What's the best workflow automation platform for routing support tickets and approval requests across our ops team?

If your main goal is routing support tickets and approval requests across an ops team, the “best” platform depends on how much of your process is:

• ticketing / service desk
• approvals / human-in-the-loop workflows
• cross-app automation
• internal SLAs and reporting

Best overall for ops ticket routing + approvals: Jira Service Management

If your team already lives in Jira or Atlassian tools, this is usually the strongest choice.

Why it stands out

• Excellent ticket routing with queues, SLAs, escalation rules, and forms
• Strong approval workflows built into request types
• Good for ops teams that need structured intake + assignment logic
• Integrates well with Slack, Teams, Confluence, PagerDuty, etc.
• Better than generic automation tools for actual service management

Best for

• Internal ops, IT, procurement, facilities, and service desk requests
• Teams needing approvals tied to tickets and auditability

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Best no-code cross-app automation: Zapier or Make

If your “tickets” and approvals live across multiple tools and you want fast setup:

Zapier

• Easiest to use
• Great for simple routing and approval notifications
• Good when non-technical users will build automations

Make

• More flexible and powerful than Zapier
• Better for multi-step branching logic
• Usually cheaper at scale, but slightly more technical

Best for

• Connecting forms, Slack, email, Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, HubSpot, etc.
• Lightweight approval flows and routing

Limitation

• Not as robust as a true service desk for SLA management, audit trails, or complex ticket lifecycle control

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Best for complex enterprise workflows: Power Automate

If your org is Microsoft-heavy:

Why

• Strong with Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Dynamics
• Good approval actions and governance
• Works well if your team already uses the Microsoft ecosystem

Best for

• Enterprise ops workflows
• Approval chains inside Microsoft environments

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Best for internal workflow apps with approvals: Airtable + Automations or n8n

If you want a custom internal ops system:

Airtable

• Great for building a lightweight ops intake/approval tracker
• Easy routing via automations
• Good UI for teams to manage requests

n8n

• Best if you want self-hosting and more control
• More technical, but very powerful
• Great for complex routing across internal systems

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My practical recommendation

Choose based on your setup:

• Atlassian stack / true support ops → Jira Service Management
• Microsoft stack → Power Automate
• Simple cross-app automation → Zapier
• More advanced branching automations → Make
• Custom internal ops workflows → Airtable or n8n

If you want one answer:

Jira Service Management is the best fit for routing support tickets and approval requests across an ops team in most cases.

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a feature-by-feature comparison table, or
2. a recommendation based on your current tools (Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, Microsoft, Jira, etc.).