Even if you love your work, there’s probably something you do each day that’s the bane of your existence. Chances are it’s something mundane—the kind of time-suck you’re definitely noticing since every minute counts at your busy organization. Maybe it’s, for example, the manual assigning of routine subtasks every time you assign a team member a standard task. The best task automation software handles this—and so much more—on your behalf without you so much as lifting a finger.

• What is task automation?
• Types of tasks that can be automated
• How to choose the best automation software
• 10 of the best task automation software in 2024

What is task automation?

Task automation is the use of software to complete a normally manual—and often low-value—process without any direct work on your part. Instead, the software automatically handles the task from start to finish. Your team has little to no hands-on involvement in the task, freeing up everyone’s time for work that fully requires an actual person’s involvement. 

For example, let’s say you’re having a team update meeting and need a written transcript of it afterward. Does anyone on your team really want to sit there with the recorded audio and tediously transcribe it? Probably not. With meeting tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI), you can entirely automate this task. The AI will record and transcribe the meeting for you in real time, saving you a major headache.

Types of tasks that can be automated 

One of the major benefits of task automation software is that it can handle an impressive variety of work activities. These include:

• Data entry: Automation software can handle repetitive data entry tasks. For example, it can automatically populate databases with new information from forms or emails, reducing manual input errors and saving time.
• Organization-wide communications, such as posting on social media and replying to customers’ live chat questions: This includes automating posts on social media platforms and responding to customer inquiries via live chat. Automation tools can schedule and publish social media content at optimal times and use chatbots to provide instant responses to common customer queries.
• Legacy system management: this refers to integrating older systems with new automation technology. For instance, automatically updating stock levels in a database when sales are made or when new stock arrives, ensuring inventory information is always up-to-date.
• Task assignments and due-date reminders: Automation software can distribute tasks to team members based on predefined rules or schedules. It can also send reminders before due dates, helping teams stay on track with deadlines and project timelines.
• Sending invoices and paying bills: This automation involves generating and sending invoices to clients, as well as setting up scheduled payments for bills. It ensures timely invoicing and bill payments, improving cash flow management and reducing the administrative burden.
• Generating meeting agendas, summaries, recordings, and transcripts: Automation tools  like Fellow can assist in preparing for meetings by generating agendas based on input from team members. They can also record meetings, provide summaries, and transcribe conversations, which aids in documentation and ensures that important discussion points are captured and made accessible for future reference.

“In most cases, the work that’s being “botsourced” is work that the human employee would rather not be responsible for. These software computer programs (“bots”) take on the mundane, high-volume, low-reward work so humans don’t have to. … Not only is automation not taking over our jobs — it’s improving them.”

– Mike Magnifico, Forbes

How to choose the best automation software 

To find the right automated task management solution for your team, figure out which tasks you really need to automate. Are you forgetting to delegate work to people after meetings, or are you struggling to take meeting notes in the first place? Look for software with features that address these concerns at prices that fall within your budget.

From there, check whether all the software options you’ve lined up can accommodate the number of team members who will use them. Make sure each platform is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with your other software programs. From there, try each contender out before committing to it. This is a great way to see whether the platform truly achieves all your workflow automation goals.

10 of the best task automation software in 2024

These 10 platforms can help you streamline your work with automation.

• Fellow
• ClickUp
• HubSpot
• Jira
• Leapwork
• Moosend
• ProcessMaker
• Wrike
• Zapier
• Zoho Flow

1Fellow

With Fellow’s meeting automations, you cover the key actions you’d normally do manually before and after meetings. These include canceling meetings that don’t have agendas, reminding team members to contribute to agendas, and sending summaries after the meeting. Plus, with Fellow’s Meeting Guidelines, you automatically get prompted to clearly define your meeting purpose and give ample notice before meetings. These guidelines will tell you if you’re trying to book a meeting on no-meeting days or too close to other meetings as well.

Key features: 

• Cancelation of meetings with no agendas
• Agenda contribution reminders for team members
• Post-meeting recaps
• Prompts to define meeting purposes
• Team member notifications before meetings
• Measures to avoid booking too many meetings

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per user per month for a maximum of 10 people
• Pro: $7 per user per month for a maximum of 25 people
• Business: $10 per user per month for a minimum of 10 people
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for a minimum of 10 people

Learn more about Fellow’s pricing plans. 

2ClickUp

You can use over 100 pre-built automations within ClickUp or build your own. The tasks that ClickUp automates include task assignment, comment posting, and status movement. There are roughly 50 native ClickUp integrations and approximately 45 ClickUp integrations built by other platforms.

