10 Best Workflow Automation Tools in 2026

Brandfolder is an enterprise digital asset management (DAM) platform that helps organizations store, organize, and distribute brand assets across teams and external partners. Now part of Smartsheet, Brandfolder provides a centralized hub for managing logos, images, videos, documents, and other creative content while maintaining brand consistency. The platform features intelligent asset organization with AI-powered tagging, advanced search capabilities, and customizable taxonomies. Brandfolder enables teams to create curated collections, set permissions and expiration dates, and track asset usage analytics. Integration with creative tools like Adobe Creative Cloud and Figma streamlines workflows from asset creation to distribution. Brandfolder supports brand portals and public-facing asset libraries where external stakeholders can access approved materials. The platform includes built-in image editing, format conversion, and templating capabilities that allow non-designers to create on-brand content while maintaining brand guidelines.

Kafka moves data at massive scale. When millions of events per second need to flow between systems reliably, Kafka provides the highway. Producers publish messages, consumers read them, and nothing gets lost even when systems crash. Topics organize streams of data with configurable retention. Consumer groups enable parallel processing. The distributed architecture means no single point of failure and virtually unlimited throughput. Kafka has become the backbone of modern data architectures. Real-time analytics, event-driven microservices, change data capture—any use case involving high-volume streaming likely runs on Kafka.

Atlan is a modern, cloud-native data workspace and active metadata platform that helps data teams discover, understand, and collaborate on data assets. Named a Leader in Gartners 2026 Magic Quadrant for Data & Analytics Governance, Atlan offers automated lineage, data quality monitoring, and embedded collaboration features designed for modern data stacks.

Evisort, now acquired by Workday, offers a complete, AI-native platform for comprehensive contract lifecycle management (CLM). It leverages the first large language model built specifically for contracts to help businesses gain deep insights into their agreements. The platform is designed for savvy contracting professionals at global brands, enabling them to surface risks by automatically identifying and fixing problematic language, spot opportunities by finding untapped revenue potential and cost savings, and track obligations to manage relationships and improve forecasting. Evisort aims to drive value across businesses by automating compliance, customizing business processes, and eliminating manual effort, leading to significant ROI. It provides document generation capabilities, workflows, and AI in a user-friendly interface. Evisort differentiates itself by building proprietary AI, including its contract-specific LLM, for better accuracy, security, and control, rather than licensing generic third-party AI. This makes it a future-proof investment for companies looking to enhance their contract intelligence and management.

Bynder is an enterprise digital asset management (DAM) platform that helps global brands organize, manage, and distribute their creative content across teams and channels. Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DAM, Bynder serves marketing teams at companies who need centralized control over brand assets with powerful search, collaboration, and distribution capabilities. The platform features AI-powered asset management with automatic tagging, smart search, and content recommendations. Bynder supports the entire content lifecycle from creation through distribution, including creative project workflows, approval processes, and brand guidelines enforcement. The customizable brand portals enable controlled sharing with external partners and agencies. Bynder integrates with 145+ marketing tools out of the box, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, HubSpot, and major CMS platforms. The platform includes analytics for tracking asset usage and ROI, helping teams understand which content performs best and where gaps exist in their asset library.

Alfred replaces the basic Mac Spotlight with something far more powerful. Type a few characters to launch apps, find files, search the web, or run custom workflows that automate your daily tasks. Workflows are where Alfred shines. Chain actions together—look up a word, convert currencies, manage snippets, control apps—triggered by simple keywords. The community shares thousands of ready-made workflows. Power users on Mac consider Alfred essential. Once you experience searching and acting on everything from the keyboard, reaching for the mouse feels slow.

Rippling manages HR, IT, and finance in one platform. Employee systems unified—everything from payroll to device management. The integration is the strength. The management is unified. The automation connects systems. Companies wanting unified employee systems choose Rippling for connected HR and IT.

Lambda runs your code without servers to manage. Upload a function, configure a trigger, and AWS handles scaling, patching, and availability. You pay only when code executes. Functions respond to HTTP requests, process queue messages, react to database changes—any event can trigger execution. The runtime handles everything except your business logic. Lambda changed how developers think about backends. Instead of maintaining servers, you write functions and let AWS handle the rest.

Smartling is an AI-powered translation system that provides end-to-end localization and translation services. It leverages AI to select appropriate translation models, apply context automatically, and continuously improve quality as content scales. The platform is designed to unify translation efforts across various content types, including marketing content, websites, help centers, learning & development materials, and software/mobile applications. Smartling offers extensive automation capabilities, integrating with over 50 pre-built connectors, APIs, and a translation proxy to connect with existing tech stacks. It centralizes translation efforts with unlimited users and in-platform collaboration tools, while also providing built-in review workflows, quality scoring, and reporting. The service combines AI translation with professional linguists and project managers to review output, manage exceptions, and guarantee quality, offering a starting cost of $0.005 per word and claiming significant cost savings and automation rates. It is suitable for global brands looking to streamline their localization process, reduce costs, and accelerate content delivery across multiple languages and regions. Smartling supports a wide range of file types and content formats, including JSON, XML, HTML, Microsoft Word, Excel, PDFs, and mobile app strings. It integrates with popular CMSs (WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, Contentful), CRMs (Salesforce, Zendesk), marketing tools (Marketo, HubSpot), and code repositories (GitHub, Bitbucket). The platform also boasts strong security and compliance, adhering to PCI, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, HITRUST, and various ISO certifications.

Zapier is an AI orchestration platform that automates workflows between 7,000+ apps with Zaps, Tables, Forms, and Zapier MCP for connecting data, automating tasks, and building custom integrations without code.