Bardeen empowers you to automate workflows with you “in the loop.” With this release, you can customize “ask me every time” variables and make them optional.
We’ve also polished the UI, added new commands, and fixed bugs.
Lastly, we’ve met in person in Croatia to plan our next sprint, features, and the future of Bardeen.
Let’s take a closer look at version 2.2.4.
💡️ Pro Tip: get a real-time view of everything we are working on in our roadmap or in our user community.
With Bardeen, you can participate in an automation. Imagine you are looking at candidates for hiring (like us 😉️) on LinkedIn and want to save them to Notion and add a personal note.
In this case, you have to decide a) whom you want to save and b) what the note should say. No software can make this decision for you. But you can automate this otherwise very manual process with Bardeen.
In this release, we’ve added the ability to name user inputs and make inputs optional.
To build an automation to be configured every time you trigger a Playbook, select the “ask me every time” argument and give it a name. It will show up when you run the Playbook in the popup window.
Previously, you were required to fill out all fields to run the automation.
With this update, you can make some fields optional and run your Playbook without filling them out. Click on the “advanced options” next to the argument and check the “optional” box.
This action allows you to remove duplicate items (objects) from a list (array). In practical terms, if you want to save contacts from a Gmail thread to Notion, Bardeen will remove the repeating contacts in the tread and only add the uniques.
You can also remove duplicates from tables.
This command will split a table with multiple rows into multiple tables with one row. This allows you to use individual rows in the follow-up actions and transform each row inside a table.
This command combines multiple tables into one. It works well with the previous action if you want to create a new table and use it as a single unit later. For example, if you send a table in Slack, instead of sending 100 messages, there will be one message sent with 100 entries in it.
During the last month, we focused on performance improvements, bug fixes, and polishing the UI after the big Bardeen 2.0 launch. We’ve also made the app faster and improved Coda, Notion, and Gmail apps.
Here is what we’ve worked on.
💡 Pro Tip: you can get a real-time view of all in-progress tickets in our feedback platform here or ask us for details in our user community.
We partnered up with the top Notion creators to build the go-to resource for everything Notion Automations. Most people will spend more time automating stuff than they will ever claim back from those automations.
Building automations is relatively straightforward and requires some skill, but figuring out WHAT to automate is the hardest part.
The hub consists of the 50+ most useful pre-built automations for Notion, 16 database templates, and learning resources. There are also 7 use cases that cover automations for specific job roles like sales or project management.
The Notion Automation Hub has become #2 product of the week and product of the day on Product Hunt.
Here is an example of how Notion creators use Bardeen:
We’ve added two actions to our Coda integration. You can now retrieve data using the “get rows from Coda table” action.
And we’ve added the “delete records from Coda table” action. It is excellent for deduplication flows and data refinement processes.
If you haven’t tried Coda yet, you have to give it a try! Find Bardeen < > Coda Playbooks here to get started.
Since day one, Gmail has been one of our top 5 most used integrations. We’ve re-written the integration with Gmail from the ground up to make it faster and more reliable.
Now emails get indexed better, and the triggers are more reliable.
When you need to extract large amounts of data from the web, you need to configure pagination. It loads more data either with infinite scroll or click-pagination.
But some websites are harder to scrape than others. This is why we’ve added the ability to customize the click pagination action if the default point-and-click interface fails.
You can now specify the exact location of the “next” button using XPath or CSS selectors.
We are in the business of saving your precious time. So making Bardeen feel snappy has been the priority since day one!
During this sprint, we’ve made the Bardeen engine load faster, so that you can enjoy the experience of saving time every step of the way.
This version of Bardeen consists mainly of bug fixes and some UI improvements. To get a more detailed view of what we are working on at the moment, visit our feedback platform here.
If you use Bardeen on multiple devices (or browsers), Autobooks will not sync across devices.
We’ve added math actions to help you do more inside Bardeen without having to output data into a spreadsheet.
The new math actions:
A few days ago, Bardeen became “Product of the month” on Product Hunt!
Since we’ve launched 2.0, we’ve gotten an overwhelming amount of feedback, a few bug reports, and many fascinating use-cases that our users can now automate with Bardeen.
For the last two weeks, we’ve focused on performance improvements and polishing the UI. The following are the release notes for version 2.0.2.
We’ve just started using a new feedback system that will help you give feedback, track it in real-time, and vote on tickets.
