WinAutomation: Old-School RPA That Still Runs General Overview WinAutomation isn’t new, and it’s not under active development anymore. But for what it was built to do — desktop task automation on Windows — it still works. No cloud. No orchestration. Just a thick client that runs bots locally and quietly.

It came from Softomotive, later absorbed by Microsoft, and then folded into Power Automate Desktop. But plenty of teams never migrated — mostly because the workflows kept doing their job, and n

SaltStack for Windows-Compatible Automation General Overview Salt is not a lightweight tool. It was built for scale. Master–minion architecture, custom DSL for state descriptions, and fast remote execution — that’s what it does. You can run it with agents (called minions), or without them over SSH. On Windows, it works, though it’s not its natural environment.

It’s best used in large Linux-centric infrastructures, but if you’ve got Windows mixed in, Salt can still control it — either through th

Puppet Bolt: When You Need Automation Before Full Configuration Management General Overview Puppet Bolt is a task runner. It doesn’t care about agents, catalogs, or reports. It connects to machines over SSH or WinRM, executes a command or a script, and exits. No daemon, no persistent setup. If the environment is too early-stage or not under Puppet control yet — Bolt works there.

It was created as a stopgap. But in practice, it handles many of the use cases where admins just need something to ha

AutoIt for Windows Automation General Overview AutoIt is a small scripting language created to automate keystrokes, mouse movements, and window control under Windows. It’s not designed for complex development — its strength lies in building repeatable, input-driven workflows that operate against the GUI directly. Think install automation, UI regression test sequences, or basic task scripting in environments where command-line tooling is not viable.

It’s structured, strict, and behaves more pred