Binions is for people and teams who want powerful automation on hardware they own. If you run your own Linux machine, are comfortable in a terminal, and would rather wire your tools together with a small text file than click around a hosted canvas, Binions will feel like home. This page helps you decide honestly whether it is the right fit — and shows the kinds of people who already use it.
Good to know. Binions is aimed at people comfortable with SSH and a text editor. It does not have a drag-and-drop visual builder — you describe workflows in short YAML files. If that sounds like a step too far, the honest fit check further down points you to tools that may suit you better.
The more of these that describe you, the better the match:
Because the building blocks are generic, very different teams put Binions to work:
Automate the everyday glue work — read invoices from a mailbox and extract the figures with AI, sync data between a CRM and a database, send scheduled reports, or route form submissions. The kind of work people often reach for Zapier, Make, or n8n to do, done on your own host.
Bring factory-floor equipment into modern workflows. Binions speaks MODBUS (TCP and RTU-over-TCP) natively — poll a PLC for temperature or vibration, write a setpoint, or run a small edge node right next to the machine. OT means “operational technology”: the controllers and sensors that run physical processes.
Turn security signals into action: route alerts from monitoring tools to your team, verify signed webhooks, and keep a tamper-resistant audit log of everything that happened. A lightweight, self-hosted way to wire detection to response.
A small, scriptable alternative to heavyweight home-automation hubs. Bridge MQTT devices, automate your email, summarise an RSS feed with AI, or control hardware — all on a Pi in the corner, with plenty of headroom to spare.
Run Binions on behalf of your clients. Its small footprint and immutable audit trail make it practical to give each client an isolated, lightweight stack, while you keep one consistent toolset across every engagement. (An MSP is a managed service provider — a team that runs IT for other businesses.)
Be honest with yourself here. Binions trades a point-and-click experience for control, speed, and a tiny footprint on your own hardware. If the points below describe you, a graphical automation tool will probably make you happier — and that is a perfectly good choice.
If one or more of those is a dealbreaker, a visual tool such as n8n, Make, or Zapier is likely a better starting point. You can always come back to Binions when you need to keep data on your own hardware or reach equipment those tools cannot.
* Raspberry Pi and other 64-bit ARM hardware are supported from the public 1.0 release. Binions is currently in alpha, and the alpha packages are for 64-bit x86 (amd64) only.