If productivity and profitability are your goals as a team manager, you may feel like you need a magic wand to improve how your team handles things. You might not need a magic wand, but something that makes your work seamless and productive.
SweetProcess and Flowster are tools that can relieve you from being the bottleneck in your company processes. You can relieve yourself from all the manual and paperwork by picking the right tool.
Even though these tools are both meant to automate your processes, they have some differentiating features. The major difference between Flowster and SweetProcess is that while SweetProcess can help you create your public and private knowledge base, Flowster has a different feature. Flowster has a marketplace where you can buy and sell different SOP templates, while SweetProcess has an inbuilt template you can use to create your process and procedures from scratch.
The contrasting and similar features of Flowster and SweetProcess will be discussed comprehensively in this guide.
If you ever find yourself at a crossroads in choosing between Flowster and SweetProcess, this guide is what you need to see which of these tools is tailored to suit your needs.
SweetProcess is our tool, and we’d love you to try it out for 14 days. This guide is a review of SweetProcess and Flowster. Read to find out which one fits your needs.
$4.95 per user $99 for 20 active users Discount for low-income countries
$12 per user $24 for 2 users: Start-up plan $89 for 5 users: Growth plan $199 for 10 users: Enterprise plan
What is SweetProcess?
SweetProcess is a robust SOP tool that helps you map processes, document procedures, and implement policies. Some of the applications of SweetProcess include employee onboarding, task automation, process mapping, and knowledge base creation. It can function as the single source of truth for your business where all the important documents and details are hosted.
With SweetProcess, mid-sized, enterprise, and multinational companies can easily document their SOPs and be sure that their employers and clients are always on the same page with relevant company information.
Features of SweetProcess
1. Document repetitive tasks such as processes and procedures
Your company’s processes and procedures can be standardized with SweetProcess. This way, all your team members will have access to the same information and carry out all important tasks uniformly.
It is easy to document any of your processes or procedures in SweetProcess following the practical steps below:
You can also create a free account now if you’re new to SweetProcess. No credit card is required.
● Click on “More” and select “Procedures” or “Processes.”
● Click on “Create Procedure.”
● Give your procedure a title and click “Continue.”
Optionally, we can take it up from here and create your procedure while you fold your arms. In this case, all you need to do is click on “Write with SweetAI” and you will have our SweetProcess artificial intelligence create your procedure in about 30 seconds.
● If you’re writing your procedure from scratch, after clicking on “Continue,” you’ll be taken to the next interface where you can add the necessary steps and decisions to the procedure.
● Give each step a title and description.
● Click on “Finished Editing” to save the draft of each step.
● Continue adding more steps with their title and description until your procedure is complete. You can also embed videos, images, or forms in any of the steps using the corresponding icons under each step.
● Once you have finished adding all the details, the next thing is to approve your document and make it available to your team members for their work.
If you are in a position to approve the document, you can easily do that. Otherwise, you can request the right person to approve the document to make it go live.
2. Assign and manage tasks
If you already have your processes and procedures documented, assigning corresponding team members to different tasks becomes more valuable. This will help you get the job done without delays or disappointments.
Both the team manager and the assigned employee will get notifications when the task is assigned, complete, or overdue. You can also fill a procedure with forms that the employee can fill out while they are completing the task.
To assign a team member to a specific task, follow the practical steps below:
● Ensure the task is documented in SweetProcess as a procedure.
● Log in to your SweetProcess account and locate the specific procedure on the homepage.
● Click on the three dots next to it.
● Click on “Assign as Task.”
● Input the required details on the Assign Task dashboard and click “Next.”
● Input the task name, due date, and frequency of the task. The task name is a great way to differentiate this task from others based on the same procedure. For example, if assigned now, the Talent Recruiting Procedure task can be renamed as May 2023 Talent Recruiting or Product Manager Recruiting.
You can change the due date and starting time. (Teammates will get a notification at the start time, or due date if no start time is given). You can have a task repeatedly come up as you deem fit, e.g., every last Friday of the month or weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.
● Once you click “Assign Task,” the teammates you have assigned will get a notification about the new task assigned to them. You will also get a reminder email on the task due date and whether the job is completed or overdue.