The new feedback tool complements great conversations in our user Slack. We want to make sure nothing gets lost, and the most important things get the attention they deserve. We will prioritize tickets with the most upvotes and engagement.
Now, you can also track the status of tickets in real-time, instead of following up with us! All issues in Canny (the feedback platform) are synced with our project management tool (Jira) and will update automatically.
Check out this tutorial about creating feedback posts.
We’ve added a new Notion action - “Update or add Notion page to database.”
The action creates a new page in the database if it doesn’t exist or update the data if it does.
You should use this action in combination with the “find Notion page action.”
Here is a demo from Artem (our CTO):
We’ve added the ability to extract audio and video files from most websites using our scraper.
Additionally, we’ve added the ability to paste data from your clipboard. You can find it when clicking on “get more fields.”
Finally, the scraper now has the “delay” action. It is handy to avoid scraper detection and handle use cases where data loads dynamically.
Welcome Bardeen 2.0!
We’ve rethought the automation experience from scratch. Our mission has always been to help you win back at least an hour per day from doing manual work.
With these updates, saving time with automation has just become much easier!
The new Builder allows you to create Playbooks visually with just a few clicks. We’ve also introduced Autobooks: They run in the background, either triggered by some event or on a schedule!
And our AI-based suggestions have improved to deliver you even better playbooks at the right moment.
We launched Bardeen 2.0 on Product Hunt and became the product of the week. 😻🎉
ProductHunt covered our launch in their Weekly Digest newsletter here: https://www.producthunt.com/newsletter/9961-1-500-upvotes
The new Builder allows you to create and edit Playbooks with a few clicks.
The previous version of Bardeen used natural language with “commands” to create Playbooks. It came with speed but made complex automations hard to create. You can still access Classic by hitting Option + O.
The Builder has simplified the experience. You can browse through apps and actions and put them on a canvas to create an automation. Mapping data between actions is also intuitive.
To learn more about getting started with the new interface, explore this tutorial.
Welcome “Autobooks” to the family!
An Autobook is what we call an automation with a trigger. Unlike Playbooks that are you can initiate manually, Autobooks run “when something happens” (either on a schedule or based on some trigger event).
Autobooks run in the background, unlocking new opportunities to automate workflows that don’t need you in the mix. You can browse through triggers for your favorite apps in the Builder.
Learn more about Autobooks in this tutorial.
The conditional filters allow for a new level of complexity in your automations. You can build branches based on keywords, true/false conditions, dates, and much more.
Check out this tutorial to start using conditionals in your Playbooks.
The hardest part of workflow optimization is figuring out what to automate. Bardeen flips the script, where automations come to you. It will show you the right automation in the perfect moment.
We’ve improved our suggestions algorithms to deliver even better Playbooks to you when it matters the most.
In the last few sprints, the majority of our efforts went into building Bardeen 2.0 with a brand new playbook builder interface. We are planning to release it very soon, so stay tuned!
As we are building 2.0, the current version has gotten some performance improvements, bug fixes, and we’ve added two new integrations - Coda and WebEx.
Being the cornerstone of proactive automations, the scraper has also gotten performance and UX improvements.
Here are the detailed release notes.
Coda is a tool that combines text, data, and automations in one interface built for collaboration.
The Coda < > Bardeen integration empowers you to automate even more. Our scraper will save website data directly to Coda, bridging the gap between web and Coda databases.
Many of our enterprise users requested integration with WebEx. And it’s finally live!
You can now create WebEx meetings on the go and much more.
We started Bardeen with three main commands DO, GET, WHEN. These commands were mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (along with define), and you can automate pretty much anything.
The DO command performs an action. The GET command pulls up data from your web apps. And the WHEN command is a listener that triggers a workflow when something happens in a web app or on your screen.
After tons of user research, we’ve learned that many people want to have more flexibility in language. “Do create new Google Sheet” is probably not the first thing that would come to mind.
We are now classifying all Bardeen commands into groups of more descriptive “action verbs” such as Create and Add.
Automations traditionally take too much time to set up. And most of the time, it’s easier to do something manually at the moment than to build an automation for the process.
The result? Most people keep clicking around and staying stuck with manual workflows.
That’s where context comes into play again. Bardeen suggests you pre-built automations based on the page that you are currently on.
We’ve improved our playbooks suggestions engine.
👉 Enable the playbook suggestion feature to discover new ways to save time and automate your manual workflows passively.
We’ve added new actions to manipulate your browser tabs.
