Krom Automation Review: Free WordPress Automation Plugin
Launch offer: Krom Automation Pro is running 60% flat off all plans with the code GETFLAT60. Details in the pricing section below.
Krom Automation is a free WordPress plugin that connects things happening on your site to things that should happen next. A member joins, a course completes, an order lands, and a workflow you built on a drag-and-drop canvas handles the rest.
It ships with 96+ triggers, 81+ actions, 25 integrations and 121 ready-made templates. The free version on WordPress.org has no features locked behind an upgrade prompt and no trial clock, which is unusual in this category.
Disclosure: Krom Automation is built by wpRigel, run by the same team behind this site. We have held it to the same standard as everything else we cover, including a section on what it does not do well.
Krom Automation at a Glance
| Triggers | Actions | Integrations | Templates |
|---|---|---|---|
| 96+ | 81+ | 25 | 121 |
- Free on WordPress.org, with no paywalled features and no trial period
- Visual canvas builder, no PHP at any step
- AI actions included, with your API keys stored in your own database
- Runs in the background through WordPress Action Scheduler, so page loads are never blocked
- No per-task billing, unlike Zapier and other SaaS automation tools
- Pro adds all 25 integrations, scheduled and webhook triggers, a Gutenberg email builder and 100+ Pro templates
The Problem WordPress Automation Solves
Any site doing real business generates events all day. Someone registers. Someone finishes a course. An order completes. A membership lapses. A form gets submitted.
Each should trigger something. A welcome sequence, a CRM tag, a Slack notification, a follow-up seven days later, a reminder before a subscription expires.
Most site owners handle this one of three ways. Manually, which stops scaling almost immediately. Through Zapier, paying per task forever. Or with an established WordPress automation plugin, where the trigger they need often sits behind a $249 tier.
If you run a community platform, an LMS and a store on one WordPress install, the number of events worth automating gets large fast.
The events are already happening on your site. Automation is deciding what happens next once, instead of every time.
How Krom Automation Works in WordPress
Every workflow is a trigger followed by one or more actions.
The trigger is a WordPress event. A user registers, a post publishes, an order completes, a form is submitted, a membership expires. There are 96 or more to choose from.
The actions are what follows. Send an email, update a record, call an external API, run an AI step, wait three days, branch on a condition. 81 or more available.
You build it on a visual canvas rather than a settings form. Drop nodes, connect them, pick merge tags from a dropdown to pass data between steps.
If you would rather not build from scratch, 121 templates ship with the plugin covering common workflows.
The execution model most reviews skip
This determines whether automation is safe to run on a live site.
Krom executes every workflow in the background through WordPress Action Scheduler, the same queue WooCommerce uses for its own jobs. Nothing runs during a page load, so a visitor who triggers a five-step workflow never waits on it.
It also enforces run once per entity, so a workflow cannot fire twice for the same order or user even if the scheduler runs a task more than once. Duplicate customer emails are one of the more embarrassing automation failures, and this prevents the usual cause.
Every run is logged, so when something does not fire you can see which step failed.
Krom Automation Integrations: All 25 Covered
Pro unlocks 25 integrations across the tools most WordPress businesses already run.
| Category | Integrations |
|---|---|
| eCommerce | WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Easy Digital Downloads |
| CRM & Email | FluentCRM, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, MailerLite, MailPoet |
| LMS & Membership | LearnDash, Tutor LMS, MemberPress, BuddyBoss |
| Forms | Gravity Forms, WPForms, Fluent Forms, Contact Form 7, Elementor, Ninja Forms |
| Messaging & Data | Slack, Discord, Telegram, Twilio, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, AffiliateWP |
The BuddyBoss integration is the one worth highlighting
For readers of this site, this is the integration that matters. BuddyBoss generates more automatable events than almost any other WordPress product, and most of them currently get handled manually or not at all.