3. Write procedures, policies, and processes with SweetAI
Since we value your time and the need to get a lot of things done, we have given you a procedure writing partner right in your SweetProcess account. Using the title as the prompt, SweetProcess Artificial Intelligence will help you come up with your procedure in a matter of seconds. Next is for you to make a few edits, and boom, your procedure is done in less than one-tenth of the actual time.
To have SweetAI write your procedure for you, follow these practical steps:
● Click on “More” and select “Procedures.”
● Input the title for your procedure.
This title will serve as the prompt for SweetAI, so you should include the necessary words or keywords that will make the output more accurate. You can always edit the title to a shorter version later.
● Click on “Write with SweetAI.”
● Your procedure will be created for you in just a few seconds.
● You can add your finishing touches to the document to fit your desired outcome.
● Approve the procedure or notify the appropriate team member to approve, and your procedure will be live.
4. Keep company policies and embed them in processes and procedures
If you want your employees to take all company policies to heart, saying it to them every day is not your best bet. You can achieve this by documenting all of your policies in SweetProcess. Whenever you need to reference a particular policy in the middle of a procedure, you can easily do that by following it without hassle.
Follow the steps below to create a policy.
● Click on “More” and select “Policies.”
● Click “Create Policy.”
● Give your policy a title.
● Click “Add to teams” to add the policy to a team or multiple teams.
● Click “Continue” to manually add all the contents of the policy. Once done, click on save changes to affect the change needed.
● If you don’t want to go through the hassle of writing everything from scratch, you can click “Write with SweetAI” to have your policy generated for you in a few seconds.
● Make the necessary edits to your manually produced or AI-generated policy.
● Approve your policy and make it ready for use.
Here’s how to reference a policy in your process or procedure.
● Click on the policy you want to reference.
● On the left-side panel displayed on the page, select “Related Procedures.”
● Select the appropriate procedure or create a new one if it does not yet exist.
● The policy is automatically linked to the procedure.
5. Build private and public knowledge bases
With SweetProcess, you can easily create one or multiple knowledge bases. You should ensure that the frequently asked questions by your employees, clients, or collaborators are answered on the knowledge base. This will help to eliminate the time spent answering these questions on a one-on-one basis. You can also make some of your processes, procedures, and policies easily accessible through this knowledge base.
● Click on “Create Knowledge Base” to create your first knowledge base.
● If you have pre-existing knowledge bases and want to add a new one, click on “Create Knowledge base” at the top right side of your screen.
● Give your knowledge base a title and click “Continue.”
● Your knowledge base has been created. You can create categories, set them to public/private, and start adding helpful content to your company’s knowledge base.
6. Track version histories
You can easily view your policy, procedure, and process history in SweetProcess. This can help you see the changes that have happened to your document over time and when the document was created.
To view the version histories of your document in SweetProcess, follows the simple steps below:
● Open the document.
● Click on the clock icon on the left-side panel of your screen.
● The different version histories will be displayed to you.
● You can click “Highlight Changes” to see the changes made to the document.
7. Embed videos and other files
To create highly interactive processes and procedures, it’s a great idea to use multimedia items such as videos, images, and so on. SweetProcess allows you to attach videos in MP4 or WEBM format. You can attach up to 50 MB of files to each step.
● To attach a video to a new or existing procedure, click on the “insert video” button for the step.
● To attach an image to a new or existing procedure, click on the “insert image” button for the step.
● To attach a table to a new or existing procedure, click on the “insert table” button for the step.
● To attach a file to a new or existing procedure, click on “Attach File.”
● To link an existing document to a step in your current procedure, click on the “Link to Procedure” button for the step.
8. Ready-to-print offline documents
To increase the accessibility of your team members and clients to important policy and procedure documents, you may want to make them available in various forms. Your existing documents in SweetProcess can be made available as a Word document, PDF document, HTML file, and even as QR codes.
● Open the document while logged in to your SweetProcess account.
● Click on “Actions.”
● Select “Export.”
● Choose your desired file format. This could be Word, PDF, or HTML format.
● Click on “Export.”
If the team manager has turned off the ability for teammates to export PDF or Word documents, other team members may not see the “Action” button.
