Announcement
Nov 26, 2025
What is RPA by Workato? The Ultimate Guide to Unified Automation (iPaaS + RPA)
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, businesses rely on a mix of modern SaaS applications and mission-critical legacy systems. The challenge lies in connecting them to achieve true end-to-end process automation. This is where RPA by Workato steps in.
RPA by Workato is a complete Robotic Process Automation solution that unifies the power of Workato's iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) with enterprise-grade RPA capabilities from Robotiq.ai. It allows organizations to orchestrate complex workflows that span cloud applications, on-premise systems, and even desktop applications that lack APIs.
Why Do You Need Unified RPA and iPaaS?
Traditional Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is great for automating repetitive, screen-based tasks. However, it often operates in a silo. Workato solves this by making RPA a seamless part of a larger workflow.
With RPA by Workato, you can:
Bridge the Gap: Automate tasks within older ERPs, browser apps, and desktop systems that don't have open APIs.
Orchestrate Everything: Use Workato recipes to trigger RPA bots based on real-time business events across your SaaS tools (like Salesforce, NetSuite, or Slack) and complete the workflow back in your cloud apps.
Automate Any System: Achieve end-to-end coverage across all applications—from modern cloud services to legacy mainframes.
Key Features of RPA by Workato
The RPA by Workato connector is built to make automation accessible, flexible, and powerful:
1. Low-Code/No-Code Interface
Create, monitor, and refine your automation processes using a cloud-based, drag-and-drop interface. This empowers business users and non-technical staff to build robust workflows without writing complex code.
2. UI Recorder
Record automation scenarios by simply capturing your interactions with a user interface. This feature instantly generates step-by-step outputs, making it easy to create and manage automations that mimic human actions with precision.
3. Script Support for Complex Tasks
For advanced scenarios, the platform offers flexibility with support for scripting languages like Visual Basic. This ensures you have the control needed to handle highly complex tasks that are not easily managed through a graphical interface.
4. Advanced Excel File Operations
Many enterprise workflows revolve around data in spreadsheets. RPA by Workato offers built-in support for reading, updating, manipulating, filtering, and converting data within Excel files, ensuring high accuracy and efficiency in data processing.
5. Workato Genies (AI Agent) Support
Extend the capabilities of your AI agents. Workato Genies the platform's AI automation agents can be given the ability to execute real RPA tasks, allowing them to run complex UI automations as easily as they call a standard API.
How It Works: The Four Steps of Automation
RPA by Workato enables a simple yet powerful flow:
Trigger: A business event occurs in a connected system (e.g., a new order is placed in Salesforce, or a file is uploaded to a shared drive). This event initiates a Workato recipe.
RPA Invocation: The Workato recipe securely invokes a Robotiq.ai RPA bot through the RPA by Workato Connector, passing all necessary context and data.
Screen-Based Execution: The RPA bot takes over, performing the necessary UI tasks inside the designated legacy application, desktop app, or web portal. It logs in, navigates screens, inputs data, or extracts required information.
End-to-End Flow Completion: The RPA bot returns the result to Workato, which then completes the remaining steps of the workflow (e.g., updating a record in a cloud database, sending a notification in Slack, or triggering the next process step).
Automate Any Use Case
By combining iPaaS and RPA, businesses can automate crucial processes such as:
ERP Automation: Execute UI-based transactions and trigger actions within platforms like SAP, NetSuite, and Oracle EBS.
Web Portal Automation: Automate tasks like data scraping, report generation, and form population on any internal or external web portal.
Legacy Desktop Apps: Integrate and automate interactions with older line-of-business applications like Oracle Forms, Java apps, and even systems accessed via RDP or Citrix.
Ready to see it in action? Explore the tutorials and documentation to start building your first end-to-end automation with RPA by Workato today!
Changelog
