Tines Templates: Automate Your World with No-Code Workflows
Step into the future of operational efficiency with Tines, the groundbreaking no-code automation platform designed to empower security, DevOps, and IT teams. Tines is not just a tool; it’s a new way of thinking about complex workflows. At its core, the platform allows you to connect to any REST API or web application, enabling you to automate repetitive manual tasks without writing a single line of code. Tines Templates are the perfect starting point, offering a rich library of pre-built, customizable “Stories” (their term for workflows) that solve common problems right out of the box. Whether you’re dealing with phishing threat response, employee onboarding, or cloud security alerts, Tines provides the building blocks to create powerful, resilient automation tailored to your exact needs.
Capabilities
While Tines isn’t a generative AI tool for creating images or videos, its true power lies in its ability to orchestrate and automate workflows that can involve various data types, including text and API data. Think of it as the central nervous system for your tech stack.
- Text & Data Manipulation: Tines excels at parsing, transforming, and acting on text-based data. This is crucial for tasks like analyzing security alerts, extracting indicators of compromise (IOCs) from emails, generating reports, and sending customized notifications to platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
- API Integration: This is Tines’ superpower. It can seamlessly connect to thousands of third-party tools via their APIs. This means you can automate actions across your entire ecosystem, from creating a ticket in Jira, to quarantining a device in CrowdStrike, to enriching an IP address using VirusTotal.
- Logic & Flow Control: Tines provides robust logic capabilities. You can build workflows that use conditional logic (if/then/else), loops, and delays to handle complex scenarios with precision, mimicking the decision-making process of a human analyst.
- Orchestration with AI Tools: You can integrate Tines with generative AI platforms. For example, you could build a workflow that takes a security alert, sends the summary to an AI model like OpenAI’s GPT for analysis or a plain-language explanation, and then posts the result back into a support ticket.
Features
Tines is packed with features designed for power, flexibility, and ease of use.
- Visual Storyboard: A clean, intuitive drag-and-drop interface where you build your automation “Stories” by connecting different action agents. It makes complex workflows easy to visualize and debug.
- Expansive Template Library: Get a head start with hundreds of pre-built templates covering security, IT, DevOps, and more. These are not just examples; they are production-ready workflows you can import and adapt in minutes.
- Seven Action Types: The building blocks of Tines are simple yet powerful: Receive Email, HTTP Request, Event Transform, Trigger, Send to Story, IMAP, and Page. These seven types can be combined to create nearly any workflow imaginable.
- Credential Management: Securely store and manage credentials for all your integrated tools in one place, ensuring your automation is both powerful and safe.
- Cloud & On-Premise Deployment: Tines offers the flexibility to use their secure cloud-hosted platform or deploy on-premise within your own infrastructure for maximum control.
Pricing
Tines offers a flexible pricing structure to suit teams of all sizes, from individuals experimenting with automation to large-scale enterprises.
- Community Edition: A generous free plan perfect for individuals and small teams. It includes thousands of monthly story runs, access to all action types, and unlimited stories, allowing you to prove the value of Tines without any financial commitment.
- Team Plan: Designed for growing teams, this plan offers a higher volume of story runs, increased support options, and more collaborative features. Pricing is typically on a per-seat basis.
- Enterprise Plan: A fully-featured, custom plan for large organizations. It includes features like single sign-on (SSO), dedicated support, on-premise deployment options, and unlimited scalability to handle the most demanding automation needs. You’ll need to contact their sales team for a custom quote.
Applicable Users
Tines is built for technical operators who want to automate their workflows without being bogged down by custom scripts. Key user roles include:
- Security Analysts (SOC): For automating threat intelligence enrichment, phishing response, and incident triage.
- Incident Responders: For orchestrating a coordinated response across multiple tools during a security incident.
- DevOps & SREs: For automating infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD pipeline notifications, and monitoring alerts.
- IT Administrators: For streamlining user onboarding/offboarding, managing cloud resources, and automating helpdesk tasks.
- Software Engineers: For creating powerful internal tools and automating development-related processes.
Alternatives & Comparison
Tines operates in the space of Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) and broader hyperautomation. Here’s how it compares to some alternatives:
- Zapier / Make: These are excellent general-purpose automation tools, but they are often simpler and less suited for the complex, logic-heavy workflows required by security and operations teams. Tines offers far greater flexibility, power, and control for technical use cases.
- Palo Alto XSOAR / Splunk SOAR: These are powerful, enterprise-focused SOAR platforms. However, they can be more complex, rigid, and significantly more expensive to implement and maintain. Tines is often seen as a more agile, user-friendly, and flexible alternative that doesn’t lock you into a specific vendor ecosystem.
- Custom Scripts (Python/Bash): Writing your own scripts offers ultimate flexibility but is brittle, hard to maintain, difficult to scale, and lacks the visibility and collaboration features of a platform like Tines. Tines provides the power of code in a much more accessible, manageable, and visual format.