Optionally, you can have QR codes for different procedures printed on your office board or placed on corresponding offices and equipment. This will make your documents more accessible.
You can print individual QR codes for procedures, policies, and processes. You can also print a QR code that links to a particular tag.
9. Real-time collaboration
To collaborate on a procedure in your SweetProcess account with your team members, you need to be able to comment and leave feedback at each step of the process.
Here’s how to comment on an assigned procedure in SweetProcess:
● Log in to your SweetProcess account and open the procedure.
● Click the comment icon on the left task bar.
● Add comments in this section.
● You can use the “@” feature to mention team members in between comments.
● Click on the “send” icon to notify all concerned parties. They can also reply to your comments, and everyone will be on the same page.
10. Reasonable pricing: Only pay for active members
While some SOP tools have different pricing plans with different accessible features, SweetProcess has a single pricing model. This unified pricing in SweetProcess gives you access to all the features. If you’re on the 14-day free trial plan, you will also have access to all the features in SweetProcess for 14 days.
With $99 a month, you can manage a SweetProcess account with 20 active members. You will need $5 to add an additional member afterward.
If you have less than 20 members, you don’t need to pay for non-existent members. You can reach out to SweetProcess support for your custom pricing.
How do you determine an active member within SweetProcess?
An active member is a user who has used SweetProcess at least twice in the previous two weeks.
If a user has not used SweetProcess at least twice in the previous two weeks, such a user is considered inactive.
Removing a member from SweetProcess will also make such a member an inactive member.
Whenever a member becomes inactive, your SweetProcess account will be credited with the unused part of the billing period due to inactive members.
How SweetProcess Works
As an indispensable tool for companies and teams who are keen on optimizing their processes and workflows, SweetProcess has helped thousands of companies to standardize their workflows and keep their team members and collaborators on track. It is indispensable in creating standardized repositories, documenting SOPs, and streamlining workflows.
Users of SweetProcess range from subject matter experts (SMEs) to large organizations and start-up companies. Founders, CEOs, financial analysts, team managers, project managers, and people in different professional fields have attested to the functionalities in SweetProcess that have brought profitability to their business.
Below are a few highlights of how SweetProcess can support your growth in different capacities.
For Team Managers
With SweetProcess, team managers can enhance efficiency and drive consistent execution of tasks. This is because managers can effortlessly create, organize, and distribute step-by-step procedures and workflows among team members. SweetProcess makes it easy to ensure that all members can access the most up-to-date information, eliminating confusion and enhancing collaboration.
Don Houk, the team lead at Next7 IT, adopted SweetProcess to help him build a proactive system. This helps their organization foresee challenges and make the necessary recommendations for implementing effective solutions.
SweetProcess helped Next7 IT facilitate its growth in improved documentation, new hire onboarding, employee training, consistent service delivery, and much more.
Don Houk is automatically assured that his team members will always deliver great and consistent service to the clients, all thanks to SweetProcess. This has given him more time to focus on bigger company goals.
The benefits of adopting SweetProcess for a team manager are abundant. It significantly reduces training time for new team members by providing clear and detailed SOPs. This enables them to quickly grasp the required processes and contribute to the team’s success as soon as they arrive. Moreover, SweetProcess acts as a centralized knowledge hub, fostering consistency and standardization in task execution across the team.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial of SweetProcess to determine how you can coordinate your team members to bring out the efficiency in your team.
For Financial Advisors
SweetProcess revolutionizes the workflow and employee onboarding experience for financial advisors. It is undoubtedly a user-friendly platform that empowers advisors to streamline their processes, drive efficiency, and ensure seamless onboarding for new team members.
SweetProcess helps to simplify the creation, organization, and distribution of detailed standard operating procedures (SOPs) among financial advisors and their teams. The intuitive interface in SweetProcess facilitates collaboration and eliminates confusion by ensuring that all team members have up-to-date information at their fingertips.
Thimbleberry Financial, a leading financial advisory firm, witnessed significant improvements in employee onboarding with the adoption of SweetProcess. Amy Walls, the firm’s financial expert lead, used SweetProcess to create uniform and effective operations manuals for the business. Having the team work with these documented manuals helped them to streamline documentation, enhance new-hire integration, and optimize employee training.
