Hexomatic Review – Automate any manual process

I’m a big fan of automation. The worst type of tasks for me are manual repetition tasks. I always look for ways to automate my processes, and with today’s product showcase, you can automate all of your manual data processes. Today’s product showcase is Hexomatic a platform allowing you to automate almost any type of task.

With their workflow builder you build your flow and let Hexomatic take care of the rest. So whether you need to build an email list, a list of Tweets or something. Third, then Hexomatic can do this for you. So without further Ado, let’s dive into Hexomatic and build some automation.

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

Features of Hexomatic

We are now inside Hexomatic on the dashboard. Here we get a quick overview of our workflows down here. We get some news about Hexomatic and then they have a fun little feature up here where they just show you how much time you have saved on using the automations. I don’t know how they calculate this, but it’s a fun little add on. Then you can see your credits and again, the news down here now over in the menu is where the funny elements are.

The first menu point is our actual workflows, and this is also where you build your workflows. First I want to show you a workflow that I have built already. In here I have built a workflow to crawl my front page in order to find any links that just didn’t work. So you can see the workflow here is just to crawl my website. It needs to select all the items with the Proximo data centre with a maximum of ten URLs, and then basically it just crawls them.

Clicks on the URLs to see whether they return at 200 code, which is good or a 404 code, which means that it doesn’t exist. Now in order to see the results, we need to click on the log data and in here you can see that it has clicked on a lot of different links and most of them they respond with a 200 code, which is good. Now there is one link up here returning a 404 code, but that is incorrect. I have tested it. Maybe it’s just LinkedIn returning something strange, but other than that it looks great.

You can see that it has tested some different URLs and it has tested maximum ten URLs. If I do want it to test even more, I can go back, and then I can in my workflow change my limit to maybe let’s say 100, and then I can update and run it again. Now I can choose to run it now or I can schedule it. I will just run it now and continue anyway. So now it will start again to crawl my front page and then basically just click on all the links to see whether they work or not.

That is how it works overall with the workflows. Then they you also have a scraping recipe in here where we can build a new recipe and a scraping recipe is basically where you crawl a specific website and then you tell it what to crawl. So if I enter one website here and I click preview, then it will fetch the website here though without images, but the entire website is here, and then I can say, okay, I want all of the H1’s here so I can choose to either only select the single H1 here or H2, or I can select all of them, so I will just click select all of them.

Now when you do select all, you cannot scroll anymore. It’s a little bit frustrating.

I would like to be able to scroll in order to see whether it has crawled and chosen all the correct ones. But then you can see over here that we need to give this a name. We call this one headlines and then we need to choose the type right now it’s text, so you can see it chose four items and the text down here collect income from multiple affiliate platforms. That is correct.

So I will press save and then we need to give it a name up here. We’ll just call this one Kolekti.io headlines. I think that’s fine. Then when we are done we press save and we now have a scraping recipe. This scraping recipe we can use when it is we build workflows.

So I will just move on to automations. Within automations we have a lot of prebuilt ones. So as you can see, we have AI audio transcription, AI text to speech, AI logo detection, and a lot more. Within Heiomatic you can basically do and crawl whatever you would like to crawl as long as you can build it and think yourself to build it.

So I think let’s start with the email scraper here. So we would like to find all emails on a specific website. So I will choose the email scraper, over here we can see some similar ones, but I’ll just create the workflow with the email scraper here. So what we need first is we need some data just for the sake of this video.

I’m going to go to scraping recipes, and then I’m going to choose Kolekti.io headlines because now we have a data set to run on. I then press the plus down here, and then I search on email and then we have the email scraper. In source I choose Headlines and Proximo data centre. That is fine. Now what it will do is that it will scrape all of the data.

It will then look for all of the emails and then it will list it out. Right now there are no emails, so it should give us a zero result. But let’s try and see. I will press continue and I will say run now. Now you can see that we have it in progress up here and if I click on it we have, of course, our current workflow.

And then we have the log data right now in the log data it just says scraping recipe started. It says now Element scraper for Kolekti.io success. So now it has the data set, and now it needs to start to find all of the emails within the data set, but it won’t find any email, so it will probably just stop here. But this is just one example.

Let me show you another example by going back to automations. And then let’s try this AI logo detection. This one looks interesting. Now when I do just click create workflow. I’m just sent directly into the workflow to a completely blank slate, and then I have to start over.

So before we move on with the AI logo detection, then let me go back to the workflows and then click here on new workflow. This is a little bit easier to start this way because here we need to choose whether we want to use a data input like CSV or text file. We want to use a template library. We want to use automation or a scraping recipe. So let’s try the template library in here.

We have even more templates to use. So for instance, we can extract meta tags for a list of URLs. We can find B2B leads from Google Maps. We can do so much more. For instance let’s try this one competitor research from a list of domains.

