DEV Community: Dessi

Top 5 Inventory Management Tools for 2024 and How to Integrate Them in a Single App

Dessi — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 11:16:45 +0000

Inventory management is a critical operation in the retail, manufacturing, and e-commerce industries. Inefficiencies can lead to overstocking or under-stocking, resulting in high storage costs or lost sales. There's also the risk of inaccurate inventory tracking causing errors and inefficiencies. Without clear visibility into inventory trends, businesses may struggle to make informed decisions for production planning and demand forecasting. A good inventory management app facilitates smoother, accurate, and cost-effective business operations.

In this article, we explore some of the most popular inventory management tools available in 2024. And how they can be integrated into a single application for a comprehensive and unified management experience.

The increasing importance of inventory management tools

Consider a growing e-commerce business that is struggling to keep track of inventory levels manually as orders increase. Without an inventory management tool, they lack real-time visibility into stock levels, leading to inefficiencies, customer dissatisfaction, and potential revenue loss.

Inventory management tools are no longer a luxury but a necessity for businesses, regardless of their size. They help track stock levels, manage orders, and provide valuable insights into inventory trends.

Industries such as retail, manufacturing, and e-commerce are showing are increasingly adopting these tools. Accurate inventory tracking is crucial in retail to avoid overstocking or under-stocking products, which can result in increased storage costs or lost sales opportunities. For manufacturing businesses, effective inventory management ensures the availability of the right materials and components for production, minimizing delays and optimizing resource allocation. In the e-commerce industry, where order volumes can fluctuate rapidly, inventory management tools provide real-time visibility into stock levels, enabling prompt fulfillment of customer orders and avoiding stockouts.

If your business operates in one of these industries, here is a list of inventory management tools to streamline your operations and improve efficiency.

Top 5 inventory management tools for 2024

There are many inventory management tools on the market, and each of them have unique features and capabilities. To make your decision-making easier, we've created a shortlist of what we think are the top five tools:

Inventory management software	Pricing from
https://www.zoho.com/inventory/	Free 1 user, $39 USD/month for 2 users
https://cin7.com/	$349 USD/month for 3 users
https://www.fishbowlinventory.com/	$329 USD/month for 2 users
https://www.sortly.com/	Free 1 user, $49 USD/month standard for 2 users
https://katanamrp.com/	$129 USD/month for 1 user

Top Zoho Inventory features

Zoho Inventory is an all-in-one inventory management system that offers a wide range of features such as multichannel selling, order management, and inventory control.

Item management: Supports various tasks such as item grouping and bundling to efficiently organize inventory by categorizing similar items together. Zoho provides multi-warehouse management to operate in multiple locations or have multiple storage facilities. Serial and batch tracking keep track of individual items or batches of items.
Customer lifecycle: Lifecycle features include sales order management - the process of receiving and managing customer orders, invoicing, and packaging and shipping. Invoicing manages generating and sending invoices to customers for the products or services they have purchased, and packaging and shipping generates packing slips, sources real-time shipping rates, and prints labels.
Vendor relations: Manages vendor price lists for regular vendors, and automatically updates prices. It also includes a purchase order and billing solution to maintain your purchase order history and keep track of unpaid bills. Additionally, it handles back orders and drop shipments, allowing you to create backorders or initiate drop shipments.

Top Cin7 Inventory features

Cin7 is a unified, automated inventory management platform that provides real-time stock visibility, enabling you to make informed decisions.

Multi-channel selling: Cin7 allows you to manage sales across various channels, such as online marketplaces and physical stores, from a single platform. This streamlines order management and ensures accurate stock updates across all channels.
Order management: You can efficiently handle the entire order lifecycle, from order creation to fulfillment and shipping. It includes features like order tracking, pick and pack, and shipping label generation.
B2B e-commerce: Cin7 provides a B2B e-commerce platform that allows you to create custom portals for your wholesale customers. This enables seamless ordering, personalized pricing, and easy management of customer-specific catalogs.

Top Fishbowl Inventory features

Fishbowl offers advanced inventory tracking and warehouse management features, making it a favorite among manufacturing and wholesale businesses.

The top three features of Fishbowl Inventory are:

Advanced inventory tracking and warehouse management: Fishbowl offers robust features for tracking inventory in real time and managing warehouse operations efficiently. This includes functionalities such as stock level monitoring, inventory transfers, and barcode scanning.
Manufacturing and wholesale focus: Fishbowl is particularly popular among manufacturing and wholesale businesses. It provides specialized features and tools to streamline production processes, manage bills of materials (BOM), handle work orders, and track costs associated with manufacturing.
Integration capabilities: Fishbowl offers deep integrations with various accounting software, e-commerce platforms, and shipping carriers. This enables seamless data synchronization and workflow automation, reducing manual data entry and improving overall efficiency.

Top Sortly Inventory features

Sortly is a visual inventory management tool that allows you to organize items with photos, QR labels, and custom tags.

Visual inventory management: Sortly allows you to organize items using photos, QR labels, and custom tags. This visual approach makes it easy to locate and identify items quickly, improving overall inventory management efficiency.
Customizable fields and categories: Sortly provides the flexibility to create custom fields and categories to suit your specific inventory management needs. You can tailor the system to match your organizational structure and workflow, ensuring a seamless integration with your existing processes.
Real-time tracking and notifications: Sortly offers real-time tracking of inventory movements and updates. You can receive notifications when items are added, moved, or removed from your inventory, enabling you to stay informed about inventory changes and take necessary actions promptly.

Top Katana Inventory features

Katana is an intuitive tool designed for modern manufacturers. It offers visual production planning, real-time inventory tracking, and more.

Visual production planning: Katana offers a visual approach to production planning, allowing you to easily visualize and manage your manufacturing processes. This feature helps optimize production schedules, allocate resources efficiently, and streamline workflows.
Real-time inventory tracking: It provides real-time visibility into your inventory levels, allowing you to monitor stock levels, track materials, and manage orders effectively. This feature helps prevent stockouts, minimize overstocking, and optimize inventory management.
Intuitive user interface: Katana is designed with a user-friendly interface that simplifies the inventory management process. Its intuitive layout and navigation make it easy to navigate through different features and functionalities, enhancing the user experience and productivity.

