This is a testimonial written by Said Hasyim, Author of productivity books.
"Within a few weeks of usage, Windmill replaced all my previous workflows and automation tools, consolidating my flows into a single, efficient platform."
What before Windmill?
As an independent author, I am always on the lookout for ways to optimize my workflows and simplify processes to focus on my core job: writing content. The key challenges are around managing subscriptions, purchases and keeping my internal databases up to date.
Before transitioning to Windmill, I had been using Meta API (code-based automation), followed by Amazon Lambda to help me manage my workflows.
How did Windmill help?
I use Windmill to build workflows meant to be automatically triggered (either scheduled or by external events). I only use a few workflows - 2 or 3 on a daily basis - but they are business critical.
Within a few weeks of usage, Windmill replaced all my previous workflows and automation tools, consolidating my flows into a single, efficient platform.
In particular, I use Windmill for:
Automatically managing purchases and redemptions
This workflow handles a multi-code redemption process, allowing users to choose between redeeming one or two codes which will determine the result of the redemption.
Prepare data to scrape ...
... and process scraped data
The goal here is not to detail these workflows as I made them unique to my own stakes. As you can see, Windmill can handle even the most intricate branchy flows seamlessly. To build them, I used Hub scripts, my few skills in programming (I am not a developer) and Windmill's attentive support.
I also use Windmill for:
- updating my CRM with customer information
- monitoring book reviews
- segmenting blog subscriptions
What you need to know is that all those workflows are fully automated and interact with internal databases.
Now you have the context. I would like to highlight a few reasons why Windmill has replaced all my pre-existing automation tools.
User Interface
While AWS Lambda lets you write scripts in a traditional way, Windmill lets you write and design them with a beautiful graph-based interface. This makes the process of designing flows for complex projects quicker and more error free because you can visualize the logic while building them.
Approval Steps
I was amazed by its “flow approval” function that allows you to set up an approval flow. That feature led me to streamline some of my processes and is now an integral part of my operations. I no longer need to do the laborious tasks of accessing a system, validate the transaction, data patch, and rerun a script. All I need now is to receive an approval request email in real time, review on the go, hit approve/reject, and my flow will resume/abandon.
Interconnectivity
Like Retool, you can design your admin console and connect it to your database. Windmill allows you to connect to your existing scripts and flows that you have already designed inside Windmill i.e. you can reuse them, which saves a lot of time.
Clear Visualization
Its job runs panel is intuitive. Each job run’s audit is shown graphically. You can track the progress visually in real-time when a transaction is triggered. It is easy to tell the exact flow your logic traversed in each run, making AWS CloudWatch logging look basic in comparison.
At last, I want to talk about its team and founder, Ruben. In a few weeks of using Windmill, significant changes and updates were made. All these changes improved my experience with the product. Windmill welcomes feedback and deploys extremely quickly for improvements.
How to use Windmill?
You can self-host it using a docker compose up, our go with the cloud app.
You can self-host Windmill using a
docker compose up, or go with the cloud app.