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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

This is cool, but I feel like Zapier, IFTTT and their open source equivalents have moved far past Yahoo Pipes. How do you see this stacking up?

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They do a fraction of the data manipulation options available from pipes and they require connectors being custom developed, plus they limit you on result delivery, which cannot be pulled.

This is mostly out of date -- Zapier has lots of ways to do this without custom connectors:

* Formatter -- https://zapier.com/help/formatter/

* Filters -- https://zapier.com/help/filter/

* Webhooks -- https://zapier.com/help/webhooks/

* Code (JS/Py) -- https://zapier.com/help/code/ or https://zapier.com/help/code-python/

Plus if you want -- those custom developed apps can be added by anyone, for free: https://zapier.com/developer/.

No those don't do at all what pipe did. First of all, everything needs development. Secondly, webhooks and all that stuff are push only.

The real value of pipes was to pull data out from any compatible client. Wonderful for processing data and have it pulled from a feed reader, not so as a trigger engine, for that zapier abd ifttt are better, but to straight out pulling data from a reader processing websites on demand, none of those could replace pipes.

Agree Zapier is pretty awesome and pretty powerful.

(I have no affiliation, just a happy customer)

Do you know what the most fully featured OSS equivelants are?

I've been trying to find such a system that can read from RSS feeds and post to a Facebook Company Page, but to no avail.

Huginn is one option: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

As far as I Kno, IFTTT only supports simple if a: then b triggers, you cannot have multiple inputs or outputs. Do zapier or others improve on this?

Yeah, Zapier has multi-step workflows https://zapier.com/learn/getting-started-guide/multi-step-za....

This doesn't include if true do A else do B logic right? I see they have filters, maybe this can be abused somehow?

I'm interested in the answer to this questions myself :) For me, this is about the ease of use of the visual programming interface, and the focus on feeds to enable the pipe concept. I do not see this in the same space as Zapier and IFTTT, but I might be wrong!

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