Boomi vs. Zapier: Which is best for enterprise automation? [2026]

Your business teams want to use AI and automation to make their lives easier, and they know exactly which pain points, inefficiencies, and annoying admin tasks they want to eliminate. But when every idea requires developer time, weeks of implementation, and back-and-forth tickets for iterations and changes, all that bottom-up momentum naturally fizzles.

Zapier is built for rapid experimentation. Even non-technical users can create AI-powered apps and workflows in hours, figure out what works, and scale. Boomi is a more traditional iPaaS solution built for integrations where centralized IT planning is more important than testing and launching ideas quickly.

If your enterprise runs entirely on cloud apps, Zapier is probably all you need. If you're dealing with legacy connections or on-premises deployments, Boomi can handle your core infrastructure while Zapier democratizes automation across every team. Here's how to think about where each one fits into your enterprise automation strategy.

Table of contents

• Zapier vs. Boomi at a glance

• Zapier is built for rapid adoption; Boomi is built for IT

• Zapier offers end-to-end AI orchestration; Boomi provides enterprise iPaaS capabilities

• Zapier focuses on cloud-to-cloud automation; Boomi specializes in ERPs and legacy systems

• Zapier connects with 8x more apps than Boomi

• Zapier's pricing is transparent and predictable; Boomi's costs are complex and high

• Boomi vs. Zapier: Which is best?

Boomi vs. Zapier at a glance

Here's a quick summary, but keep reading for more details.

Zapier is built for rapid adoption; Boomi is built for IT

At some enterprises, automation and AI adoption is an exclusively IT-led initiative. In some ways that feels rational: IT teams can manage data security, keep automations stable, and ensure compliance. But running everything through IT creates unnecessary bottlenecks, slows experimentation, and prevents teams from solving their own problems.

Zapier takes a more scalable approach. Anyone in your organization can identify repetitive work or inefficiencies, then quickly design and launch an automation that fixes the problem. Micro-projects and edge cases that would be too small to earn a place in your IT queue can move forward with citizen automators and—if they work—can be replicated in other departments. If your goal is to create a culture of experimentation that infuses AI workflows throughout your organization, Zapier's bottom-up philosophy helps you get there far faster.

Using Zapier Copilot, an AI assistant, non-technical users can create complex multi-product workflows by simply describing the end result they want—whether that's a workflow, an AI agent, or an app.

You can easily refine your workflows by continuing to chat with Copilot or by making the final tweaks manually using Zapier's visual builder.

Zapier also includes thousands of templates covering common automation needs, which means getting started is often as simple as choosing a template, connecting your apps, and clicking Publish.

Of course, using Zapier's Admin Center, your IT team can easily maintain oversight over automation activity without becoming a bottleneck. IT still controls governance and sets guardrails, so you can define precisely who can create automations, which app connections are allowed, and what approval workflows need to be followed before publishing.

Boomi takes a more traditional, IT-led approach to implementations. While it's technically a low-code builder, creating automations with Boomi requires technical expertise.

Projects often require multiple specialists:

• Developers or integration architects to design workflows

• DevOps engineers to manage deployments and infrastructure

• Technical specialists to maintain connectors and troubleshoot issues

Developers can use Boomi to build complex workflows and processes using dynamic variables, custom schemas, caching, parallel processing, and schema-aware mapping.

While developers get serious customization power, Boomi has fewer options for less-technical users. Boomi Marketplace offers a couple dozen task automation templates along with recipes for advanced processes (like "Connect NetSuite Items to Shopify Products via GraphQL"). Another option is Boomi Task Automation, a separate no-code builder, which was built to help citizen integrators like business analysts create workflows.

However, Boomi Task Automation currently integrates with fewer than 30 apps, and each app only features a handful of trigger events. Non-technical users can use it to create basic "if this, then that" workflows, but there's no way to create automations with advanced conditional logic, branching, or multi-step decision paths.