You can now save the currently opened tab to Notion, Google Sheets or Coda. Or you can save your entire browser session and reopen all tabs later.
We’ve discovered that analysts waste hours every day by bringing all relevant information in one place. As a result, we’ve built many great playbooks for their most popular use cases, and we are working on making data enrichment easier than ever before.
Have you ever tried to read an article only to find out that it’s locked behind a paywall? Welcome, our new most popular playbook that removes a paywall with a shortcut. (Tip: try it on the Economist or NYT).
Want to stay on top of new playbooks and ways to save you time? We’ve launched a TikTok account with bite-sized content. So check it out and follow us there.
As always, big thanks for all the support and feedback.
Welcome one of our most exciting releases yet!
We are thrilled to introduce two game-changing features and a new integration.
Bardeen has also become much more reliable, and your favorite scraper feature has been getting a lot of love from our engineering and UI teams.
Here are the juicy details about this release!
ClickUp has officially joined our integration family! ClickUp is a cutting-edge all-in-one workspace focused on getting things done.
Now, you can streamline your manual workflows and get even more out of ClickUp.
If you use ClickUp as a CRM, you can add people to your contacts list from LinkedIn, Twitter, or Gmail. As always, one click only!
If you do sales, you can create deals out of UpWork job posts.
And pretty much anything else you can imagine.
Since the very beginning, our goal has been to make information across your web tools more accessible.
We are thrilled to announce the Widgets (currently in beta)!
Widgets bring data across your web apps to one place without opening new tabs.
When is your next meeting? What’s in your Jira sprint? Got any unread emails in your inbox? Want to check out the social profiles of your next meeting participants?
That’s where widgets come in! Open Bardeen with a shortcut (Option + B), and the information is already there waiting for you.
To create a widget, hover over a playbook and click on “render as widget.”
Everything is better when shared.
Share custom playbooks with your friends and colleagues in seconds.
Hover over a playbook and click “share playbook.” A popup will open, where you can customize your playbook page.
Copy the link into the clipboard or share it anywhere you want.
Our goal is to help you discover use cases that will save you time and empower you to do more of what you love.
So we’ve launched our user community on Slack.
The community is the space to meet fellow automation hackers, share productivity tips and tricks, and get recommendations on how to streamline your work.
You’ll be the first to learn about the latest features we are building, and your integrations and commands requests will be prioritized.
If you have Bardeen already installed, finding and launching playbooks has become much easier. Pick a playbook from our playbooks catalog and click on “try it.” The playbook will run automatically right from the website.
Many of you have been asking about the Pipedrive integration that we had announced earlier. We are inches away from getting it approved on Piperdrive’s Marketplace 🌴 so that you can finally start using it!
Want to learn about how we build playbooks and no code automations for your use cases?
We’ve just started our new Live Build video series, where we show you the process from start to finish.
And finally, we’ve just released playbooks to take screenshots of websites automatically.
What’s the use case?
Automating marketing reports and increasing the visibility of your metrics!
The month of August was devoted to performance improvements. We are working hard to make the engine faster and suggestions more relevant.
We’ve added Pipedrive to the integrations family and introduced the Playbooks Suggestions widget.
The UI team did a major overhaul of the Scraper interface and the playbook builder.
Here are the latest release notes!
We are excited to introduce our first CRM integration. Pipedrive has been ahead of the game with its native workflow automations. And today, it has become more powerful than ever!
With Bardeen, you can create a Pipedrive contact right from LinkedIn, associate external emails with deals, and create notes on the fly. All without opening new tabs or copy-pasting.
If you are a pipedriver yourself, check out our latest post about getting leverage with Pipedrive automations.
When we surveyed hundreds of knowledge workers, we discovered a crucial insight. Very few people are actually aware of the manual, repetitive tasks they do on their computers daily.
At Bardeen, we want to take an active role in helping you reclaim your time and focus. And discovering automation opportunities is the way to get you there!
Welcome the Playbook Suggestions!
Based on your browsing behavior, a popup will appear with the related playbooks.
For example, when you visit a Zoom cloud recordings page, Bardeen will suggest you these playbooks:
You might not have even realized that these automations are possible. Going forward, you can use these playbooks instead of doing the tasks manually like you are used to.
As time passes, this feature will help you automate the majority of your repetitive tasks.
Our vision for the future is to leverage artificial intelligence not just to suggest but to generate personalized playbooks based on your behavior.