To build or to buy an inventory management tool?

The decision to "build versus buy" is a critical one when it comes to choosing an inventory management tool.

Building a custom inventory management app allows you to tailor the solution to your unique business requirements, ensuring a perfect fit for your inventory management processes. Unlike off-the-shelf solutions, a custom app gives you full control over features, functionalty, and the user interface. You can customize the app to address specific challenges or unique aspects of your business. Additionally, a custom app provides ongoing support and updates and as your business grows, your inventory management needs may change. With a custom app, you can easily incorporate new features or modify existing ones to meet the changing demands of your business.

But it can also be a complex endeavor, as it requires seamless integration with existing systems, real-time data updates, and user-friendly interfaces. One of the main challenges is integrating the app with various existing systems and software that are already in place within the organization. Another challenge is ensuring real-time data updates and synchronization across different modules of the app.

Appsmith can help bridge the gap and integrate your inventory management tools

Appsmith is a low-code application platform that allows you to quickly and easily build your inventory management applications. It provides a click-and-drag interface for placing UI widgets such as buttons, tables, and form inputs. Additionally, it can connect to a wide range of data sources, including popular inventory management software.

Using Appsmith, you can choose the inventory management tools that work best for you and consolidate the data they collect into a single interface. This saves time and reduces the confusion that comes with juggling multiple platforms. You can also easily develop custom extensions to add capabilities to existing platforms without having to rip-and-replace an entire system.

Key features in Appsmith to build a single view of your inventory app

Custom Integrations and Widgets

Inventory management systems often need to integrate with other tools and software. Custom integrations and widgets allow the app to be tailored to the specific needs of the business, enabling seamless connectivity with other applications in use.

Versioning with Git (Unlimited Repos)

Versioning is important to track changes in the inventory database over time. Git versioning, especially with unlimited repositories, allows for efficient management of changes, rollback in case of errors, and collaboration among multiple users.

Granular Access Controls by Roles and Attributes

This is crucial for an inventory management app as it ensures that users have the appropriate level of access based on their roles and attributes. This helps in maintaining data security and preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Audit Logs

Tracking and recording all activities within the inventory management system is essential for accountability, compliance, and troubleshooting. Audit logs provide a detailed history of user actions, changes, and system events.

User Provisioning and Group Sync through SCIM

Simplifying user onboarding and ensuring that access permissions are automatically synchronized through SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) helps in maintaining an up-to-date and secure user directory.

Start building your inventory management application with Appsmith

Easily get started with your inventory application by forking the "Inventory Management Dashboard" template, which gives you an immediate head start. You can also follow our documentation to create your application from scratch.

Our free cloud-hosted community version is perfect for beginners. As your project grows and demands more customization and support, you can upgrade to our Business or Enterprise plans. To see if our Enterprise plan suits your use cases, you can chat with a team member today.

Five Free Open-Source Database Managers for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and More

Dessi — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:53:12 +0000

Database managers provide a user-friendly interface for interacting with your data as an alternative to managing and querying your databases from the command line. This article lists some of the most popular general-purpose database managers that are open source or free to use.

The database managers listed in this article support most popular databases including MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Snowflake, Redis, MongoDB, SQLite, Google BigQuery, and Firebase.

Database management software use cases and advantages

The most common use cases for database managers are:

Importing and exporting data between databases
Importing and exporting data to and from files (often for backup purposes)
Manually editing and correcting data
Comparing databases and verifying backups
Managing permissions

Database managers are designed to make databases more convenient to administer and query. They save time by providing shortcuts to otherwise complex tasks and reduce errors by providing forms for inputting data, making it:

Much easier for non-technical users who are not familiar with SQL syntax
Much easier for technical users who don't want to have to write and debug SQL syntax
Faster and more secure when connecting to databases with credentials management
Easier to get an overview of a database's contents, users, and permissions
Easier to see useful information like query execution time and the size of query responses, helping you optimize your queries
Easier to debug your complex queries and spot problems with them before you run them with syntax highlighting and linting

It's worth noting that, while general-purpose database managers are better for most users than working on the command line, they’re not always the best tool for non-technical users working with important data — more on that later.

Managed databases are not database managers

It's easy to get "database managers" and "managed databases" confused, for obvious reasons. Managed databases are a different product to database managers entirely: they are a service that hosts and maintains your database servers for you, so that you only have to worry about the data inside them. Managed databases are a great way to outsource some of your infrastructure overhead if you don't want to host database servers yourself. Examples include MongoDB Atlas, Amazon RDS, Azure SQL Database, and Google Cloud Databases.

Regardless of whether you are self-hosting or using a managed database, you can use the database managers on this list to connect to it.

Comparing five popular free open-source database managers

Below, we compare five free-to-use, open-source database managers, including the pros, cons, and what databases they support.

OmniDB: Firebird, MySQL/MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL Server

OmniDB is a collaborative open-source database manager that’s available as a hosted version or as a stand-alone app. The application is built keeping simplicity in mind, making it one of the most user-friendly database managers.

OmniDB supports multiple tabs, so you can connect to multiple databases in one session and write clean code. Its smart SQL editor offers code linting and auto-complete.

Use cases: OmniDB is perfect for collaborating with a team or for remotely managing databases.

Pros:

Support for multiple databases like MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL
Support for SSH terminal
Monitoring dashboard: it provides a graphical interface to monitor all your configured units using Python scripting and other configuration files
Auto-complete
Dark theme support

Cons:

No support for NoSQL databases

HeidiSQL: MySQL/MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, InterBase, and Firebird

HeidiSQL is extremely user-friendly. It is also one of the most capable database managers and enables you to create tables, create logs, and manage users on MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and SQLite databases and other database technologies.

You can export your data into formats like CSV, Excel, HTML, SQL, LaTeX, wikitext, and PHP arrays. You can also edit multiple tables together by using the bulk edit option. Additionally, it includes monitoring tools that let you kill processes that may have hung or are impacting your database servers.

Use cases: This is the best database manager for the Windows operating system and is popular with developers.