Zapier offers end-to-end AI orchestration; Boomi provides enterprise iPaaS capabilities

Zapier brings together everything you need for AI-powered automation in one unified experience. You can easily combine multiple Zapier products into sophisticated workflows by letting Copilot think through your project's requirements, map out a process, and build it.

For example, if your customer success team needs to create a bespoke onboarding portal, Copilot identifies the right tools—Interfaces for forms and portals, Tables for storing data, Chatbots for support, and Zaps for notifications—then creates a Canvas to orchestrate everything.

This multi-product approach is what makes Zapier so flexible for enterprise needs. Learn It Live, an eLearning platform, saw a 40% reduction in support tickets after creating a multi-product system connecting a chatbot, a table, and Zaps. The chatbot answers common questions from customers, stores data in a table, and triggers Zaps when human intervention is needed; the whole process runs through a single platform that anyone can understand and modify.

You can embed Zapier Agents into your workflows to handle tasks like meeting prep, lead qualification, and content creation. Agents can also act as digital teammates that run autonomously on a schedule, all while keeping you involved with important decisions by defining human-in-the-loop controls.

Boomi offers AI capabilities too, but it can't quickly coordinate business processes like Zapier does; you can't ask Boomi to "create a customer onboarding portal" and have it assemble multiple products into a working solution. Instead, Boomi's AI is focused on creating agents and speeding up integration development.

Agentstudio, Boomi's tool for creating and governing AI agents, is more user-friendly than what most other iPaaS platforms offer. There are 100+ agent templates to help you get started quickly, and you can use natural language prompts to design your own custom agents.

The rest of Boomi's platform is focused on enterprise iPaaS capabilities:

• Integration for connecting applications and data

• Master Data Hub for master data management

• B2B/EDI Management for structured business document exchange

• API Management for API lifecycle governance

• Event Streams for real-time data streaming

• Flow for low-code apps and workflows

• Task Automation for no-code automations

Many of these can be used together, but unlike with Zapier Copilot, the process to do so can be time-consuming and manual.

Zapier focuses on cloud-to-cloud automation; Boomi specializes in ERPs and legacy systems

Boomi is a powerful solution for connecting ERPs and legacy systems, especially when compliance is important. For example, Beyond Bank, an Australian bank, used Boomi as part of a digital transformation project to connect core banking applications, automate data retrieval, and introduce eSigning. Boomi offers on-premises and hybrid deployment options, which is important for healthcare systems that need to comply with HIPAA, government agencies that require FedRAMP certified systems, and financial institutions with strict compliance needs.

Zapier is focused on cloud-to-cloud automation between modern SaaS apps. While there's no consistent on-premises or hybrid deployment available, Zapier's cloud-only architecture means infrastructure management, API updates, and security patches are all handled automatically and seamlessly. Zapier's accessibility and its massive selection of connected apps make it the default organization-wide automation tool at many enterprises. Jacob Sirrs, Vendasta's Marketing Operations Specialist, says, "We're using Zapier across marketing, revenue, support, and solutions architecture. It's embedded in every part of the business."

Boomi and Zapier are often complementary. Enterprises use Boomi for heavy ERP-to-warehouse integrations, legacy connectivity, and on-premises data that can't move to the cloud. Zapier handles customer support workflows, marketing operations, sales automation, AI chatbots and agents, and rapid experimentation and iteration.

Zapier connects with 8x more apps than Boomi

Zapier offers an enormous integration library covering over 8,000 apps, from enterprise platforms like NetSuite and Salesforce to more niche tools. Many Zapier users can handle the entirety of their automation needs with prebuilt connectors, which means less development time, faster rollouts, and greater accessibility for non-technical team members. And since Zapier manages connector updates when APIs change, there's far less development overhead and ongoing maintenance than you'd get with custom integrations.

