You can connect to any tool that has an API with Tines. API is an abbreviation for Application Programming Interface. APIs serve as intermediaries that facilitate communication between two applications. In Tines, we typically use API as shorthand for web APIs involving HTTP requests between web servers. You can even build your own APIs with Tines.

Actions are the building blocks of all stories in Tines. They emit events to other actions in your story. Once you drag an action onto the Storyboard in Tines, you have started building your first story in Tines.

The action bar is the small menu of options that appears when you select an action on your Storyboard. You can do things like run your event, test your event, and see event data for that action.
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A type of action that's available on Tines plans with AI features which allows you to securely and privately run a large language model (LLM) at any point in your workflow. It supports two modes of operation: task and chat, enabling both behind-the-scenes automation and interactive user experiences. It allows you to configure system instructions (how the agent should behave) and a prompt (the task to be performed). You can also add tools to be used by this action. Read more here.

All Tines plans receive a monthly allocation of credits:
• Community Edition: 50 credits
• Paid Editions: 5000 credits

Credits reset on the first of each month and don't roll over. Each credit is equal to $0.01 USD. You can monitor the dollars in the reporting dashboard.

For community users, the 50 monthly credits can be used for AI actions and Workbench (limited to 20 daily messages tenant-wide).

System-level instructions that define the rules, context, and constraints for the AI agent action. In chat mode, this should define the agent's goal, where the chat ends when the goal is achieved.

You can build apps with Tines by configuring an exchange of user input and background automation. Think of the app’s backend as the Story run, while the user-facing page as the front end.

A Story that has been placed into a temporary pre-trash location so that they can be recovered. These stories are not deleted until you choose to delete them.

Any time a user changes any piece of data in your Tines tenant, through the UI or API, it is automatically captured as an audit log. You can view your audit logs via your tenant admin menu in the top left of your dashboard when you click the Tines logo.

A tab in the properties panel used to configure your actions.

With Cases in Tines, you can work together, comment, and track activity for any alert or incident.

Case blocks are discrete, reorder-able sections. Each block has its own title, color, type, and visibility settings.

Case fields let you capture custom, structured data within your cases – like ticket IDs, affected systems, or investigation outcomes – beyond built-in case properties like name, status, and priority.

A form-based input mechanism that allows users to manually provide data into a Case, typically surfaced through a Tines Page or form associated with the case.

A rule or constraint applied to a Case Input field to ensure the submitted data meets certain criteria (e.g., required, specific format, value range) before it is accepted.

Pre-built structures for cases that include pre-defined fields, notes, and metadata. These types of templates allow you to quickly create new cases without starting from scratch, which is especially useful for workflows your team handles repeatedly.

With change control in Tines, you have two working spaces for each Story; test and live. These environments run independently of each other without any interference. You can enable Change control in the manage dropdown menu above your Storyboard. When your story is ready, admins can push story changes from test to live.

Authentication keys for the various systems and services you connect with Tines. Your credentials are saved in Tines, and accessible via the team they are saved within.

You can access a list of quick actions by using command+K in Tines.

CoHTTP is an add-on feature that allows your Tines tenant to make programmatic calls to systems running on your private network, which may not have HTTP interfaces. It is deployed as a container service within your network, and has the capability to execute Python, Bash, and PowerShell scripts there.

One of the eight action types in Tines. With a condition action type you can define the rules or conditions that determine what happens in your story. The condition action compares the contents of a field from an incoming event with predefined rules. When the rules match, an event is triggered.

Rules determine when and how condition actions should fire.

Connect flow

The mechanism in the Tines tool which guides users through the process of creating a credential for a specific product or tool. Each connect flow is unique to its product and via secure browser window-to-window communication, will create a credential for the user in the team where the flow was completed. It supports creating various types of credentials including managed OAuth-type credentials (not available for self-hosted tenants).

A mode of the event transformation action. Deduplicate mode is available in any event transform action. You can specify a field in an incoming event and only emit the event if that field contains a unique value.

A mode of the event transformation action. With delay mode, you can deliberately pause a story for a set number of seconds before emitting an event. More in our docs here.

A Tines dedicated tenant refers to a separate, isolated instance of the Tines automation platform that is set up exclusively for a single customer or organization. In other words, it’s a private version of Tines where all the data, workflows, and automations belong to that specific customer, ensuring security, customization, and resource allocation tailored to their needs.

A story that has been permanently deleted after having been archived. These types of stories, cannot be recovered.

The descriptive text you can provide about your story, action, page, record, or other story components.

A private place to build stories on your own before moving them to a team when you’re ready.

An editor in your team is a user that has read and write permissions to most objects across a team, but they cannot manage member access to the team or perform destructive actions. This role is helpful for most users who need the ability to create, edit, and run Stories in Tines.

Actions, tools, or templates you can pull onto the Storyboard to begin a workflow.

The process by which an action generates and sends an event to subsequent connected actions within a Story.

One of the eight action types in Tines. Use the event transformation action type to modify and transform incoming events or data for further downstream processing. It has several modes: message-only mode, extract mode, explode mode, deduplicate mode, delay mode, implode mode, and throttle mode.