Pros:

Supports multiple database technologies including SQLite
Exports data in multiple formats

Cons:

HeidiSQL's UI is minimal, which may not be to everyone's tastes
No support for NoSQL databases
Windows only

Studio 3T: MongoDB

Studio 3T, formerly known as RoboMongo and Robo 3T, is an open-source GUI client for MongoDB. The application is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Studio 3T is one of the most popular projects on GitHub, which means there's an experienced community to help you out. Since it uses the default MongoDB shell, it is very light on resource usage, so running complex queries is less impactful on server performance.

Use cases: Few database managers are dedicated to MongoDB, so choices are limited if you want something tailored to this database platform — this is the best of them.

Pros:

Auto completion
MongoDB shell
One of the fastest database managers

Cons:

The UI becomes cluttered sometimes

Navicat: MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, SQLite, and MongoDB

Navicat is another powerful database management and design application that supports multiple drivers and databases. It comes as a standalone application for Mac, Windows, and Linux and allows you to manage many different databases including MySQL, Redis, SQL Server, SQLite, Oracle and PostgreSQL.

This application comes with a lot of extra functionality like exporting data to Excel, stored procedures, scheduling, and data transfer. One of the most interesting features is data transfer, as it allows you to transfer tables from one database to another even if they’re not on the same server.

Use cases: Navicat is perfect for developers who work on different operating systems or with different database technologies and want a consistent set of tools.

Pros:

Support for multiple databases and drivers
Data transfer functionality
Available on all platforms
Redis support!

Cons:

It’s not open source, but it is incredibly popular and free licenses are available for open-source projects
We’ve included it here because it’s one of the few database managers with Redis support and because we think it’s worth highlighting that it isn’t open source, as it’s not always clear to readers evaluating their options

phpMyAdmin: MySQL, MariaDB

phpMyAdmin is the stalwart of free open-source database managers. It’s been around forever, and it’s just plain good at what it does — providing a graphical interface for fully managing every aspect of MySQL databases. It’s built using PHP and runs in the browser.

Use cases: phpMyAdmin is widely used by web hosting companies to provide interfaces to their managed databases and developers who want a simple tool for managing their MySQL/MariaDB databases.

Pros:

Fully manage every aspect of MySQL from users and permissions to databases and tables
Runs in a browser for remote management and remote query execution

Cons:

Can be annoying to set up, especially on a server serving multiple PHP applications with different requirements
The interface is a bit utilitarian

What about the rest?

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list. There are many other database management software packages out there, including MySQL Workbench, DBeaver, and pgAdmin. We’ve chosen these database tools because they cover the most common database systems and use cases, but if you find they aren’t meeting your needs, be sure to explore further or consider building your own database user interface — it’s easier than you think.

Don’t put your data at risk: when you definitely should NOT use a database manager

For most users, database managers are far more convenient than manually writing queries. However, they are designed for technical team members to maintain and interact with database systems, not for end users to perform data entry:

Database managers require an understanding of how databases work under the hood
They have no guardrails and limited data validation, which means they let you make mistakes
They have general-purpose interfaces that are not optimized for specific tasks

Granting users access to vital data using database managers can easily lead to them accidentally deleting or corrupting data, and if they don't notice they've done so, business can be interrupted and the whole database can be rendered valueless. Think about how easy it would be for a tired (or careless) user to do the following with a database manager:

Accidentally drop a table
Accidentally delete a row ID and break relationships
Access data they shouldn't see (risking a GDPR violation)
Accidentally disclose their database credentials to a phishing attack

Any one of these happening, just once, would be catastrophic to your business. Manually managing each user's database permissions is not enough to protect against this, as if you're granting access to many users with different levels of access it's still far too easy to make a mistake. You should not be granting users direct database access for the purposes of managing your e-commerce system, CRM, or internal records, or for other common data management tasks.

App platforms are the tool you use to build your own interfaces for your data. You can build interfaces that enable safe and fast data entry and, in many cases, add automation to further speed up your business processes.

App platforms let users interact with your vital data, without the risks

Modern, data-driven businesses cannot risk having their data corrupted or lost due to simple operational mistakes. App platforms like Appsmith allow you to build fully bespoke interfaces to every database mentioned in this article, other platforms like Shopify, Airtable, Snowflake, and Google Sheets, as well as REST and GraphQL APIs by using integrations.

Appsmith solves the security and data reliability issues associated with database managers (whether they are free, open source, or proprietary) by:

Keeping database credentials secure — users authenticate with your app, not your database
Enforcing access and showing your users only the data they should be allowed to see
Optimizing workflows with interfaces tailored to a specific purpose with fields presented in a layout that makes sense to the user and buttons to automate common tasks
Implementing data validation and user guardrails to help prevent accidents from damaging data
Allowing you to present data from multiple sources in the same place, making for reliable transfer of data between systems

You can also build data visualizations and dashboards alongside your data entry interfaces, making Appsmith the perfect tool for handling all of the internal tools for your organization — a single app to integrate all of your business data and processes. All you need to do is connect your database — we even automate the process of building your first data entry forms for you.

You can start building now on our free, cloud-hosted version, or deploy Appsmith to your own infrastructure using Docker.

15+ Best Customer Service Software Platforms for 2024 and How to Integrate Them

Dessi — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:03:43 +0000

The success of your business depends on the satisfaction of your customers, which is sustained by the quality of service you provide. You must be able to support your customers across a growing variety of interactions — from sales channels, to email and helpdesk, realtime chat, and messaging, as well as in person. One customer service tool is often not enough to cover all of the touch points for an enterprise and its patrons.

This article explains the most important enterprise use cases for customer support platforms and lists the best customer service software tools available for 2024. It includes contact center, helpdesk, project management, and chatbot tools that your customer service staff can use to enhance your customer experience, and it shows how you can best leverage these tools to provide a single customer view so that all of your customer data is readily available in one place.

Reviewing the top customer service software platforms used by successful support teams

Your customers need to be able to contact your business and receive a timely response. They may wish to ask a question about your product before making a purchase, follow up on an order, or solve a problem with a previous purchase. Addressing customers’ issues quickly and accurately is paramount if you want their continued business and to maintain the good reputation of your company.

Doing this manually is a non-starter. Even in the pre-digital age, there was always a system in place to streamline managing customer interactions: rolodexes, printed invoice and customer feedback templates, carbon copies, tickler files, etc. Fax, telephone, and pen-and-paper mechanisms were always being iterated on and improved, just like their digital successors.

