - Your pricing conflicts with your open source users. You need them to build and improve the product but you also want them to have a worse experience otherwise your cloud-hosted solution will not prevail.

dachryn 4y ago
self hosting feels like an afterthought. That's a red flag, it means they actually don't have any open source users or ecosystem.
- csomar 4y ago
  Right? They advertise as an "Open-Source", MIT and self-host. But then they make it difficult (you need to figure out how to install this thing, lol). That would be understandable if this was done pro-bono (the paid service didn't exist). But they have a team and a paid service behind me. It's not the model that bothers me (if you want to mix OS with SaaS/Paid, then it's all good) but the false and dark-pattern advertising.
- mattaitken 4y ago
  Really sorry about this – we are working on a guide and it will be released soon.
tluyben2 4y ago
I always check the license first and this is not too nice. These mixed licenses are a real nightmare for companies and their lawyers. Keep it clean & simple or there won't be a lot of adoption really.

wraptile 4y ago

Automation in Javascript isn't what I'd call developer friendly. I'm constantly perplexed by javascript presence outside of web environment.

brokebroadbeat 4y ago

‘Developer-first Zapier alternative’ is an odd positioning, I think the point of Zapier is that it’s for non-developers mainly. Looking at the comments, though, it seems like there’s a need for something like this. Keen to see how you iterate and improve your positioning. Good luck!

benjaminsky2 4y ago
My experience with Zapier is that you quickly hit a point where you’re building an ultra complex expression or manipulating json in a less than ideal editor. Also your zap is basically the ast of the code you would have written and grows quickly. Code is far more terse. That said, long running durable workflow tools that are targeted at devs all have challenges. There’s room for a Goldilocks solution. I’d imagine temporal will win though.

wlonkly 4y ago

I just want Yahoo Pipes back. Is that so much to ask?

hajrice 4y ago

Zapier is very easy to use - everything you want to do/learn is in the no-code interface page, no need for reading documentation. This (as a developer myself) seems very complex to use. I have to read each integration's library, and also use Typescript (why not JS or something more popular?), at which point, I may aswell just write code and use an API.

mattaitken 4y ago
We think Zapier is a fantastic product and we've used it ourselves many times. But it's more focused on simpler use cases and we found ourselves hitting the wall and then being frustrated that there wasn't a good alternative that could live in our code. You can use JavaScript and will have a great experience – all of our code is in TypeScript which means you get a really nice experience as either a JS or TS developer.

microsaasapps 4y ago

Looks amazing. Thanks for puting this accross. If you can add no code version.