Show & Tell

moved our team off zapier last month, heres what we learned

Mar 29

figured id share since i spent weeks evaluating alternatives and couldnt find many real comparisons from actual users (just SEO blogs that all say the same thing) background: marketing ops team, 6 people. we had about 40 zaps running, mostly form captures > CRM updates, lead routing, email triggers, slack notifications, and a few data sync things between sheets and our CRM why we left: - cost kept going up. we were at $750/mo and every time we needed a premium integration it jumped - error handling was painful. a zap would silently fail and wed find out days later when someone complained - no way to see all our automations in one view. 40 separate zaps with no real connection between them what we moved to and hows it going: the forms piece was the easiest switch. our lead capture forms look better now and the conditional logic is more flexible. biggest win is the forms feed directly into workflows here instead of needing a separate trigger tables replaced our google sheets dependency for a bunch of stuff. instead of zapier reading/writing to sheets we just use tables natively. no more API quota issues or weird sync delays workflows took the most time to rebuild but theyre honestly cleaner now. being able to see the full flow visually instead of a list of steps helps a lot. error handling is also way better - you can see exactly where something failed and why things i miss from zapier: - the sheer number of integrations. zapier has connectors for everything. here you sometimes need to use the HTTP node for niche tools - the community is bigger over there so its easier to find answers (for now) overall happy we switched. our bill went from $750 to roughly $200 and we havent lost any functionality for our use cases

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Comments (13)

Casey Perez · Mar 29

appreciate you writing this up. we went through the same thing about 3 months ago, 25 zaps, similar use cases. the cost difference alone was worth the switch but the native forms > workflow connection is what really sold us. in zapier every form submission was a separate trigger and a separate zap. here its just one flow

River Thompson · Mar 29

this is the comparison post ive been looking for. thanks

Ashley Hernandez · Mar 29

good writeup but id push back slightly on the integrations point. the HTTP node honestly covers 90% of what those niche zapier connectors do, you just have to set up the API call yourself instead of picking from a dropdown. once you do it once its actually not that bad and you have more control over what data you send and receive the only time i really miss zapier connectors is for apps with really complex auth flows. oauth stuff can be annoying to set up manually

Michelle Harris · Mar 29

how long did the migration take you? weve got about 30 zaps and im dreading the rebuild

Phoenix Walker · Mar 29

took us about 2 weeks but we werent rushing. most of the simple zaps (form > email, form > slack) took like 15 min each to rebuild. the complex ones with multiple steps and conditions took longer, maybe an hour each. honestly the hardest part was just auditing our zapier account to figure out which zaps were actually still in use. turned out 12 of our 40 were either broken or for things we dont do anymore

David Martinez · Mar 29

the silent failure thing in zapier drove us crazy too. at least here when something breaks you get a clear error with the actual response from the API. in zapier it would just say "error" and you had to guess

Jamie Hernandez · Mar 29

+1 on the tables thing. getting rid of the google sheets middleman was huge for us

Ashley Jones · Mar 30

agree on the HTTP node being underrated. we use it for our niche accounting software that nobody has a native connector for. set it up once and forgot about it. actually prefer it now because zapier connectors sometimes break when the third party updates their API and you have to wait for zapier to fix it

Parker Ramirez · Mar 30

real question - any reliability issues? we got burned switching platforms before (tried make.com for a while and had random execution failures). our workflows are customer facing so downtime isnt an option

Phoenix Walker · Mar 30

fair question. weve been on it about 5 weeks now and havent had any downtime. had one workflow fail because of a bad API response from a third party tool but the error handling caught it and retried automatically. so far so good but obviously 5 weeks isnt a huge sample size. ill try to update this thread in a few months

Robin Sanchez · Mar 30

really appreciate posts like this. honest real-world comparisons are way more useful than marketing pages. thanks for sharing

Ashley Hernandez · Mar 30

one more thing for anyone migrating - export your zapier task history before you cancel. we almost lost our execution logs and those were useful for debugging the new workflows during the transition

Michelle Harris · Mar 30

this convinced me. starting the migration next week. thanks phoenix and everyone