Below we review the best customer service software for a variety of enterprise use cases and look at what they can do to improve your customer support experience.

Contact center software comparison

Contact center software centralizes your communications with your customers. This category of support tool provides features including multichannel communication that lets you consolidate your interactions across voice/phone, email, chat, and social media into one location, call and chat routing so your agents receive enquiries based on their availability and specialty, and communication logging so you can inspect ****interactions and continually improve your processes.

Ideally, contact center software will also provide or integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) software for storing logs, maintaining customer details, and scheduling follow-ups. Increasingly, contact center platforms are also including AI assistants that can respond to customers looking for basic information, allowing your support team to focus on the customers who need the most help.

Contact center software	Pricing from
Talkdesk	$75 per user per month
Intercom	$39 per user per month, 14-day free trial
Genesys	$75 per month, 14-day free trial
Five9	$149 per month

Top Talkdesk features

Advanced routing: Automate call distribution and add interactive voice prompts to improve efficiency
Integration with business and customer support tools: Connect with Zendesk, Salesforce, and other popular support tools
Monitoring and reporting: Monitor calls in real time and view analytics

Top Intercom features

Helpdesk: Provide your customers with a combined contact center, helpdesk, and knowledge base
AI chatbot: AI support agents can help your customers by learning from your support content
Proactive support: Pre-empt common customer questions with automated messages and onboarding to reduce agent workloads

Top Genesys features

Skills-based intelligent routing: Automatically categorize and route support queries to the agents with the most appropriate skills to resolve them
AI automation: Provides AI-driven tools including chatbots, predictive engagement, and voicebots
Customer journey management: Track your customers through the support process and collect analytics to ensure success

Top Five9 features

Agent call scripts: Ensure consistent messaging with scripts tailored to each call
Do not call (DNC) compliance: Comply with regulations for your inbound and outbound communications
Call quality monitoring: Monitor and guide your agents during calls to make sure your customers are getting the best possible experience

Ticketing and helpdesk support tools comparison

Ticketing and helpdesk software receives, stores, and organizes incoming service requests (referred to individually as tickets) and allows support teams to respond through a variety of communication channels. Customer support platforms in the helpdesk category should provide functions for ticket management so agents can see the status of enquiries and make sure everything is taken care of, workflow automation to reduce the number of repetitive tasks, and reporting and analytics so that you can measure the time it takes to respond and whether there are issues that are going unresolved.

Many ticketing and helpdesk platforms are also expanding to provide knowledge base and self-service portals. These allow you to publish documentation, so that customers who want to seek their own answers are able to, and publish responses to enquiries so that they are publicly visible to others who have the same question. Both of these tools can drastically reduce load on your support staff if implemented properly.

Ticketing/helpdesk software	Pricing from
Zendesk	$19 per agent per month, 14-day free trial
Freshworks	$18 per agent per month, 21-day free trial
Jira Service Management	$21 per agent per month, 7-day free trial
HubSpot Service Hub	$450 for up to 5 agents per month, 14-day free trial
Zoho Desk	$20 per agent per month, 15-day free trial

Top Zendesk features

Messaging and live chat: Allow your customers and support team to chat in real time
Voice: Offer your customers phone support via internet or telephone
Community forums: Facilitate self-service and allow your customers to help each other

Top Freshdesk features

Ticket automation: Automatically assign tasks based on agent skills and workload, and use scenarios to perform multiple actions with a single click
Customer self-service: Provide a knowledge base and self-service portal to customers who want to seek their own answers independently
Customization: Build fully customized, cloud-hosted customer portals tailored to your brand and requirements

Top Jira Service Management features

IT service management (ITSM) capabilities: Tailored to IT service management, connecting IT, development, and business teams to aid collaboration
DevOps integration: Integrate with development workflows for rapid issue resolution
Templates: Get started quickly with pre-built templates for request types, workflows, and other components for a complete service experience

Top HubSpot features

CRM: Integrate customer data from marketing, sales, customer service, and other sources all into one dashboard
Website builder: Quickly create simple business pages with a drag-and-drop website builder
Meeting scheduling: Add links to a meeting scheduler on your emails and websites that syncs to your calendar

Top Zoho Desk features

Service-level agreements (SLAs): Define your commitment to your customers and set different response times for different criteria
Sentiment analysis: AI scans support threads to determine whether customers are satisfied (or not), allowing you to far more efficiently track customer success
Advanced response editor: Respond quickly to your customers using pre-written snippets and keyboard shortcuts

Project management platform comparison

Project management platforms are used internally to plan and track the implementation of projects — for example, to track training, process optimization, or knowledge base development. Project management tools should provide task and subtask tracking, organization and categorization, scheduling, and resource management so that your team can keep all of the information related to a project in one place. They should facilitate collaboration and, like the other tools, provide analytics and reporting so that you can make sure your team is hitting the right KPIs.

Project management platform	Pricing from
Asana	Free
Trello	Free
Monday.com	Free
Basecamp	$15 per user per month, 30-day free trial

Top Asana features

Project views: Organize your work by list, calendar/timeline, Gantt chart, or Kanban board
Custom fields: Sort, filter, and report on custom data entry fields
API integrations: Connect other platforms to Asana to interact with data in it

Top Trello features

Butler automation: Automate tasks and workflows
Power-ups: Connect Trello to other services like Google Sheets, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and more
Templates: Start with a blueprint based on the successful workflows of others

Top Monday.com features

Modular building blocks: No/low-code components for easy customization of your project management system
Powerful automation: Flexible automation options to improve productivity
Widgets: User interface components that make project status more visible, including tables, overviews, and board updates

Top Basecamp features

Card table: A unique variation on the Kanban board that is ideal for tracking workflows and monitoring task progression
Hill charts: An unambiguous representation of project status that avoids unclear percentage-based measures
Lineup: Shows all project statuses on a single timeline for an overview of all work in progress

Chatbot and conversational AI software comparison

Chatbots have been around for a while and had a poor reputation for providing canned responses that weren’t always helpful. This has changed with the arrival of conversational AI platforms that respond in natural language.