Boomi offers prebuilt connectors for around 1,000 apps, with a heavy focus on enterprise CRM, ERP, cloud storage, and data platforms. You'll find deep integrations with SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft products, for example. However, Boomi's hyperfocus on big enterprise systems doesn't extend to popular enterprise apps like Gong, Qualtrics, or Datadog—all of which are covered by Zapier.

While you can build your own custom connectors with Boomi, doing so requires development experience and familiarity with API frameworks. And relying on custom integrations increases your ongoing maintenance burden since you need to update connectors yourself when APIs change. A more scalable path is to use Boomi when you absolutely need to—for deep ERP connections, for example—and Zapier for everything else.

Zapier's pricing is transparent and predictable; Boomi's costs are complex and high

Boomi doesn't offer public-facing pricing. Typical contracts for mid-sized companies run from mid-five figures to six figures per year. One influential pricing variable is the number of connectors you need access to, which means that Boomi's pricing quickly gets less accessible if you need to connect to lots of apps.

You need to talk to Boomi's sales team for custom pricing, which depends on your environments, usage, and connectors. Engaging with sales comes with opportunity costs in the form of discovery, scoping, demos, negotiations, and internal approval cycles, which means you might spend the first few months of your automation initiative managing procurement instead of building workflows.

Boomi does offer a 30-day free trial, along with a self-serve Pay-as-You-Go plan that costs $99/month plus usage ($.05 per "message," which is effectively any time a unit of data is moved or transformed). Pay-as-You-Go is mainly for small-scale testing and gets pricey fast at higher volumes. For example, syncing 5,000 records per day from Salesforce, transforming the data, and passing it to NetSuite could cost tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Zapier's pricing is simple and transparent. You can get started for free or on an affordable self-serve plan, start automating workflows and proving ROI, and move to an enterprise plan whenever you're ready. Zapier uses a simple task-based model: you pay for completed work actions in your connected apps. Unlike Boomi, there are no per-connector fees, no separate charges for basic functionality like sending emails, and no surprise add-ons.

Solo users can get started for $19.99/month, while groups of up to 25 users can collaborate on Zapier's Teams plan starting at $69/month. Enterprise plans include unlimited users, admin controls, advanced compliance features, and a technical account manager.

Zapier's total cost of ownership is even lower when you consider consulting and maintenance. Since Zapier is easy to use and scale across your organization, there's little need for training, developers and integration architects, or outside consultants. And with thousands of fully managed integrations, Zapier offers a "set it and forget it" approach to app connections that reduces ongoing maintenance costs.

Zapier vs. Boomi: Which is best?

Your enterprise needs a solution like Boomi if you're dealing with complex ERP integrations, legacy systems, B2B/EDI, or on-premises data requirements. Zapier is for everything else. With thousands of prebuilt connectors and an AI assistant that allows anyone to build anything, Zapier is designed to scale AI workflows quickly across your organization.

Choose Zapier if:

• You want to scale quickly by empowering non-technical users to create their own workflows

• You need to build cohesive apps combining agents, chatbots, tables, workflows, and interfaces

• You want access to 8,000+ prebuilt integrations maintained automatically by Zapier

• You prefer transparent, predictable pricing that scales with usage

• You're focused on connecting enterprise cloud apps

Choose Boomi if:

• You need to integrate legacy systems that lack modern APIs

• You have unique compliance needs like on-premises deployment, HIPAA, or FedRAMP

• You have a dedicated team of developers, integration architects, and DevOps engineers

• You prefer to centralize all automation and AI activities in the IT department

• You're building core ERP infrastructure like ERP-to-warehouse integrations

Even if your enterprise needs Boomi for heavy-duty integrations, its pricing, complexity, and lack of connectors means it's probably not the best solution for the rest of your automation needs. Instead, you can use Zapier to efficiently scale the automations your business teams need while relying on Boomi for core systems.

Create a Zapier account to start experimenting with workflows right now, or connect with the Zapier team to explore how Zapier fits into your enterprise automation strategy.

Related reading:

• Zapier vs. Make: Which is best?

• The best business automation software

• The best Make alternatives