SweetProcess played a vital role in Thimbleberry Financial’s success. It is easy for the team members to follow all the procedures and fix anything that is broken in the process without having to consult Amy, the team lead.
SweetProcess empowers CEOs to optimize their operations and make prompt and valuable decisions. With a comprehensive training and knowledge base management platform, SweetProcess makes it easy to streamline processes, enhance team collaboration, and improve customer satisfaction.
SweetProcess simplifies creating and managing training materials and knowledge bases for team members. Its user-friendly interface aids efficient documentation of standard operating procedures, the development of training modules, and the organization of valuable resources. You can be sure that all team members have access to up-to-date information. This will foster collaboration and greatly empower all team members.
AEJuice is a prominent company in the digital design industry where they utilize SweetProcess to optimize their customer support team.
Customer support is a huge part of AEJuice’s business as it is vital to help their customers use their products effectively. Everyone on the support team has to be on their A-game to be efficient. Before SweetProcess, Jacob Syrytsia was faced with the issue of excessive questions coming from the support team members all the time.
With SweetProcess, the CEO, Jacob Syrytsia, implemented an optimal training and knowledge base system to enhance the effectiveness of their support team. The platform enabled Jacob and his team to streamline onboarding for new support team members. Clear and detailed SOPs facilitated training, allowing new hires to quickly grasp procedures and deliver exceptional customer support in a short time.
As a centralized knowledge base system, SweetProcess helped in the consistency and accuracy of information across the customer support team. This empowered team members to access critical resources, troubleshoot efficiently, and provide prompt customer solutions.
Take the bold step of transforming your productivity by integrating SweetProcess into your organization. Sign up for a free trial today and unlock the full potential of your company’s operations.
For Founders and Business Owners
SweetProcess proves to be an invaluable tool for founders and business owners looking to scale up their operations by streamlining business processes. With its user-friendly interface, SweetProcess empowers entrepreneurs to optimize workflows, enhance efficiency, and foster growth.
SweetProcess simplifies the creation, organization, and distribution of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for founders and business owners. By providing a centralized hub for documenting and sharing processes, SweetProcess ensures that everyone in the organization can access up-to-date information, fostering collaboration, and driving consistent execution of projects.
Emma Mills, the founder of MiPA, had a great experience scaling her thriving start-up with SweetProcess. She implemented SweetProcess to streamline their business processes and improve the team’s efficiency.
Some of the features that helped Emma scale up her business rapidly with SweetProcess are the ability to build processes and improve on them as well as seamless employee onboarding and training.
Moreover, SweetProcess acted as a central knowledge repository, ensuring that employees had the necessary information at their fingertips. This facilitated collaboration, improved communication, and eliminated the inefficiencies caused by information gaps or miscommunication.
SweetProcess is a game-changer for business intelligence personnel seeking to optimize their workflows and enhance efficiency in data-driven decision-making. With its intuitive interface, SweetProcess empowers professionals to streamline business processes, improve collaboration, and maximize the value of their data.
SweetProcess simplifies the creation, organization, and dissemination of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for business intelligence personnel. The platform provides a user-friendly interface to document and share critical processes, ensuring that everyone has access to up-to-date information. This makes it easy to collaborate on projects and execute projects in a consistent pattern.
Turkstra Lumber, a leading lumber and building supplies company, supercharged its employees’ efficiency with SweetProcess. The business intelligence team implemented the platform to create seamless business processes, and this enhanced their analytical capabilities.
Jamie Ramsden, the business intelligence champion at Turkstra Lumber, found inconsistencies in their processes, hence the search for the right tool that unifies their processes.
By adopting SweetProcess, Turkstra Lumber recorded significant improvement in their team productivity. They leverage the platform to experience improved documentation, a centralized knowledge base, enhanced team efficiency, and better team collaboration.
Clear and detailed SOPs accessible through SweetProcess ensured consistent execution and enabled new team members to adapt and contribute to data-driven decision-making quickly.
If you’re a business intelligence professional seeking to optimize your workflows and enhance data-driven decision-making, you may consider checking out how SweetProcess can be helpful to you.
What is Flowster?