Traditional chatbots can follow predefined rules and scripts to respond to enquiries, allowing them to guide users and provide broad information. Conversational AI does much more than this, intelligently interpreting your customers’ questions using natural language processing (NLP), pulling information from your own documentation to construct the right answer, and implementing machine learning (ML) so that it can evolve its responses based on new information.

Chatbots and conversational AI let you scale your customer support processes. Often they can handle a large proportion of incoming enquiries, allowing your agents to focus on the most important, high-value customers and tasks.

Chatbot software	Pricing from
Chatfuel	$14.39 for 500 conversations, free trial for first bot
Manychat	Free
Tars	Price on enquiry
Botsify	$49 for 2 chatbots, 14-day free trial

Top Chatfuel features

Multi-agent responses: Multiple AI agent bots can work via a single WhatsApp number, improving response times
Abandoned cart recovery: Send personalized messages to customers to encourage them to complete abandoned purchases
ChatGPT integration: Sell products directly on WhatsApp using ChatGPT bots that can understand customers and complete transactions

Top Manychat features

Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and SMS automation: Cross-platform chatbot that can automatically respond to customer queries
AI assistant: Use AI to help build your automations
Templates: Ready-to-go conversation templates

Top Tars features

Internal business use cases: Provide self-service HR, payroll, and other administrative functions to your staff
Automation consulting: Tars will work with you to design solutions that optimize your workflows
Enterprise-grade security: Tars implements security best practices including zero trust and the principle of least privilege, and is compliant with regulations such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR

Top Botsify features

Drag-and-drop chatbot builder: Botsify allows anyone to easily program a chatbot
Third-party integrations: Connect to Slack, Shopify, Google Sheets, and other services
Agent fallback: Let a human take over if the chatbot fails to resolve the issue or a personal touch is required

Factors to evaluate when choosing a customer support tool

These platforms are often specialized, so one tool is unlikely to do everything you need it to. Therefore, you need to consider the possible side effects of adopting a new tool into your larger workflows. If the tool works well, you will come to rely on it in the long term, moving your data into it and building your processes around it. You must look at the history and reputation of the vendor and make sure that they provide a path to moving your data out of their service — otherwise it will be difficult to migrate to another tool in the future if the quality suffers, the price rises, or its functionality falls behind its competitors.

If your workflows are highly bespoke and rely on custom implementation, take care to avoid technical debt. Relying on workarounds and quick fixes to keep your customer support infrastructure up and running could result in costly ongoing maintenance (or an abrupt halt to your customer service if things fall apart).

You must also think about your future needs: there may be something that a tool doesn't do that you don't need now, but if you’ll need it as your business grows, you should include it in your initial requirements.

Pros and cons of traditional software for enterprise use cases

Some commercial software tools claim to be able to cover all of your customer support needs, but using a single tool comes with some risks. You lose choice and flexibility, you’re locked into their way of doing things, and all of your eggs are in one basket — if the platform experiences a problem, your entire customer support process is dead in the water.

Enterprises are increasingly eschewing the traditional approach of using a single commercial application to host their data and power their businesses. Instead, the trend is towards using multiple software tools and platforms: a combination of in-house software and best-in-class products to fill the specific role they are best suited for. This creates an ecosystem of business tools tailored to how you do things, fitting with the best practices that work for your industry, employees, and customers.

However, integrating multiple customer service tools into one location is much easier said than done. Fortunately, there are tools to help with this.

The best way to connect multiple customer support platforms for a single customer view

Appsmith is a low-code application platform that lets you quickly and easily build your own customer support applications. It provides a click-and-drag interface for placing UI widgets like buttons, tables, and form inputs, and connects to a wide range of data sources including popular customer support platforms. By using Appsmith you can choose the customer support tools that work best for you and unify the data they collect into a single customer support interface.

Applications built with Appsmith can connect to data from your sales, support, helpdesk, and project management software. When a customer request comes in, your customer support team members can find the customer and immediately see all of their interactions with your business across different channels and platforms, as well as the internal status of their enquiry including internal notes. Your agents can then assess, prioritize, and rapidly respond to customer enquiries with up-to-date information.

If there is functionality that you require that isn't provided by a commercial tool, you can implement it yourself. You can use templates to accelerate the early stages of development, and test your Appsmith apps before deployment to ensure reliability.

Appsmith is free and open source with no limitations (you can even host it yourself). For mission-critical applications you can sign up to our Business or Enterprise plans for additional functionality and support.

How to unify and enhance your customer service channels with Appsmith

Companies including AWS, Dropbox, and ByteDance are building their own custom apps with Appsmith. Both small and large businesses are benefiting from being able to integrate their data from the best customer service software and accelerate their customer support with automation and streamlined interfaces.

One popular use case we’ve been assisting our enterprise users with is combining Zendesk and Jira to connect external and internal support tools. This allows support teams to quickly match incoming customer enquiries with actions being taken by their technical teams and provide status updates and problem resolutions with a much shorter turnaround than using the Zendesk and Jira platforms separately.

If you want to see how Appsmith works in action, we've put together a live coding session that shows how you can put together your own customer support solution in hours, not weeks.

The Future of Intent-Driven Design

Dessi — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 11:30:19 +0000

After deciding that intent-driven auto layout with a drag-and-drop interface was the future of Appsmith’s UI-building interface, we made a significant investment of time and energy to overhaul our codebase to support this new, innovative functionality.

While this investment was worth it for the user-experience benefits provided by intent-driven layout alone, this work forms the foundations for something much grander. We are extending the concept of intent-driven design to cover many more aspects of UI-building, from app-level layouts to theming and beyond.
In this article, I look ahead to where we’re taking intent-driven design and our goal to completely redefine the front-end experience in the internal tools space.

Building on the next big thing: app-level layouts

With intent-driven auto layout, Appsmith is now able to assess where you want to put a UI widget on the canvas and place it there — without unnecessary per-pixel adjustment and with sensible reflow across different screen sizes. This allows developers to move quickly when building their UIs without worrying about maintaining complex user interfaces as their applications grow.

This process, however, still requires that you choose the right input type for your data fields and manually drag the corresponding UI widgets, one by one, onto the UI canvas. You have to repeat this over multiple pages for every entity represented in your application. This is still an arduous process and largely unnecessary for many use cases.