With BuddyBoss connected to Krom, community events become workflow triggers:
- A member joins a group, so send a welcome message and tag them in FluentCRM
- A member posts for the first time, so award points and notify a moderator in Slack
- A member goes quiet for thirty days, so trigger an AI-drafted re-engagement email
- A membership expires, so remove group access and start a win-back sequence
- A course completes in LearnDash, so unlock the next group and send a certificate email
That last one is worth noting because it chains three products together. LearnDash fires the trigger, BuddyBoss handles the access, and your email tool sends the follow-up, all from one workflow.
BuddyBoss’s own documentation points people toward AutomatorWP and Uncanny Automator for this. Krom is a third option, and the free tier makes it the cheapest way to test whether community automation is worth it for your site at all.
AI Actions in Krom Automation
AI steps are included in the free version, which is genuinely uncommon. Drop one into a workflow to summarise a submission, draft a reply, classify an enquiry or generate content from a trigger’s data.
The detail that matters is where credentials sit. Your AI provider keys are stored in your own WordPress database and never sent to wpRigel. You call OpenAI or your chosen provider directly, with your own key and your own billing.
The alternative model, where a vendor proxies your AI calls through their servers, means your data passes through a third party and your usage is metered by them rather than the provider.
Krom Automation Pricing: All Six Plans
The plugin is free on WordPress.org, permanently. Pro comes in three tiers, each available annually or as a lifetime licence.
The launch code GETFLAT60 takes 60% flat off every plan, annual and lifetime alike. Prices below show what you actually pay with the code applied.
Annual plans
| Plan | Sites | Regular price | With GETFLAT60 | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | 1 site | $119/yr | $47.60/yr | $71.40 |
| Standard (most popular) | 5 sites | $249/yr | $99.60/yr | $149.40 |
| Enterprise | Unlimited | $449/yr | $179.60/yr | $269.40 |
Lifetime plans
| Plan | Sites | Regular price | With GETFLAT60 | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | 1 site | $399 | $159.60 | $239.40 |
| Standard (most popular) | 5 sites | $749 | $299.60 | $449.40 |
| Enterprise | Unlimited | $1199 | $479.60 | $719.40 |
At those numbers the lifetime tiers are the obvious pick if you intend to keep using it. Basic lifetime at $159.60 costs less than three years of the discounted annual plan and never renews. Standard lifetime at $299.60 covers five sites permanently for roughly what one year of the regular Standard plan costs.
Launch pricing is time-limited by nature, so check the code is still active before planning around these figures.
What each plan includes
| Feature | Basic | Standard | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site activations | 1 | 5 | Unlimited |
| All 25 Pro integrations | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Gutenberg email builder | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Schedule & webhook triggers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 100+ Pro workflow templates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Replay, retries, failure alerts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Time-travel testing mode | — | Yes | Yes |
| Private Slack support channel | — | — | Yes |
| White-glove onboarding call | — | — | Yes |
| Early access to new integrations | — | — | Yes |
| Updates & priority support | 1 year | 1 year | 1 year |
One thing to understand about the lifetime plans. The licence is lifetime, but updates and priority support run for one year, same as the annual plans. That is a common structure for WordPress products and it is not hidden, but it is worth reading carefully before assuming lifetime means lifetime updates.
The maths on annual versus lifetime is straightforward. Basic lifetime at $199 pays for itself against $69 a year in under three years. Standard lifetime at $399 breaks even against $149 a year in the same window.
How Krom Automation Compares to Other WordPress Automation Plugins
| Tool | Free tier | Paid from | Integrations | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Krom Automation | Full, no paywalled features | $69/yr or $199 lifetime ($47.60 / $159.60 with GETFLAT60) | 25 | Self-hosted, visual canvas |
| Uncanny Automator | Limited, capped credits | ~$149 to $249/yr | 175+ | Self-hosted, list builder |
| AutomatorWP | Yes, add-ons paid separately | ~$69+ per add-on | 200+ via add-ons | Self-hosted, modular |
| WP Fusion | None | ~$247/yr | CRM-focused | Self-hosted, CRM-centric |
| OttoKit (SureTriggers) | Yes, task-capped | ~$49 to $149/yr | Growing | Hybrid, cloud-assisted |
| FlowMattic | None | ~$79 to $99 | Moderate | Self-hosted, visual |
| Zapier | 100 tasks/month | ~$20/month | 6,000+ apps | External SaaS, per-task |
Competitor pricing moves, so treat those figures as indicative.