During the last few sprints, we’ve focused on making Bardeen snappier and loading suggestions faster. Every second that we save you is a big win for us.
To make the experience even smoother, we are doing a major overhaul of our suggestions engine. The new engine will leverage command annotations and your context (such as previous commands run and installed apps).
But snappier experience has another essential component: you! To help you find what you are looking for at a glance, we’ve renamed many of our playbooks and given them more informative descriptions.
The last significant improvement we started working on is the new success blocks. They are the results that you see after you run a playbook.
Instead of showing you all information as a list, the success blocks will display data in a cleaner way. For example, playbooks that return emails will show a “reply” button and the elements like subject line, body, and recipients. Playbooks that return events, on the other hand, will display the “join” and “view event” buttons.
We are developing a visual playbook builder. The playbook builder will allow beginners to create custom playbooks without learning our commands. Additionally, the new builder will support conditional logic (If, then, filter, etc.) to build more complex workflows.
We also are making the Bardeen commands simpler by replacing the DO, GET, and WHEN words.
Today’s commands have been written based on what we can do with the APIs, such as “Do upload file to Google Drive.” You can click on the entire command and run it.
The commands of tomorrow, however, will be grouped into atomic units such as “upload,” “send,” or “create.” The new engine will let you compose them step-by-step (Upload... last file...to Dropbox).
Finally, the Bardeen scraper is both getting a complete interface rebuild. We are also adding a new data extraction framework to increase accuracy.
Enjoy!
We’ve added Asana to our integrations list. Asana is our third task management app complementing Jira and Github.
The integration allows users to create tasks on the fly from anywhere on the computer with our global shortcuts, use page context to create more descriptive tasks, and automate task creation.
Explore our pre-build Asana playbooks from the catalogue.
We will add even more commands in the next release.
Web scraping is an immensely powerful feature for human-in-the-loop workflow automations. It eliminates copy-pasting and makes static websites actionable.
We’ve been continuously improving our scraper to make it more accurate and user-friendly.
When building a scraper model, you can now see the captured data in a preview table. As a result, creating and testing scraper models will be much easier and more accurate.
We’ve built the testing infrastructure for the most commonly scraped websites such as LinkedIn and Github. Those tests will notify us when websites change their structure so that we can fix scraper models quickly.
As a user, you can expect more accurate results when scraping popular websites.
In the future, we will introduce additional features to heal scraper models dynamically.
We got something huge cooking for you 🙌. We are building a revolutionary interface to create playbooks and automations.
The scraper will get enough improvements on both accuracy and interface to grow into Scraper 2.0!
We are almost done with the playbooks recommendations engine that suggests the most relevant pre-built playbooks based on context. Playbooks will be suggested based on the current web page opened and conditions specific to you, such as your installed apps.
Finally, we are adding our first CRM integration - PipeDrive. This integration will unlock extra productivity for sales and marketing folks when logging, tracking deals and beyond.
In the last couple of months, we made significant strides towards making workflow automation seamless and fun. We’ve added new features, significantly improved the scraper, enhanced the UI, and much more.
Here is the digest.
We’ve introduced three additional windows: Results, Queue, and Notifications.
The new Results window stores the history of all success messages when playbooks and commands are run.
The Queue window shows all in-progress playbooks that are being executed. This window was created for the playbooks that take longer to execute, such as the ones that require transferring large files or extracting data from multiple web pages with our scraper.
You can run multiple playbooks in parallel without waiting until each playbook is executed.
The Notifications window brings important notifications and error messages from the Settings page to the front of the app so that you can check them effortlessly.
We’ve moved the main window to the center of the screen and removed the spotlight view.
Although this may not seem important, this change has massive implications on the UX!
Previously, when Bardeen was inside the extension window, it was subject to two limitations: 1) fixed window size 2) UI loading speed being throttled, causing an annoying lag when opening Bardeen.
With these limitations removed, you can launch Bardeen with a global shortcut and install playbooks from the website.
You can now launch Bardeen from anywhere on your computer! Yes, you can now schedule a Zoom call or send an email reminder right from your code editor or Photoshop.
You can configure the global shortcut from here: chrome://extensions/shortcuts
You can install and run playbooks right from our website. Just browse through our playbooks catalog or blog, and install the playbook directly from there—so no need to type the title of a playbook to add it to your favorites anymore.
Soon you will be able to embed Bardeen playbooks to your websites as well. You will be able to share a custom playbook with your colleagues and readers seamlessly.