The layout and inputs for a given table, and the interface that follows, are largely predictable, so we’re expanding our intent-driven UI system to cover app-level layouts. This system will allow you to select a layout template and automatically populate it with all of the required UI widgets — generating the entire layout for your application, which you then only need to tweak. This is the next step in the automation of UI-building interfaces.

To ensure that we’re enabling our users and improving their app development workflows, we’re conducting ongoing research on a large sample of apps already built on Appsmith, as well as learning about the kinds of apps that developers want to build on the platform in the future. We can then maintain a set of universal layouts that serve as a skeleton for most, if not all, types of applications.

What makes a great app-level layout

Let's look at what makes an effective app layout, starting with an example that we’re all probably familiar with. Gmail is a good example of how the typical email application layout should look and behave on desktop and mobile.

On the desktop version, the navigation menus are on the left side and the list of messages and the message content are on the right. It automatically reflows to one column on mobile with the menus at the bottom. UI elements collapse, and less important UI elements are organized inside menus.

Most email applications like Gmail have the same general layout on desktop: a set of menus on the left and the sequence of messages and content on the right. On mobile, this layout is reflowed to one column containing messages, with the menus on the bottom.

Now let’s look at a different type of layout, using the simple database GUI in Appsmith’s quickstart documentation as an example. For an app like this, you would want a table widget that shows you the exact rows and columns in your back-end database. And you’d probably also want another widget that displays the information for an individual entry that you select and allows you to read and update it.

This general structure would be involved in all database GUIs, so this is worth storing as a template in the set of app-level layouts.

You could imagine similar patterns for other types of applications. Company wikis would need a search bar and an expandable structure of categories, as well as room to load individual articles. And internal social apps might need a menu bar, a place for messages to be displayed in your feed, and basic information about your connections.

By identifying common patterns in applications, building on the examples set by other high-quality applications, and following user intent, Appsmith can automatically create a template with all the widgets that a certain type of application would need already in the right positions. Our users can then efficiently make adjustments and add new widgets to the layout with the existing auto-layout functionality.

Automating beyond positioning: intent-driven theming

The key lesson that I’ve learned with intent-driven auto layout is that it isn’t about adding more knobs to your UI-building interface, but rather making the platform smart enough to do what users want without them having to think about or tinker with knobs at all. Developers usually don’t need or want to control all the widget positioning and sizing decisions in their UI; they just want a good-looking UI.

Before intent-driven auto layout, Appsmith developers had to worry about a long list of attributes for each widget, like its position, dimensions, alignment with other widgets, etc. They would also have to constantly assess the impact of making changes, including factors like:

Are these widgets aligned correctly?
Is this widget the right size?
Is this button centered correctly?
Does this change break the layout on other screen sizes?

Intent-driven auto layout solves this problem, but Appsmith developers still need to worry about similar factors when making stylistic choices. They have to think about things like font family, text size, text color, text emphasis, background colors, border colors, border width, etc. And there are additional questions to consider when defining the style of an application, such as:

What is the tint of the action color?
Why is the border not visible?
Is the text readable?

Again, developers don’t want to control all the tasks needed to make good stylistic choices in their UI; they just want a good-looking UI. So in the same way that we automated the positioning and reflow of widgets on the canvas with auto layouts, we plan to automate stylistic choices in the UI with auto theming.

How would intent-driven theming work?

The idea is simple. We plan to optimize for speed of creation, just like with auto-layouts. The goal is to instantly achieve through automation what would normally take many hours of manual tweaking from a professional designer. We can do this by creating a set of algorithms which replicate the manual work of a capable designer provided with a “seed” color scheme (from a brand, for example).

Ultimately, the user wants a big red button that looks good on their interface. The added knobs to adjust positioning, ordering, sizing, color, etc. often do not help, but are instead obstacles to that goal.

However, the technical solution to achieve this is complex. The algorithms will need to take a default color scheme and computationally generate many different complementary colors. It will also need to intelligently consider things like luminance, chroma, hue, and contrast for colors. And let’s not forget about making good choices with respect to color selection for borders, shadows, fills, text, etc. within widgets. All of this must both look good and not detract from the accessibility of the user interface.

The implementation of this functionality is very complex and still in the research phase at the moment. But if you want to get an idea of how something like this could be done, have a look at these resources for automatically computing contrast and automatically generating complementary colors by “rotating by 180 degrees on the color wheel.”

The goal of intent-driven theming

The majority of UX designs implemented today build on existing work. All design choices, even the most seemingly complex and creative, are the result of applying tried and tested patterns in different combinations. Right now, these patterns are scattered in design manuals, algorithms, and professional designers’ heads.

We’re not trying to compete with the best designers in the world for the most innovative application layouts, as that would be very difficult, if not impossible. Our goal with intent-driven design in Appsmith is to consolidate these proven design patterns into one algorithm so that our users don’t have to spend years studying front-end design to build highly functional, attractive, and responsive applications.

Internal app tools used to be boring — we’re putting them at the cutting edge of features for developers

Once we had decided that we were all-in on intent-driven design, a whole new world of possibilities opened up for the Appsmith platform. Instead of throwing more and more complexity and customization at our users, we realized that the solution should be the exact opposite: reduce complexity as much as possible and make our UI-building interface smart enough to implement the “right” design choices automatically.

We’re interested to hear what you think about our work in intent-driven design and our future plans for the Appsmith platform — both as developers and as end users. We also hope that our discussion about some of the steps and missteps taken during our development process is useful to other development teams.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or your own developer story to share, be sure to join our community or see these new features in action by signing up for the cloud-hosted version of Appsmith.

The Importance of Design Thinking Early in the Development Process

Dessi — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 09:17:08 +0000

Software development is a complex process, involving interlinking components that depend and build on each other to form a functional application. Having to go back and rebuild foundational components in an application has a detrimental effect on the development process, wasting the resources invested in existing work and potentially undermining ongoing work. To avoid this, you should carefully consider the design of an application, including how users interact with it, before your first code commit.