Key features:

• Pre-built and customized automations
• Automatic task assignment, status changes and comment posting
• Roughly 100 integrations with other platforms

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per user per month
• Unlimited: $7 per user per month
• Business: $12 per user per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

3HubSpot

With HubSpot, sales and marketing teams get customizable task automation features for managing email campaigns, routine tasks, lead scoring and notifications, and deal creation. You can also automate A/B testing on sales sequences and quickly get helpful data on which sequences secure the most deals. HubSpot also offers sales automation integrations with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

Key features:

• Customizable email, task, lead, and deal automations
• A/B sales sequence testing
• Sales automations integrated with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

Pricing:

• Free tools: $0 per month
• Marketing Hub Starter: $18 per month
• Marketing Hub Professional: $800 per month
• Marketing Hub Enterprise: $3,600 per month
• Sales Hub Starter: $18 per month
• Sales Hub Professional: $450 per month
• Sales Hub Enterprise: $1,200 per month
• CRM Suite Starter: $20 per month

4Jira

With Jira, you get access to hundreds of automation templates that you can use for DevOps, business, Slack, and more. You can apply your automations to one or several projects or across your whole organization. Popular Jira automations include the generation of daily Slack summaries and the assigning of issues to their creator.

Key features:

• Leverage over 100 automation templates
• Automate one project, many projects, or your entire organization
• Create daily Slack summaries and assign issues to their creators

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per user per month
• Standard: $8.15 per user per month
• Premium: $16 per user per month
• Enterprise: Starts at $141,000 per year for teams of over 800 people

5Leapwork

The quality assurance platform Leapwork powers task automation across all your organization’s technologies and applications. You’ll build your automations visually and take the manual work out of testing user interfaces. Plus, with Leapwork, you can transform common workflow steps into subflows you can reuse time and again.

Key features:

• Visually build automations for all your software platforms and technologies
• Automatically test your technologies’ user interfaces
• Save common workflow steps as reusable subflows

Pricing: You must contact Leapwork for a customized quote, though a 14-day free trial is available.

6Moosend

You can use Moosend to build automated marketing workflows from scratch or leverage pre-built workflows. These workflows can start from just one trigger or many, and you can incorporate “and” and “or” conditions to broaden your automations. Common Moosend use cases include automatically sending emails to customers who have abandoned their online shopping carts and offering VIP privileges to big spenders. 

Key features:

• Pre-built and custom multi-trigger automations
• “And” and “or” workflow conditions
• Ability to automatically send marketing emails

Pricing:

• Free trial: Free for 30 days
• Pro: $9 per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

7ProcessMaker

This AI-powered task automation platform covers small recurring tasks as well as your most important workflows. For example, the ProcessMaker AI includes a decision-making engine and a tool for extracting and classifying data from your documents. ProcessMaker also integrates with your current platforms to unify your information and maximize your efficiency.

Key features:

• Decision-making engine
• Document data extraction and classification
• Third-party integrations to centralize key information

Pricing:

• Platform: $1,475 per month
• Pro and Enterprise+: Custom pricing

8Wrike

The automation tools within Wrike alert you when potential obstacles to your project timelines arise. Wrike also assesses your tasks’ status, risk, and priority to move them to their proper next places within your workflows. Whenever Wrike notifies you about task updates, new projects, or changes in risk, the platform also distributes resources and sets up approval processes.

Key features:

• Notifies you of potential project roadblocks
• Moves tasks within workflows
• Distributes resources and enacts approvals

Pricing:

• Team: $9.80 per user per month
• Business: $24.80 per user per month
• Enterprise and Pinnacle: Custom pricing

9Zapier

Zapier’s visual workflow builder includes tools for automating many tasks simultaneously alongside filters for requiring certain conditions to be met before automations run. You can also schedule your automations to run at the ideal time for your organization and take different actions according to if/then rules.

Key features:

• Concurrently automate more than one task
• Set filters to ensure automations run in proper conditions
• Schedule automations and set if/then rules

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month
• Starter: $19.99 per month
• Professional: $49 per month
• Team: $69 per month
• Company: Custom pricing 

10Zoho Flow

With Zoho Flow, your emails, records, and reports will sync seamlessly across all the software platforms your organization uses. Zoho Flow also includes collaboration tools through which your team can work together on building workflows that integrate all your organization’s applications. Pre-built workflows are available as well.

Key features:

• Integrate all software platforms across your organization
• Automatically sync reports, emails, and records across applications
• Use pre-built workflows or build your own collaboratively

Price:

• Standard: $10 per month
• Professional: $24 per month

Parting advice

Task automation platforms cover all kinds of business needs, ranging from internal communication to in-depth marketing campaigns. Whether you use them to cut tedious tasks out of your team’s days or power your entire email marketing strategy, they save you invaluable time. If anything, task automation platforms are a project management essential for busy teams. Don’t forget to use Fellow and its meeting automation tools to plan and act on your most important form of real-time, team-wide personal communication without any hassle!