Flowster is a workflow management tool that helps businesses organize and automate their processes. It allows users to easily create workflows for automating repetitive tasks, manage project milestones, collaborate on projects, and receive notifications about the different statuses of a task.
Flowster helps administrators manage users and projects and set up secure access to applications using a centralized dashboard. The platform also allows teams to create custom forms and surveys that can be used to gather information from customers or employees.
Features of Flowster
1. Create business process templates
To create your first SOP in Flowster, all you need to do is to grab a pre-existing template from the Flowster marketplace. Depending on your subscription plan, there is a specific number of templates accessible to each user. Here’s the practical setup for creating your SOP in Flowster.
● Login to your Flowster account.
● Go to “Marketplace.”
● Choose your desired template, which you may get for free or buy at a cost.
● Give the template a name.
● Write a description for the template to capture some of the details that will make it descriptive.
● Once you’ve given your SOP template a name and a description, it’s time to start adding the step-by-step instructions. To create these instructions, you need to use a combination of tasks and sections.
The different sections available are text, image, video, file, checkbox, request short text, request long text, request email, request URL, request file, request date, and dependent workflow.
2. Collaborative workflows
You can create a workflow once you have an existing SOP template for such a task.
To create a workflow from an SOP template, follow the steps below:
● Click the “New Workflow” button shown below.
● On the next interface, you can give the workflow a name and due date, and assign it to the appropriate team member.
You can also create the workflow now and then assign it to your team members later.
3. Conditional workflow
Flowster’s conditional logic rules can be used to hide or show certain sections or entire tasks based on the condition of other sections. An example is showing a dog whenever the word “DOG” is typed into the box.
Then, when the workflow runs, if anything other than DOG is entered, no image will appear.
4. Schedule recurring workflows
Flowster allows you to schedule a recurring workflow using a frequency of your choice. You would typically want to do this if there’s a task that is repeated, say on a weekly basis or monthly basis.
Examples of such workflows can include sending out weekly newsletters to customers, as seen below:
● Create a workflow template.
● Click on “Schedule Workflow.”
● Schedule your workflow as desired.
The above workflow means starting on Aug 16, 2021, at 12 p.m. every Monday, this workflow will be created, you will be assigned to it, and it will be due after one day (therefore due on Tuesday).
● You can check out the calendar to see that every Tuesday going forward, the newsletter workflow is due.
● Also, check out the scheduled tab to see that every Monday this workflow is scheduled to execute.
5. ChatGPT integration
You can write your procedures in Flowster using the ChatGPT integration built in for you.
● Click on “+New Template.”
● Switch to AI-generated mode.
● Input your desired topic. You can select from the suggested drop-down topics.
● Click on “Generate template.”
● The new template will be automatically generated in a short time.
● For each task, you’ll see these two buttons at the bottom:
“Generate Additional Details”: You can use this button to generate a new summary paragraph describing this task in more detail.
You can also generate additional steps using the appropriate button.
6. Flowster capture
The Flowster Capture is not an in-app feature but a Chrome Extension. It makes capturing workflows easier and less time-consuming than the old methods of recording yourself talking over video or taking screenshots and manually annotating them.
Flowster Capture, once activated, generates screenshots each time you click your mouse or use your keyboard. These screen grabs are more easily-editable than screenshots, and you can easily share them in different file formats.
Why Should You Use SweetProcess?
1. Requires no learning curve
SweetProcess has a very simple and user-friendly interface. You don’t have to go through any sort of training before you start documenting your procedures and policies. A new user can get up and running with SweetProcess in just two minutes.
Once you’re logged in, you can easily navigate and enjoy all the perks built in for you.
According to a G2 review by a marketing and operations manager, SweetProcess has almost no learning curve. This means you can jump right in and start creating procedures and processes.
Navigating the Flowster dashboard, on the other hand, is technical. You cannot execute your processes without going through the video and written tutorials available in their knowledge base.
A Flowster user explained that the interface is clunky and seems to have a mobile-optimized layout but with irregular widgets on the desktop view.
2. In-built and customizable template
The in-built SOP template is readily available in your SweetProcess account, and you can start creating your procedures following the template. You will not only end up with a written procedure but also a process map that is automatically created while you write your procedure.
