Captain Data Review – Automate all of your manual processes

Manual processes are time consuming, and not many of us like to do them. I especially do everything I can to avoid manual processes. And luckily there are tools to help us. Today’s product showcase is Captain Data, an automation platform helping with anything from lead generation to Twitter interaction. So without further Ado, let’s dive into Captain Data and let’s set up an automation.

We are now inside the platform Captain Data here we have the overview of my workflows and it is a simple, simple platform. We have four menu points out here and then we have some resources, but the four menu points are what we need to focus on. So first off, we have integrations down here and this is where you set up your integrations because it’s important to remember that Captain Data is only an engine. You still need to feed both the input, the output and the integration. So if you want to crawl data on Google, you go to Google Custom Search, and then you need to connect your API account.

1. Features of Captain Data
2. Captain Data pricing
3. Alternatives to Captain Data
4. Future of Captain Data
5. Pros & Cons using Captain Data
6. My experience using Captain Data

Features of Captain Data

This means that you need to go to Google Cloud. You need to sign up for an account, set up the API, and then you can start using Captain Data. So just do remember that they do also have guides to how you do it, which you can see right here. But it is very simple. When you have set up your integrations, then we do go back to my workflows here.

Here, you can see that right now, I have four workflows set up. An interesting one is the follow Twitter account followers. I like that one. And then we have the surf Google Search and we have some other elements and I will show you also the prebuilt workflows they have.

First off, I want to show you the Twitter automation here. By clicking on the actual automation I do get a menu here, and I do get the results. So this is the history. I haven’t run this specific automation yet. Otherwise we would be able to see results, schedules and the history here, but we can just run it.

But before we do so then we need to set it up correctly. So I will just edit it, and now you can see our automation. I will just call this one very simple Twitter. And now we need to edit our accounts.

And here we are sent directly into the integrations. So I will just connect my Twitter account. I have now connected my Twitter account. I have added it to the automation, and when we scroll down here, you can see that we have something called input.

Here it has automatically added the Twitter profile URL, which is where it will go in and then follow. And then we have the parameters, the maximum number of followers we want to do. And then we have the launcher settings. Now the launcher settings we can choose to either do it now, we can do it later or we can do it repeatedly if you want to do it every Monday or every other hour.

I will just press launch for now. So right now it is launching the automation. And then this means that the automation is now running actively in the background. Now let’s try and move on to another automation I have made. This one is a little bit more simple.

It’s called a website scraper. What I do is that I just simply scrape a specific website, in this case my own website, and then it will scrape for some specific things they will look for. Here I will say that I also want the image URLs, and then I’ll press launch. So now it will go in, and then it will scrape my website, and it will find whatever elements it can find. And then it will also look for the image URLs.

Now you can see that the Twitter one is done, and that is because we did not add that many of the Twitter profiles we need to add even more Twitter profiles to make it run even further. But now let’s just wait for the crawler here to see the actual results. The crawler is now done and by clicking on it, we can see the history. So over here we have the results and by clicking on it, we can see that it did not find any emails. It did not find any Facebook URL, any images, any Instagram, or it did not find basically anything.

And on my front page I have all of these elements. I have both images. I have the YouTube url, LinkedIn url and so much more. So it’s a bit of a letdown to see that it couldn’t scrape that. It should be a fairly simple way of scraping, but it didn’t fetch that.

Now let’s try and go back to the Twitter automation here because if I just go to the new configuration, and then I enter again Twitter here choose the setup I have made. And then let’s try and add some Twitter profile URLs. So for now I have just added one URL maximum follow 1000 of these and then let’s press launch again. So now it will try to follow a maximum of 1000 followers of that account. So let’s see how that will go.

In the meantime, I want to show you the store because in here is where all of the templates are laying. At the moment, you cannot build your own workflow. So you have to use a prebuilt workflow. But with all of their integrations, they do already have a lot of great workflows. So you can get started already, and you do not have to wait because the custom workflow editor is coming very soon.

But for instance, if we want to do something with Google, let’s press on Google. Then you can see that we have these different workflows that we can choose between. We can find and push decision makers from websites to LGM audience. Or we can simply just extract data from Google and enter it into a spreadsheet. We can also find company employees with Sales Navigator and Google and so much more.

You can see they have a lot of great Google searches you can do. You can also do a very simple Google search. Now, when you see a Google search, you could also do that manually. That is correct. However, they do also have an API.

So via Captain Data’s API, you can actually use your workflows and your automations to run from your system or wherever you want to run it from. So this is a great add-on. But now let’s try and go back to the workflows here. We can see that our Twitter account here is still running at the moment, and that is great. That means that it is working.

