Relay vs. Zapier: Which is best for your business? [2026]

Nearly every automation platform now claims to offer AI agents. There's tremendous novelty—and value—in creating agents that can autonomously reach out to prospects, handle support requests, or prep for meetings. But what happens next? In many organizations, agents provide real time savings, but their effectiveness is limited because they operate in a silo.

Relay.app is built specifically for agents and workflows, with a polished onboarding experience that lets solopreneurs and small teams create agents quickly. Zapier is equally easy to use, but it scales quickly across organizations, and its agents are just one piece of a broader AI orchestration platform that includes chatbots, forms, process mapping, and 8,000+ app integrations.

I tested both Zapier and Relay.app to understand how each performs in different contexts. Here's a full comparison to help you understand which platform fits your automation strategy.

Table of contents:

• Relay.app vs. Zapier at a glance

• Anyone can learn to use either platform in minutes

• Zapier offers complete AI orchestration; Relay.app focuses on agents and workflows

• Zapier is proven at scale for enterprises and large teams

• Zapier connects with 50x more apps

• Zapier offers simpler pricing and more value

• Relay.app vs. Zapier: Which is best?

Relay.app vs. Zapier at a glance

Both Zapier and Relay.app are no-code automation platforms that let you build AI-powered workflows and agents. Relay.app focuses on agents, workflows, and tables, while Zapier offers a complete AI orchestration platform with broader capabilities.

Here's a quick summary, but keep reading for a fuller comparison.

Anyone can learn to use Zapier or Relay.app in minutes

Zapier's no-code interface has always made it easy to use. But with Zapier Copilot, a platform-wide AI assistant, it's gotten even easier. By simply asking Copilot for whatever you need, you can create sophisticated workflows, agents, chatbots, and apps in minutes. Copilot remembers chat history, understands context across Zapier's entire platform, and operates across Zapier's 8,000+ integrations.

Once you start a conversation, Copilot asks follow-up questions, proposes solutions, and builds whatever you need. You can make edits to your workflows manually using Zapier's visual editor, or just keep chatting with Copilot until it's ready to publish.

Zapier's ease of use makes onboarding faster, exposes new users to the benefits of automation and AI, and encourages your team to build things they never would have attempted manually. Zapier's thousands of prebuilt templates allow one-click launches for a huge range of workflows and apps, often shortening the learning curve even more.

Relay.app has a similarly user-friendly experience, though it offers 50+ templates rather than thousands. Because it focuses specifically on agents and workflows rather than offering broader AI capabilities, Relay.app is able to offer an extremely tight onboarding sequence: name your agent, give it a job description, then create workflows for it to act on.

For anyone new to agents and workflows, it's an immediately intuitive experience that's made even more approachable by Relay.app's home screen, which organizes agents visually with friendly-looking icons and colors.

Once you design your agent and create a workflow, Relay.app's interface looks much like Zapier's visual editor. On the left, there's an AI assistant that you can continue prompting to adjust your workflow. On the right, there's a no-code interface that lets you connect apps and tweak your workflow manually.

While Relay.app works well for straightforward use cases, it doesn't yet support some of the building blocks needed for more advanced flows.

For example, it's missing workflow capabilities that Zapier includes natively, like:

• Step-level filters to control your data flow

• Filters for text, number, date/time, and booleans

• Autoreplay for retrying failed steps

• Custom error handling

• Multiple conditions per path

• Built-in email and SMS functionality

Relay.app historically had an edge with its human-in-the-loop controls, but Zapier recently closed that gap by adding built-in human-in-the-loop steps, including Collect Data and Request Approval.

The beauty of Zapier is that users don't have to understand filters, formatting, human-in-the-loop, error handling, or other advanced features to benefit from them. Instead, Copilot receives prompts, finds the most effective way to give users what they need, and automatically coordinates every Zapier feature necessary.

Zapier offers complete AI orchestration; Relay.app focuses on agents and workflows

Relay.app offers a polished (if occasionally limiting) experience for agents and workflows. Recently, it's also launched tables and MCP server support. For some solopreneurs and small teams, this is enough: connecting agents and workflows with Relay.app happens seamlessly, and it's relatively simple to add data to tables and tie it into your process.

Zapier offers many more features, all of which are designed to work together.

Using Canvas, Zapier's visual diagramming tool, you can create multi-product workflows that pass data seamlessly between chatbots, forms, tables, workflows, and agents. Rather than being limited to single-purpose agents, you can create full business systems—all while prompting using natural language via Copilot.

You can use Zapier to create solutions like:

• Automated help desks that resolve some tickets autonomously and escalate others

• Deal desks that use approval tracking and automated follow-ups to close deals faster

• Lead capture hubs that format data from multiple sources before passing to your CRM

• Client portals that include forms, chatbots, and project updates

If you ask Copilot to build something that requires the use of multiple products, it orchestrates between those products automatically while also mapping the process visually via Canvas.

Zapier is proven at scale for enterprises and large teams

Zapier has a long enterprise track record. Dropbox, Siemens, Thomson Reuters, and 3.4 million other companies—including 69% of the Fortune 1000—use Zapier to run automations and AI workflows. To date, Zapier has automated 80+ billion tasks and maintains a 99.99% uptime guarantee enabled by processes like intelligent throttling, data checkpoints, and API change management.

