Automations

Two kinds

They sit side by side under Automations in the menu because they answer the same worry — what is running while I am not looking — but they listen to different things and produce different things.

• Flows hold a conversation. Someone messages you or comments on a post, and the flow replies, offers buttons, follows the branch they pick, tags them, and hands the conversation to a person when it should be one. What comes out is a message.
• Triggers publish. Something happens outside PostRite — today, a Twitch stream going live — and a rule publishes a template to the accounts you chose. What comes out is a post.

Which one you want

If the sentence in your head starts with "when someone…", you want a flow. If it starts with "when I…", you want a trigger. A trigger never writes to a person, and a flow never publishes a post — that boundary is deliberate, and it is why the two are separate pages rather than one screen with a mode switch.

What they have in common

The safety vocabulary is the same on purpose, so what you learn on one applies to the other:

• A cooldown and a per-period cap. Both stop the same thing being answered or published over and over. A rule counts per rule; a flow counts per contact.
• A history that records the times nothing happened. Both write a run even when a guardrail stopped them, with the reason — because "why didn't it fire?" is the question you will actually have.
• An on/off switch that always works. Turning either off is never blocked by its own configuration being incomplete.
• Nothing is deleted when a limit is reached. Whatever is over the line simply stops acting, and says so in its history, until you have room again.

Where they differ

Four differences are worth knowing before you build one:

• What starts them. A flow starts from an incoming message, a story reply or a comment. A trigger starts from an external account you connect for that purpose — never one you publish to.
• What they produce. A trigger creates an ordinary post and hands it to the same publishing path as anything you schedule, so retries, failure notifications and analytics behave identically. A flow sends messages, tags contacts and can hand over to a person.
• Only flows are limited by your plan. How many flows a workspace can hold depends on the plan; rules have a fixed ceiling instead, the same for everyone.
• Only flows depend on Chat being on. If messaging is switched off for your workspace, flows disappear along with the inbox. Triggers are unaffected.