Structured data sent between actions within your stories. Every time an action runs, it produces an event that describes the outcome or result of the action. This event is passed to other actions connected downstream. More about events here.

A panel that appears at the bottom of the Tines storyboard UI when viewing the event details for a selected action. This panel will also show the event details for upstream actions.

A mode of the event transformation action. Extract mode allows you to use regular expressions to extract text from fields in incoming events.

View a list of your favorite stories in your tenant. Favorites are available in the top left menu in your dashboard.

A flow is a connected set of one or more elements, that can run automatically. In product terms, it is defined as:
• 2 or more connected elements that can run autonomously
• 1 or more scheduled elements

Stay organized by sorting your stories into folders in your teams.

Just like in spreadsheets, formulas allow you to transform data in Tines. You can reference event data from upstream actions or other data sources like resources and then use one of our 150+ built-in functions. For example, to count the number of items in an array, you could use a formula like `SIZE(upstream_action.array)`.

Organize and categorize related actions in a story together. Groups enable a better organization of complex stories by extracting well-defined branches of a story into a group.

One of the eight action types in Tines. With this action type you can send/fetch data to/from any API on the web.

The primary data that you send over in a http request. This is commonly known as "request body" outside of Tines.

These are modes of the event transformation action. With explode mode, you can specify a field in an incoming Event that contains an array, and Tines will emit individual Events for each element of the array.

With implode mode, you can collect and reassemble a previously exploded array into a single event. Some examples include reassembling an array of 'exploded' URLs from a previous action in the story or consolidating API paging requests into a single event by setting the size to the number of pages available.

You can import a story into Tines in two ways: selecting a pre-made story from our Story Library or importing a story file from your computer via the import button at the top of your Tines Dashboard.

An action entry point for either a send to story action or a Workbench request which contains defined values that either Workbench or the sub-story needs in order to run. These actions must be of type webhook.

You can build integrations through Tines. An integration can be as simple as an action on the storyboard (see action templates) or it can be an entire story that's integrating multiple systems. As a vendor-agnostic platform, we can integrate with any API.

A place to do upfront formula calculations before an action runs. Then, when it runs, you can refer to the results of those calculations here.

There is the option to lock a story in the top right corner of the screen. Anyone viewing the story then needs to unlock it in order to configure actions or edit connections.

A tab inside the properties panel to the right of your Storyboard. Here you can spot errors and analyze logs generated by your actions.

An operation performed using the Event transform action to iterate through a list of objects & apply the same logic to each item in the list where the output would be a new list with the specified data. Read more here.

A mode of the event transformation action. Use message-only to produce a new piece of data and emit it as an event for use downstream. You can use formulas to refer to upstream event data, and even use the loop configuration option to iterate over a list of data to transform it.

You can turn on monitoring for your entire story. It will notify you when any action fails. You can also turn it on and configure it for individual actions.

Add annotations or comments to provide additional information or instructions within your story. Available within the story toolbar

Notes support rich formatting including toggle headings (H1, H2, and H3), which allow you to collapse and expand sections to keep your notes organized. Type / in any note to access formatting options including toggle headings.

An action exit point or last action in a sub-story for which the output content is emitted by the originating send to story action or Workbench request. These actions must be of type event transform using the message-only mode.

A web page you can make using Tines. Your end users can use it to fill out forms or consume information. You can build powerful apps with pages; they can display information from events, a workflow to end-users, and pass data from users to actions via forms.

A grouping of multiple page elements on a page for which conditions and layout options can be applied. They can be created by dragging page elements on top of each other or by creating copies of a page element. Read more here.

When creating a Page in Tines, you can choose from a list of display elements that make up your page. These include title, divider, image, rich text, map and table.

When creating a page in Tines, you can choose from a list of input fields for your end-users to interact with. These include long text, short text, date, URL, email, file upload, and more.

You can organize and share visual preferences between your pages with themes.

Themes store the logo, color, and width settings for a page so they can be applied to other pages. You can create a new theme by opening an existing page and clicking on the theme dropdown.

The Tines term for an entity which retrieves a dynamic variable data value. It's sometimes just referenced as "value pill" or a "data value pill". These are primarily used to call event data from upstream actions. In software development, these are similar to local variables.

Presets allow team admins (or custom roles with the permission to manage the team) to pre-configure a set of templates (with credentials), stories, and custom instructions; making available to all team members for rapid and consistent use.

Team-scoped templates which are pre-configured actions created by someone on your team, and are visible to everyone on the team where they're created.

The specific details about the task or assignment that you want an AI agent to handle. For clarity, this can include an example of what you want the agent to output.

There is a properties panel for your story, and another for each action item in your story. From the properties panel you can access everything from the story name, tags, credentials, to the story description. At an individual action level you can access the build pane, the status pane, the logs pane, and in the case of a HTTP request, the summary pane.

One of the eight action types in Tines. The receive email Action emits events when it detects new emails on an IMAP server or when emails are sent to a uniquely generated email address hosted by Tines.Trigger workflows based on receiving emails or perform actions on incoming email messages.