Because of Zapier's reliability, millions of businesses trust it with sensitive workflows. ActiveCampaign, a marketing automation platform, uses Zaps to handle key steps in its customer onboarding process. Otter.ai, an AI-powered meeting assistant, uses Zapier AI to prioritize, route, and auto-resolve customer support tickets. Slate, a digital magazine, built a Zapier Agent that generates thousands of leads per month with AI-powered prospecting.

Zapier's comprehensive enterprise security and compliance helps enable this trust, with SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 certification, GDPR and CCPA compliance, SAML SSO, and SCIM provisioning. Admins can specify whether individual users get member, admin, or super admin privileges. Zapier also offers granular role-based and team-based permissions: you can set app restrictions and require admin approval before users publish sensitive workflows.

By setting careful guardrails in Zapier's admin hub, you can empower users across your organization to create AI workflows without creating security or compliance issues. And with Zapier's account-wide audit log, IT teams get complete visibility over everything that happens.

Relay.app focuses more on solopreneurs and small teams. While it does have an enterprise plan and meets baseline security and compliance requirements like SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and OAuth-based SSO, it's missing many of the governance features that make Zapier compelling for enterprises. Relay.app doesn't currently offer granular permissions, app-level restrictions, approval workflows, account-wide audit logs, SCIM provisioning, or a unified admin hub for centralized governance.

Zapier connects with 50x more apps

Building a massive library of integrations takes time. Zapier has been connecting apps for 15+ years and now boasts an industry-leading 8,000+ integrations. Relay.app, which launched in 2023, connects with just ~150 apps.

Does this gap in coverage matter for you? It depends.

If you're a solopreneur connecting popular services like Notion, Gmail, and Slack, you might manage ok with limited integrations. Relay.app has been strategic about connecting frequently-used small business apps, and it has solid coverage of marketing, sales, and AI platforms.

For teams, the gaps are a bigger deal. HR teams using Relay.app are missing Workday, BambooHR, Remote, and Rippling. Sales teams can't connect Copper, SugarCRM, Clari, or Salesloft. Finance teams will struggle without access to NetSuite, Gusto, ADP, and Expensify.

If you need an integration that Relay.app doesn't offer, there isn't necessarily a quick fix. Unlike Zapier—which lets you create custom or extended integrations on any plan—Relay.app only offers custom connectors on the Enterprise plan. While you can find workarounds using webhooks and HTTP requests, this doesn't provide the structure or reusability of a full integration.

Zapier's integration coverage is so broad that even teams in niche industries can often rely entirely on prebuilt connectors. And since Zapier handles maintenance, testing, and API updates for each integration, you can focus more on building and less on troubleshooting.

Zapier offers more value at a similar price

Relay.app's pricing is strikingly similar to Zapier's:

• Professional plans start at $19/month (or $19.99/month in Zapier's case) for 750 tasks

• Team plans start at $69/month for 2,000 tasks (Relay.app includes 10 users, Zapier includes 25)

• Enterprise plans are custom-priced

• Free plans include access to all platform features

Pricing stays roughly at parity as you scale, too: you'll pay $169/month for 10,000 tasks per month on the Team plan no matter which platform you go with. As you evaluate pricing, the key question is "What are you getting?" rather than "How much are you paying?"

Zapier gives you far more for your money. With Relay.app, you get workflows, agents, tables, and MCP servers. Zapier includes a full AI orchestration platform, including Zaps, Tables, Forms, Chatbots, Agents, Canvas, Copilot, and Zapier MCP. That means you can manage databases, forms, dashboards, portals, and chatbots—and create entire business systems—all without paying for external tools.

Zapier's pricing model is also more predictable when it comes to AI usage, since AI-powered actions count against the same task limit as everything else. With Relay.app, standard tasks and AI tasks are billed separately: each month, you get 5,000 AI credits to run GPT, Claude, and Gemini-powered tasks. When you run out, you can buy more credits or connect your own API keys. Relay.app's system offers transparency and makes sense for some AI-heavy agentic work, but it also adds overhead since you need to monitor two pools of credits instead of one. Depending on your usage, you may also need to budget for additional AI credits.

Relay.app vs. Zapier: Which is best?

If you're a solopreneur testing agents for marketing, sales, or admin work, Relay.app's streamlined onboarding and generous free plan make it a good option for experimentation. But most teams eventually need more integrations, advanced permissions, and the ability to build more than just agents and workflows.

Zapier is built to grow with you to any size. It offers a full AI orchestration platform, a unified admin hub, and the reliability and scale that comes from 15+ years of development.

Choose Zapier if:

• You want access to 8,000+ integrations without worrying about coverage gaps

• You need enterprise-grade security, governance, and 99.99% uptime

• You're scaling and need granular permissions and approval workflows

• You want to build complete business systems and apps

Choose Relay.app if:

• Relay.app's ~150 integrations cover all the apps you use

• You're a solopreneur or small team exclusively focused on agents

• You don't need enterprise governance or advanced permissions

• Your workflows don't require mission-critical reliability

Create a Zapier account today to start building AI-powered workflows and business systems, or reach out to our team to discuss your automation strategy and see how Zapier fits your needs.

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