Of course, perfection doesn't always happen the first time around (actually, it never does). New use cases and improved methodologies will always arise after the outset of development, as well as far into the lifecycle of a mature product. Long-lived, popular applications will need to go back to the drawing board at some point to revise core functionality to keep up with user expectations.

As I discussed in the first article in this three-part series, we had identified that Appsmith's UI-building interface had fallen into the same trap as many other internal-apps platforms — it was easy to use, but building out user interfaces (UIs) was a tedious process, especially for users wanting to focus on their app logic rather than micromanaging UIs across different screen sizes.

This article continues our look at our proposed solution to this — intent-driven design — as well as discussing the importance of design thinking early in the development process.

A proposal to solve UI building woes: introducing intent-driven design

Design is all about the consumer. Design thinking is considering how users will interact with your product and interpreting those needs to provide an attractive and highly usable experience. Developers are usually focused on functionality and logic, and how the user will interact with their application is often left as an afterthought. It’s vital to dedicate time in the planning stages to thinking about how the user will use your platform: design choices should go hand in hand with implementation choices so that they don’t cause roadblocks for each other during development.

It was only after Appsmith had taken off that we identified that the current industry-standard paradigms for UI design tools were slowing down our users. More in-depth design thinking in the early stages of development would have preempted this, but it’s never too late to correct course. That's where my specific talents come in. I’ve been working on canvas-based tools for almost a decade and have over 20 years of experience in UI design. I absolutely love exploring new ways to improve UI usability, so working on overhauling Appsmith to create a ground-breaking new developer experience presented an exciting opportunity.

We wanted to drastically speed up the process for our users to build user interfaces for their apps. In my years in the design field, I’ve learned one thing: UI designs and interactions are not magical; they’re usually just a repetition of already proven design patterns. Given this, and given that most design rules can be codified, I proposed that we automate our UI-building interface. We didn’t need to wait for some magical interface-building AI to come along — we could do this within Appsmith with currently available technologies.

As part of both my professional and personal passion for UI design, I have been experimenting with intent-based auto layouts. In my technical demos, I had successfully distilled the normal action chain for adding a UI element to an interface (add element → resize element → move element) to a single action (just add the element by dragging it onto the canvas). Accomplishing this required reading the user's intent: figuring out where they wanted the element to go and what size it should be relative to what's near it, and then setting the position and dimension when aligning, grouping, and reordering UI elements. I was able to take this even further by interpreting the movement direction and velocity of an element being dragged on the canvas to better determine what the user wanted to happen.

This was a perfect answer to the problem we were trying to solve for our Appsmith users. We would overhaul our UI-building interface so that it could read the user’s intent and automatically enforce good design patterns — liberating them from having to learn UI design and make tough design choices and just letting them build. This automated approach would also reduce the surface area on which potential design errors could occur: Appsmith apps would look good by default, unless the user really went out of their way to try and build a bad UI.

The importance of audience research early in development

The best time to solve a problem is before it happens. This isn't always realistic, however — sometimes, especially in software development, and especially during that rush to a minimum viable product (MVP), you have to “make do” with something that works, knowing that you’ll have to perfect or replace it later. This is part of every project's dreaded technical debt.

An application's design and user experience often fall into that “perfect it later” category, to the detriment of both the quality of the released product and future development. They shouldn't — design is foundational.

Many architectural decisions and much supporting development work go into making an application's UI behave a certain way, all based on the design and the design thinking behind it. Your users will also become comfortable with, and build habits around, your UI — so if you make any major changes, you need to be able to justify them to your users as well.

“Perfect it later” could mean throwing away a lot of development resources and customer goodwill that had been invested in a solution that was never going to meet its goals. This isn't to promote absolute rigidity: to make the best of the resources available at Appsmith we make compromises; we polish core mechanics first and avoid doubling down on features which could be safely added later. Decisions that are reversible or have a transition path can be ”perfected later.”

The trick is to orchestrate all dependent initiatives and test/ship them with the right priorities. This way, even if ”later” never happens, we still have a decent product. Identifying and ranking these priorities requires thorough research on your intended users and their use cases.This is best done by understanding what they aim to accomplish with your product, not necessarily how they think it should behave. What users need is not always what they want, and what they want is not always what they ask for.

This is especially important if your product is complex, for example a software development platform like Appsmith. When we ask users how they could build better UIs using Appsmith, most of them suggest increasingly granular control, which, if implemented, would eventually result in a messy Appsmith interface and poorly designed end user applications. Through our research we found that by limiting what users could do to what they needed to do, they found building their own user interfaces much easier.

Like selling a sports car to someone with a big family, giving users what they want isn’t always best for them. Design thinking during development addresses this by giving you the opportunity to fully conceptualize how the application will be used, and build to that.

The less extensive your insights into the intended audience for your product, the more re-working you’ll need to do. Changing the design of a mature product isn't just a major technical task — an existing user base will always have some aversion to change, requiring additional consultation, testing, and support to manage the potential impact of the changes.

The importance of ongoing consultation with your users

In our experience, those who are actually averse to change are a vocal minority. Most users generally do want to see the platforms they use evolve over time, rather than see them stagnating. New and better ways of doing things are always being discovered and your competitors are always trying out novel solutions and ways to improve their products’ functionality over yours to siphon off your users. While we've found that some changes are initially uncomfortable as users revise their workflows, they become “natural” after a short adoption period — as long as the new features provide a clear advantage to users and they feel like their opinions and feedback were valued and fully considered.

Appsmith's product category and audience means that we emphasize our existing users — internal apps developers expect a stable platform to build on, and breaking existing apps would be a sure-fire way to annoy them. We'll happily help our users break any bad habits they may have by giving them more intuitive tools, but we won't undo their existing hard work or make decisions that will have negative outcomes for the Appsmith apps that they’re building their businesses on.

In terms of automating our UI-building interface with intent-driven design elements, we’re confident that we’re satisfying the needs of our existing users and making Appsmith easier to adopt for new users. While we did have some concern about removing the ability to create 100% arbitrary layouts, our users have responded incredibly positively as a whole, preferring the time savings of automation over having 100% control over UI positioning. We’ve also been able to maintain backwards compatibility — our tests show that most legacy applications will be auto-layout friendly with minor modifications, and while there are some legacy apps that couldn’t be recreated using the new layout engine, they still work as they were initially built.

