The management of algal bloom is essential for the proper management of water supply systems and to maintain the safety of drinking water. Chlorophyll-a(Chl-a) is a commonly used indicator to represent the algal concentration. In recent years, advanced machine learning models have been increasingly used to predict Chl-a in freshwater systems. Machine learning models show good performance in various fields, while the process of model development requires considerable labor and time by experts. Automated machine learning(auto ML) is an emerging field of machine learning study. Auto ML is used to develop machine learning models while minimizing the time and labor required in the model development process. This study developed an auto ML to predict Chl-a using auto sklearn, one of most widely used open source auto ML algorithms. The model performance was compared with other two popular ensemble machine learning models, random forest(RF) and XGBoost(XGB). The model performance was evaluated using three indices, root mean squared error, root mean squared error-observation standard deviation ratio(RSR) and Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency. The RSR of auto ML, RF, and XGB were 0.659, 0.684 and 0.638, respectively. The results shows that auto ML outperforms RF, and XGB shows better prediction performance than auto ML, while the differences between model performances were not significant. Shapley value analysis, an explainable machine learning algorithm, was used to provide quantitative interpretation about the model prediction of auto ML developed in this study. The results of this study present the possible applicability of auto ML for the prediction of water quality.