This story list is organized by your most recently edited stories in your tenant.

Capture and store data or information encountered or generated during the execution of your stories. You can drag a record onto your Storyboard to capture the data at specific points in your story.

The operation of resendng the last event that was processed by an upstream action so that it can be (re)processed by downstream actions.

Tines reporting provides an overview of your Tines tenant and action performance. Reports include, story usage, time-saved per story, most activity by, story, action, credential, and resource.

Manage and organize reusable pieces of data like text, objects, arrays and files for use across multiple stories.

The operation of executing an automation. Since the build and execution environments are the same in Tines, your most important workflows are ready to run and make an immediate impact.

You can schedule your story to run at a specific time. Select the first action (or group) in your story, then go to status, and set your schedule there.

A visual container that can be used to associate a set of actions. They're meant to improve understanding and clarity by visually organising actions, making complex workflows easier to follow and interpret.

One of the eight action types in Tines. Automate sending emails as part of your workflow processes.

One of the eight action types in Tines. Route events or data to other stories for further processing or analysis.

A tab in the properties panel where you can monitor and manage the status of your story or action or page.

A collection of actions connected together to achieve a specific automation goal or objective. It is the building format of a Tines workflow that may include multiple independent units.

The canvas on which you plan for and build stories in Tines. This is where most of your work will occur.

AI-powered chat interface to build, understand, and optimize flows on the storyboard. You can use it to start from scratch or to work with an existing story. Story copilot makes Tines accessible to the whole team, regardless of skillset.

A repository or collection of reusable stories or workflow templates that can be shared and reused.

A story run allows you to trace the exact path an event took through a Story. It contains the Actions and their emitted events allowing you to easily troubleshoot and benchmark your automation stories.

The story toolbar in Tines includes our actions, tools, and templates. It is a fully customizable floating toolbar that appears as a floating panel on the storyboard, designed to help you build faster. Actions are grouped by function so you can find what you need at a glance.

A Story that gets triggered by another Tines story via the send to story action. It may contain a set of actions that can be used in multiple stories to send data results back to a main story which triggered it.

It can be used to perform a common action or set of actions. All actions within this type of Story must be connected as separate since unconnected sets of actions, are not supported. The exit action(s) must be in the same connected flow as the entry action.

Tags are used in a few ways in Tines. You can assign tags to categorize and organize your stories in the story library, or your cases; for easier searching and filtering. There is also a tags feature used in formulas.

With teams in Tines, you can organize your users, credentials, resources, and stories. Team members will only be able to access the configuration items of teams that they are a part of unless they are a tenant owner.

If you have multiple teams in a tenant, the tenant owner can provision story limits by team. You can find this option in your tenant admin menu.

Templates are pre-configured actions or groups of actions that you can use straight out of the box with Tines. You can browse and select them directly from the HTTP request action in the story toolbar. These are also known as public templates.

When you sign up to Tines you and your team are organized together in a shared workspace known as a tenant where you can collaborate together.

Tenant owners can perform actions on any object, regardless of the team that owns it (users who are not tenant owners can only perform actions on objects owned by a team they are a member of).

A mode of the event transformation action. Allow events to be emitted at a consistent, limited rate. Throttle mode helps you to respect rate limits when interacting with 3rd party APIs. This logic is applied to all events regardless of which story run they are from.

A program that provides hand-on guidance for building stories in Tines. It's found here.

Powers the run script action on self-hosted infrastructure. It runs Python with access to packages like `requests`, `pandas`, `cryptography`, and `boto3`. Adding libraries is straightforward, just point TCR at a public or local PyPI server and install what you need.

A learning resource that can help you to get certified with Tines. It's found here.

The name of Tine's change log, found here.

In addition to the eight action types available in the menu next to your Storyboard, you can also drag on one of 4 tools. They are; group, page, note, and Record.

An individual in Tines with access to view, edit, or manage stories and/or the tenant.

Story-versioning allows teams to back up, inspect, clone, export, and restore any workflow. You can access version history via the clock icon at the top-right corner of your Storyboard.

As a viewer, you have read-only permission across a team. You can view, but not edit, objects in a team. This role is useful for situations where a colleague or auditor needs oversight or understanding of an automated workflow, without the ability to alter it – or even accidentally break it.

Value types are options for creating the payload in certain types of actions (like Send to story and Event transformation. A value can be text, formula, number, true/false, null, an object or an array. You can learn more here.

One of the eight action types in Tines. A webhook enables communication between two applications in real-time. To create a new webhook, simply drag it onto your Storyboard to create a URL which can receive HTTP data.

Capture and process the responses received from external systems via webhooks.

Criteria that must be met in order for an event to be emitted by a Webhook action.

A Tines-powered AI chat interface. When connected to stories, Workbench can take actions and access proprietary data in real-time, privately and securely. You can interact with this using natural language (NL) or use a template.

A contest where you can submit a Story that demonstrates the overall concept of a use case handled using the Tines service. It's found here.