Overhauling our interface was expensive, and it would have been much better if we’d identified our users' needs earlier in the development process. We did consider allowing for arbitrary UI positioning alongside implementing the new intent-driven system, but this would have added to that cost as we would have to maintain two positioning modes in parallel, and users would have had to deal with the downsides of compromising and combining both approaches rather than the clear benefits of our chosen solution.

Getting the design right as early as possible is important, but it's just as important to ensure the technology behind the design leaves room to maneuver, iterate, and innovate in response to advancements in user requirements.

Always be ready to re-evaluate your choices, otherwise your product will stagnate

Innovating a mature product means being willing to tear up something that works to build something that is better. But you can reduce how much you need to tear up by making good design decisions early in the development process.

You should also maintain a healthy relationship with your users so that you can stay informed about what they want, and how they are using your product, so that you can figure out what they need and deliver it. Good design thinking will also make for a better iterative process in your product lifecycle, so that you don't make updates that later have to be reversed (or, again, torn up and replaced).

Our decision to reinvent our internal-apps platform’s user interface was a big one. Changing Appsmith’s core functionality after it had already been put to work by our users in their own internal apps came at a huge cost compared to doing it right from the outset, but we decided to do it — intent-driven design just seemed like too big an opportunity to miss on behalf of our users, who we knew would benefit greatly.

Fully implementing intent-driven auto layout has been a major accomplishment, but it's just the beginning for intent-driven functionality in Appsmith. We want to automate as much as possible, from UI positioning, to theming, all the way to automating the creation of entire application layouts. In our upcoming article, we will delve deeper into the future of intent-driven design, to see what the future holds for internal-app platforms.

Appsmith Innovate Announcements: 1-Click Upgrade, Community Portal, and Templates

Dessi — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 10:47:08 +0000

Appsmith Innovate is a wrap! Thank you to everyone who joined us live for this event filled with company updates, Appsmith best practices, and valuable tips to help you maximize the potential of your applications.

For those who couldn't attend live, we want to ensure you don't miss out. Here's a recap of some key announcements we made and sessions that took place during this event.

Introducing Appsmith Free

Appsmith Free is a new plan for our commercial edition that is available at no cost. It’s designed to address the challenges that our customers faced when migrating to our business or enterprise tiers. Previously, users had to set up a new environment and import apps, users, and configurations.

Appsmith Free eliminates these hassles. You can quickly start using it without any cost, either by self-hosting or in the cloud. And enable SSO, granular access controls, datasource environments, audit logs, or advanced features with just one click.

Appsmith remains committed to open-source and will continue to fully support our OSS edition. For more information on how to self-host either our commercial or open-source editions, refer to our installation guide.

Community Portal

The Community Portal is a central hub created to improve collaboration, learning, and growth experiences within the Appsmith community.

It serves as a platform for articles that provide tips and best practices of Appsmith and its ecosystem. Additionally, you can showcase your expertise through customizable profiles, displayed in the community member directory. You can also contribute to the community by sharing tutorials, guides, and best practices for Appsmith. Lastly, you can stay informed and sign up to the upcoming events.

Community Templates

Templates are a valuable resource for getting started with Appsmith and exploring the potential and real-word use cases of an Appsmith application. While the team has developed and maintained templates so far, we have been inspired by the innovative solutions shared by our community members and customers.

That is why we are launching a Community Library, a shared space for templates to encourage collaboration and support. This library allows you to access templates built by the community, rate existing ones, and contribute their own creations. It is another way to easily explore and implement creative solutions with Appsmith.

Appsmith Innovate sessions

We hosted insightful sessions at Appsmith Innovate, offering a glimpse into the heart of Appsmith. In case you couldn't attend, the recordings of these sessions are available on our YouTube channel.

Here are a few must-watch sessions that we highly recommend:

Trends in Internal Solutions

10 Appsmith Tricks

How Appsmith helped EDIA decrease the maintenance time of internal tools

What’s new in Appsmith?

We are currently developing several exciting features in Appsmith to enhance your overall experience. Below is a list of updates that we’ve recently shipped:

1-click data binding

Developers often face the challenge of spending a significant amount of time configuring widget data instead of focusing on customizing their UI. To address this issue, we have introduced a new feature that enables you to effortlessly connect data to your widgets with just one click.

This functionality generates and binds queries that easily integrate with your tables, JSON forms, and select widgets. This allows you to quickly and efficiently customize your UI without any hassle.

Multiple data source environments

Previously, developers would create separate applications using Git to test datasources. This process was complicated and made it difficult to understand the configurations being made. To simplify this, Appsmith has introduced Multiple Environments.

Now, you can easily switch between staging and production environments, ensuring that production data remains protected from unintended changes. This makes testing datasources and managing different environments much more efficient and user-friendly.

Email verification on Appsmith Cloud

Previously, it was possible to log in to Appsmith without verifying your email account, which could lead to the risk of junk emails and unchecked sign-ins. While this allowed you to explore Appsmith without any friction and concerns about sharing personal or work data, it also created a vulnerability to impersonation-style attacks.

To address this concern for users logging in through the form, we have implemented a new process. Now, all new users signing up with their email and password must verify their email by clicking on a magic link sent to their mailbox.

SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management)

Appsmith now offers user lifecycle management through the SCIM specification. This feature enables team managers to effortlessly manage users' access to their applications.

Organizations can automate the creation, updating, and deletion of accounts based on their company's IdP (Identity Provider). This eliminates the need for manual efforts and reduces the risk of errors. As a result, team managers can efficiently handle access management without duplicating their efforts.

What’s coming next?

Appsmith has exciting plans in the pipeline, as revealed by Nikhil Nandagopal, the Chief Product Officer. These upcoming features include improvements to auto-layout and the introduction of custom modules. These additions will provide a robust solution that enables businesses to create applications with even greater efficiency.

Watch Nikhil Nandagopal's session and get a sneak peek at what's coming next.

Appsmith - a robust solution for your business

Explore all of these new features in Appsmith by trying our free cloud-hosted version. If you’d like to learn more, or are unsure which commercial plan is right for your business, schedule a chat with our team today.

Stay tuned for more updates!