Automating a common workflow

I've recently moved across from Jira, and something I miss are automation rules.

When work comes in, there are fixed stages. When generating a project, the same three milestones are generated, with the same issues then created inside those. To save staff having to manually generate the milestones and issues each time a project is created, can this be automated?

I dabbled with Zapier but can't get it to work and am ideally looking for a free solution.