The scraper has been one of Bardeen’s most beloved features. And we’ve been working relentlessly to make it even better.
The background scraper allows you to extract data from websites periodically and without opening tabs.
You can run a scraper model on a URL and send the results directly to Google Sheets, Airtable, or Notion.
The background scraper made it possible to track job listings on Indeed, rare products on eBay, or gigs on Upwork.
Try this command:
“Get data using scraper model [model] for URL [url]”
You can extract even more information by combining scraper models.
The deep scraper allows you to extract a list using the list scraper and then run an individual scraper model on each list item. Use the output of one scraper model as the input for another.
The most important information should be at your fingertips when you need it. With the background scraper, you can send yourself website screenshots via email or Slack automatically.
Think of Google Analytics, Stripe dashboards, stock market charts, and other websites that you check daily. Just set up a WHEN command and pick the frequency of reports.
Try this command:
“Get page as PDF on URL [url]”
Bardeen now suggests relevant playbook input arguments. For example, when running the “Zoom quick dial a Slack user” playbook, Bardeen will render suggested users and channels before you type anything.
We’ve also made command suggestions more relevant so that you can run nested commands more effortlessly, as we’re working towards our vision of fully proactive workflow automation (magic!).
The advantage of being a browser extension is that we can recommend relevant playbooks at the right moment.
You will be able to discover time-saving playbooks without deliberately searching for them. You can run your workflows regularly, and Bardeen will propose the appropriate playbook for your use case.
For this purpose, we are revamping our in-context widget that will include playbook suggestions. Stay tuned 🚀
The new input interface allows you to see all arguments inside a playbook. You can hit TAB to go to the next argument and SHIFT + TAB to go back an argument.
Compared to the old interface, you no longer need to delete correct arguments to edit the desired one.
In the future, we will introduce widgets optimized for each input type. For example, when you input dates, you will see a calendar input widget. And when you input text, you will see a rich-text widget.
You can now capture list data from websites. The list scraper identifies lists based on similar web page elements and allows you to capture specific elements in that list.
With this new scraper, you can build outreach lists and collect data for analysis in under a minute.
We’ve introduced two ways of capturing longer lists: 1) infinite scroll 2) pagination.
And finally, we added the ability to capture URLs from page elements such as buttons and text elements with a link.
From over a thousand survey answers, we’ve learned that meetings workflows are by far one of the most frustrating manual tasks knowledge workers have to perform frequently.
We’ve listened and created a meetings-specific automations with lots of new playbooks and tutorials.
You can explore the top meetings playbooks here.
Here are the new pre-built playbooks:
Zoom cloud storage starts at $40/m, and if you don’t subscribe, you won’t be able to share the recordings.
Now, you can get your Zoom cloud recordings to Drive or Dropbox automatically. Here is the new WHEN command:
When Zoom cloud recording becomes available [for meeting / with topic matching], then…
As we are working on revolutionizing how people interact with their data, security has been a top priority to us. We’ve just successfully completed a security audit by an independent security auditing firm. You can be even more confident in the safety of your data. See our security page for details.
Remember that your data does not touch our servers and gets requested from your client (browser) directly.
Additional commands added:
With the background automation, you won’t need to have your computer on for the WHEN triggers to fire. You will no longer need to worry about seeing an email from someone important late.
We’ve recently deployed the infrastructure to make this feature possible and are currently testing it.
The notifications will bring important messages and error reports right to the extension. So you won’t need to go to the Settings page to get this information.
The results visual blocks display the output data in a friendlier format, and you will be able to run quick actions with the output data. For example, if you get data in the table format, the new visual blocks will display the “Import To Sheets” button.
How about the release notes and this very page?
Now, you can stay up-to-date with our latest features and improvements. We will also announce new integrations, commands, and playbooks released.
What this means to you is more time-saving automations and 🤯 customizations for your unique workflows.
We’ve tucked away some UI elements to give Bardeen a more minimalist look. Clicking on the input field 🔎 now opens the focused mode to keep you concentrated on the task at hand.
You can forget about filling out the same 10 fields eeeeeeevery siiiiingle time you need to create a Jira issue. Create your custom playbook with our Jira integration to create issues quickly from anywhere.
Dropbox 📦. You can now trigger actions in your web apps when a file is added to a Dropbox folder. Or you can simply use Dropbox as a gateway to get your Zoom recordings uploaded to Google Drive automatically.
Check out the capabilities of Jira and Dropbox in Settings > Commands.