So you can see that if I click on it right now it says it has finished and if I click on the result, it should have now outputted 1000 of the followers of this account. I’m not 100% sure if that is correct. So let’s try and go to the logs to see. So here you can see that it has processed a lot of data. So I have now refreshed, and you can see that there are some more elements running right now.

First, it has extracted all of the Twitter followers with a maximum of 1000, and it did get 1000 results. Now the next step it’s doing is that now it is following all of these Twitter profiles, and at the moment it has made six out of 400 follows just for today. Now the way this works is because I have the Chrome extension. So because I’m signed into Twitter in the browser and with the Chrome extension, then it can do this, for now we’ll just stop the job.

So it doesn’t follow more Twitter profiles. But this was great. This really works and I have checked on my Twitter profile, and it has added these follows. So that is a great automation if you want to increase your Twitter interaction or at least follow a certain amount of followers to show that you have something to share with them.

You do also have the activity overview here where you basically have an overview of all of your automations. So you can see I have run some different ones and the last one we just built together. The Twitter interaction here is also laying in here, and by clicking on it, you can see that we still get the results, and we can still cancel the job up here because it’s scheduled right now and we can see the same view as what we saw just before. Now what I want to say about Captain Data is that even though they have a great design and it’s easy to use, sometimes it can be a bit confusing.

Luckily, they do have a great onboarding over here where you can go through the different elements you can download their extension.

You can watch some videos of how you can really use Captain Data, but I do really hope that this will walkthrough gave you some idea of how you can use Captain Data for your advantage. And as you can see, even though they don’t have a custom workflow builder, they do have a lot of great prebuilt workflows that you can use right away.

Captain Data pricing

When we take a look at the pricing for Captain Data, you will immediately notice that it is a quite expensive tool and these automation tools they are expensive to use because you do have a really powerful entengineian that you can work with and these engines, they just cost a lot to maintain. So that is why the prices are like they are. However, Captain Data is actually doing it a little bit different. Often what we see with automation tools is that the pricing is based on the amount of hours that you run your automations.

But within Captain Data, you actually get the amount of tasks, so you can run, for instance, 25,000 tasks on the same plan.

That’s a big amount of tasks. Maybe this will change in the future, but right now that’s a huge benefit. However, when you do have to pick the right plan for you, you need to look at the tasks you need to try to figure out how many tasks you need to get because they differ on a lot of different parameters these different plans. So do really take a look at the tasks.

Alternatives to Captain Data

Now, the alternatives to Captain Data is Texau and Phantom Buster.

Texau I have previously reviewed, and they are ahead of Captain Data and the same with Phantom Buster. The way they are ahead is on two main elements, both within Texau and Phantom Buster. We can build our own workflows where we basically drag and drop the different elements we want to use, and then slowly we build our own workflow, whereas within Captain Data, that is not possible at the moment, we can only use prebuilt workflows right now. Another element is integrations.

Within Texau and Phantom Boxer we just have a lot more integrations, and this is so important to have because integrations is just what makes up the entire product. The more integrations the more automations we can make and the more manual processes we can get rid of. So I really hope to see more integrations in the future of Captain Data and of course, a custom workflow editor, which I will talk more about just in a moment.

Future of Captain Data

When we take a look at the future of Captain Data, they have a lot of interesting elements, but there are four main things that I noticed.

First off, they are working on more extraction models so we can extract even more data from different places on the World Wide Web. Furthermore, they are also working on a custom workflow builder.

This will really open up Captain Data so we can build our own workflows and really just narrow our workflows into do exactly what we want it to do instead of using the prebuilt workflows and try to make it work with our usecases. Furthermore, they are adding LinkedIn event invites to their workflow so we can send out these invites automatically. Last, but not least, they’re working on adding more integrations to the platform. And as I’ve already mentioned, this is crucial in order to really benefit from these automation platforms.

Pros & Cons using Captain Data

Moving on to the pros and cons of using Captain Data. Starting with the pros, they have a powerful engine, your workflows really execute fast. They have a modern and easy to use design and their extraction options are outstanding. Whereas for the cons, the extraction data is not always precise. I’m missing more integrations like Reddit and Quora, and I’m missing the custom workflow editor.

My experience using Captain Data

Captain Data are great at what they’re doing at the moment. Their prebuilt workflows works great and all of their integrations are native, which is a must for these automation tools. Overall, I will give Captain Data three and a half stars. I do miss more integrations and the fact that I can’t build my own workflows is just a letdown at the moment, but yeah, that is my review of Captain Data. I hope that you liked the review and if you did, please give it a thumbs up.

If you have any questions to Captain Data other products you would like me to review, please leave a comment down below. Thank you so much for watching. Let’s catch up on the next one.