Flowster requires you to get or buy templates from the template marketplace to build your procedure. The process map feature is also not present in Flowster.
3. Import existing SOPs
If you are new to SweetProcess, you don’t have to start everything from scratch. In a situation where you have pre-existing SOPs somewhere, you can bring them on to SweetProcess with just a few clicks. This means if you’re migrating from another SOP to SweetProcess, you just have to continue from where you stopped and not start afresh.
This is not possible with Flowster, as you can only use templates from the marketplace, or rather build one from scratch.
4. Get one-on-one support
If you ever need help to maximize the features of SweetProcess, we have more than enough support hands to walk you through.
Our knowledge base has most of your questions answered, and you can start from there.
If you need more hands, feel free to make use of the phone and email support on the contact page here. We have the support team members waiting to answer your questions and will even be happy to have a screen share session with you if needed.
5. Create a knowledge base for your employees and customers
The knowledge base feature is not a common perk with most SOP tools. Having your procedures and your help documents in one place is a great feature you should adopt. SweetProcess allows you to create both public and private knowledge bases.
The private knowledge base is only visible to your signed-in team members. You will be able to equip it with information that is only relevant to your employees and not the public. The public knowledge base, on the other hand, can be seen by anyone on the internet, even through a Google search. You will be able to equip it with all the details that will be helpful to your clients, collaborators, and everyone willing to know more about your product.
This will multiply your company’s productivity by reducing the time needed for team managers to answer repetitive questions among their employers. It will also cut down the time spent by your customer support staff in handling tickets from existing and prospective customers.
With Flowster’s company knowledge base hosted on Freshdesk, you will agree that no such feature exists in their system. You may have to navigate from one tool to the other to manage your SOPs and knowledge base documents as a Flowster user.
6. Affordable pricing
SweetProcess comes at a comparatively cheap cost that can be easily affordable by small and medium enterprises. More so, it has a uniform pricing model such that you can access all the in-built features even while on the free trial plan.
By calculation, a single user on SweetProcess pays $4.95 per month and $4.17 monthly billed annually.
Flowster, on the other hand, is a bit pricey. To have access to all the features in Flowster, a single user will pay up to $29.90 per month.
No doubt, this pricing will be quite affordable for some small and medium-scale companies.
7. Automated process maps and flowcharts
It is possible to have some team members who are not a fan of many words. This is where the automated flow charts in SweetProcess get helpful. Having a process map in the form of an infographic will make it easy for all team members to get the hang of what is required of them at a glance.
While creating your procedure in SweetProcess, the process map automatically pops up. The same thing happens when any of your team members open the procedure to view or perform a task.
This feature is not obtainable in Flowster. All the processes are in written form, and some of them may be difficult to comprehend.
8. Free guest member access
If you have a client or collaborator who doesn’t have regular access to your SweetProcess account, you can still assign tasks to them using the guest member feature. This will help you to also save costs because you don’t have to sign them into SweetProcess. A guest member will have access to work on the task assigned to him for 14 days. You can extend this expiry date if necessary.
Flowster vs SweetProcess: Which One Should You Choose?
This guide has equipped you with a detailed overview of SweetProcess and Flowster. These are tools used in documenting procedures to make it easy to unify and coordinate your team.
While SweetProcess has a simple interface without any technical demand, Flowster requires a bit of tech savviness. You may not be able to navigate the Flowster interface without some hands-on training.
According to a reviewer on G2, Flowster has a learning curve, and this is why it was a challenge to get all team members to fully get on board with it. After adopting Flowster, it was a challenge in itself to get users to steer away from Google Docs and Loom videos for SOPs due to the learning curve required for Flowster.
SweetProcess, on the other hand, according to a G2 reviewer, has no learning curve, and you can jump in and start creating your processes.
SweetProcess is also a robust tool that accommodates not only your processes, procedures, and policies but also your public and private knowledge base. This is a great upside compared to Flowster, where you have to adopt an entirely new tool for your knowledge base documents.
With SweetProcess being more affordable than Flowster, all business sizes can use SweetProcess without taking too much of their revenue.
Do it with SweetProcess, click here to learn more
Leave a Reply