Now you can see that compared to what I did before where I went directly from automations. Here we actually have a full recipe where we have some data input. Then we have some discover, both for tech stack, whois, the SEO meta Tags and some traffic insights. So you can see when I click on data input right now we have two URLs.

These URLs we would be able to replace with our own competitors. For now we’ll just enter my own domains just again for the sake of this video, so we can see the output. So now we have two domains here. The first one has an okay amount of traffic, and the last one doesn’t have any traffic at the moment. So let’s see how it goes.

I will press continue, and I will press run now. So you saw that we have the entire recipe just built out for us. And this was so fast. And now I will get a report of a lot of data for my competitors, in this case my own website. So again I click on the workflow, and then I click log data because here we can see what is going on and you will notice when you start using Hexomatic that sometimes the workflows can be a bit slow.

And the reason being that if they just ran through all of the steps extremely fast, they would be seen as spam. So they need to act like human beings and do it in a certain amount of speed. In order to not fall into any spam filtres or any kind. So it will now log everything. So every time it does a step it will add it to the log here, we will come back to this workflow, but before we do so, I just want to show you my settings here because in here we can set up integrations to Google, Discord, Telegram and Slack in order to use that so you can actually crawl data within Slack or within Google.

We do also have API and Webhooks over here to work with. If you want to integrate a third party system, they are also working on adding even more integrations. Now they do also have email notifications. If you want an email when a workflow is completed or it fails.

So those three options are great. They do also have an Academy up here. If you want to learn even more about Hexomatic and learn how you can really utilise all of the functionality within Hexomatic. Now we are back at the workflow and you can see so far there’s still no data, and sometimes you really need to be patient. But when it’s done you can see now it made the next step, and it took two minutes.

But when it’s done then it will output everything in the log, and then you can choose to either act on it within the log or you can export it up here to either Google Sheets as a CSV or JSON, so you can work with it in a third party system. But overall, that is the functionality within Hexomatic. As you can see, you can build any type of recipe you would like. It always starts with the data input where you either paste in some data or you upload a text file or you crawl an entire website for data.

It could be an archive, it could be a specific website.

Then you pinpoint what data you want, and then based on that data, then you just do the steps that you would like to do. It could be that you want to find the emails you want to find leads. You want to find Twitter profiles. Your options are endless.

Hexomatic pricing

When we take a look at the pricing structure of Hexomatic, it consists of four plans. Now the first plan is a completely free plan where you get 75 automation credits each month, and you get one simultaneously process running. Now the three premium plans. They differ on both the amount of credits, the amount of processes you can run at the same time and features. So it’s very important that you deep dive into these plans to really figure out what plan meets your needs.

For most of us, the first paid plan is more than enough for us, but if you do have a big need, you should take a look at the last plan.

Alternatives to Hexomatic

Now the alternatives to Hexomatic is Webscraper.io and APIFY. Now these three tools compared to each other are very similar. Personally, I do like Hexomatic a lot because of the Workflow builder is so easy to use. They have a lot of great recipes, and it just runs great.

The logs are easy to use, but overall, it really comes down to the workflow the way that you build up all of your recipes and your automations. So you should really dive into the different tools next to each other and see what tool you like most and what tool you can easily build out the different recipes.

Future of Hexomatic

Moving on to the future of Hexomatic they have a packed roadmap, but there are five things that I have pointed out to be very interesting. First off, they’re adding more integrations.

This means that we can build our workflows to another level and add even more integrations. Then they’re working on us being able to sort the data. So when we get a huge data set, we will be able to sort on specific properties in order to move on the next step. Furthermore, they’re going to add even more workflow templates, so it’s easier for us to get started. Now, one really exciting thing they are adding is AI text generation.

This will make it possible for us to respond to Tweets, for instance. So if you crawl a bunch of tweets and you want to add some comments you want to retweet or you just want to add a little bit of context to it. This will be possible with the AI text generation module that they’re working on. The last exciting element is SMTP built into the Workflow editor. This means that we can actually send out emails from the Workflow builder.

This is so interesting, and it’s not something I’ve seen before, so you will be able to collect an email list and then within the workflow, send out emails to all of the different emails that you have collected. This will make it possible to automate it even further.

Pros & Cons using Hexomatic

Now moving on to the pros and cons of Hexomatic. Starting with the pros, the UX is really helpful. They have a lot of great scraping recipes, and it’s easy and very visual to crawl data, whereas for the cons, I do experience the automations to be a bit slow. I’m missing social media integration to be able to crawl even deeper, and I would like to be able to crawl an entire website instead of only one page.

My experience using Hexomatic

Hexomatic is really an intriguing tool with endless possibilities. You can build almost any type of crawler and work with the data. Overall, I will give Hexomatic four stars. The design, the UX and the help videos are on point, but I feel I’m missing the entire social media aspects for them to be a superb tool, but yeah, that is my review of Hexomatic.

I hope that you liked the video and if you did, please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions to Hexomatic or 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.