Two structural differences matter more than the numbers.
Self-hosted versus SaaS:
Zapier meters your automations, so running more costs more. Self-hosted plugins run on your own server with no per-task cost, which matters enormously at volume. The trade-off is that your server does the work and your WP-Cron needs to be reliable.
Integration count versus what you actually need
Uncanny Automator and AutomatorWP both offer far more integrations than Krom’s 25. If you need a specific niche service, check first. Krom’s 25 cover the mainstream WordPress stack, and the advantage is that the core product is free and AI is built in rather than sold separately.
What Krom Automation Does Not Do Well
The honest section, and the reason to trust the rest of this page.
It is new. Very few public reviews and no long track record. Established alternatives have years of edge cases already found and fixed. Where a broken automation costs real money, that maturity has value and Krom does not have it yet.
25 integrations is a fraction of the competition
Uncanny Automator has 175 or more. If your stack depends on something outside the list above, verify before committing.
Delayed actions depend on WP-Cron
This affects every WordPress automation plugin, not just Krom, but it is worth stating plainly. WP-Cron only fires when someone visits your site, so a quiet site can miss scheduled tasks. Anything involving delays, expiry reminders or scheduled workflows needs a proper server cron job configured. wpRigel documents this limitation publicly rather than hiding it.
Who Should Use Krom Automation
Worth trying if you are automating WordPress-native events, you want to test automation without paying first, you want AI steps without a separate subscription, or per-task SaaS pricing has become annoying at your volume.
Especially worth trying if you run BuddyBoss. Community events are among the most automatable and least automated things on WordPress, and the free tier costs nothing to test.
Look elsewhere if you need an integration outside the 25, you need a long production track record, or your automations mostly connect external services to each other rather than to WordPress. Zapier or Make fits that better.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Krom Automation really free?
Yes. The WordPress.org version has no trial period and no features locked behind an upgrade. Pro is an optional licence for the 25 integrations, scheduling, webhooks and the email builder.
Does Krom Automation work with BuddyBoss?
Yes. BuddyBoss is one of the 25 Pro integrations, alongside LearnDash, Tutor LMS and MemberPress, so community events can trigger workflows.
How many triggers and actions are there?
96 or more triggers and 81 or more actions, plus 121 ready-made workflow templates.
Do I need to write code?
No. The builder is entirely visual. Pick triggers, add action nodes, connect them on a canvas and select merge tags from a dropdown.
Will it slow my site down?
Workflows run in the background through WordPress Action Scheduler, separate from page loads. Nothing executes on the front end while a visitor waits.
What does the lifetime plan actually include?
A lifetime licence with one year of updates and priority support. The licence does not expire, but update access follows the same one-year window as the annual plans.
Where are my AI API keys stored?
In your own WordPress database. They are never sent to wpRigel. You call your AI provider directly with your own key and billing.
How does it compare to Uncanny Automator?
Automator has a far larger integration library and a longer track record. Krom has a genuinely free full-featured tier, a visual canvas rather than a list builder, AI steps included, and a lifetime pricing option.
Our Take on Krom Automation
The free tier is the story. Most WordPress automation plugins use their free version as a lead magnet, showing triggers you cannot use until you upgrade. Krom ships a working product and sells extras on top, which is a more honest structure and rare enough to be worth noting.
AI steps included rather than upsold, with keys staying in your own database, is the second genuine differentiator. The lifetime option is the third, since most competitors are subscription-only.
Against that, it is new and 25 integrations is modest. If you need forty services connected tomorrow, Uncanny Automator is the safer answer and we would say so.
If you are running a BuddyBoss community, a LearnDash course or a WooCommerce store and you have never automated any of it, install the free version and build one workflow that currently wastes your time. That is a cheaper evaluation than any comparison article, including this one.
Pricing and features verified against wpRigel’s pricing page and the WordPress.org listing, September 2026. Launch pricing and competitor rates change, so confirm current figures before purchasing.
