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

NetSuite organizes monthly events for its users around the world, from Dubai to Sydney, and in each and every city you'll find a similar sight: people in Celigo shirts handing out swag. Officially, Celigo is an enterprise iPaaS solution with lots of use cases. But practically speaking, it's best known as the go-to platform for NetSuite integrations.

If you're processing thousands of eCommerce orders daily through NetSuite, Celigo should probably be a part of the solution. But most enterprises also want to boost productivity by encouraging every department to adopt AI and automation. Zapier is built to scale quickly across your organization by empowering every team to launch AI workflows and agents without developer support.

Celigo and Zapier often work together. I spent time researching and testing both platforms to evaluate how each handles different aspects of enterprise automation. Here's a full comparison to help you understand where each fits into your strategy.

Table of contents:

• Zapier vs. Celigo at a glance

• Celigo is built for NetSuite; Zapier connects your entire tech stack

• Zapier lets you scale quickly; Celigo requires dedicated developers

• Zapier's AI orchestration platform has far more features

• Both offer enterprise-grade security and compliance with different strengths

• Zapier is more affordable than Celigo and scales transparently

• Celigo vs. Zapier: Which is best?

Zapier vs. Celigo at a glance

Celigo is an iPaaS known for its deep integration with NetSuite and its specialized enterprise retail, eCommerce, and logistics workflows. Zapier is a comprehensive AI orchestration platform built for organization-wide automation across any apps your teams use.

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

Celigo is built for NetSuite; Zapier connects your entire tech stack

NetSuite isn't the easiest platform to integrate. Its customization-heavy data model, complex record relationships, strict API governance limits, and reliance on saved searches make it more complex to work with than many SaaS tools. Celigo is an enterprise iPaaS that's gone all-in on solving these challenges for the NetSuite ecosystem. While Celigo also integrates with other ERPs, like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle Fusion, that's not where its deepest strengths lie.

If NetSuite is your ERP and eCommerce order processing is your primary automation need, Celigo could be a good fit. Its ~700 connectors are heavily weighted toward the NetSuite ecosystem, along with enterprise retail, logistics, fulfillment, and finance apps. You'll find hyper-specific Celigo integrations like an Advanced Auto Parts EDI and a Best Buy EDI, used by suppliers that integrate with those retailers' systems for ordering and fulfillment workflows.

But since Celigo charges per connection, it can be overkill for anything that's not both mission-critical and NetSuite-specific. Zapier, on the other hand, is designed to automate every business app you use—even the niche ones. In addition to connecting with core enterprise platforms like NetSuite and Salesforce, Zapier integrates with a broad range of specialized enterprise apps like Qualtrics for customer experience, SolarWinds for IT, and Iterable for customer engagement. And rather than paying for each connection individually, you get access to Zapier's 8,000+ integrations instantly, even on the free plan.

Zapier's massive library of prebuilt connectors means many businesses can handle the entirety of their automation needs without ever creating a custom connection. Since Zapier handles prebuilt connector maintenance automatically, this lowers your maintenance burden and boosts reliability. Even for enterprises that rely on Celigo for strategic NetSuite integrations with eCommerce and logistics platforms, Zapier is often used to roll out AI and automation to the rest of the organization, including marketing, RevOps, IT, sales, HR, and customer support teams.

Zapier lets you scale quickly; Celigo requires dedicated developers and long implementation times

Zapier allows anyone in your organization to create the automations, agents, and apps they need by simply typing their request into Copilot, Zapier's AI assistant. As a result, business teams like marketing, sales, and customer support can automate their workflows as easily as technical teams can.

After prompting Copilot, you can continue making changes with AI until you have what you need. Using Zapier's visual builder, you can also refine your workflow manually by adding paths, filters, delays, and webhooks precisely where you need them, as well as AI steps that summarize content or extract and analyze data.

Zapier also has a massive library of thousands of templates for an endless array of use cases, from simple workflows to complex business apps. Getting started is often as simple as launching the template you need.

Expanding AI and automation access to everyone doesn't require sacrificing control. With Zapier, you get both security and scale: IT retains granular control by defining allowable apps, actions, and permissions for each team, and your business teams can generate whatever they need without creating compliance or security issues.

This democratization of AI automation has compounding effects:

• Business teams no longer need to wait in a queue for developer support

• Non-technical users can create small workflows even if they don't justify developer attention

• Innovation accelerates because employees closest to the problem can launch solutions instantly

• Developers can focus on heavy integration projects instead of fielding minor support requests

Empowering business teams to launch and maintain their own workflows has a profound business impact. Korey Marciniak, Senior Manager of Customer Support Strategy and Operations at Okta, used Zapier to create an escalation bot that saves up to 10 minutes per ticket; rather than waiting for developer support, he makes adjustments to the workflow himself. Megan Tsang, Marketing Operations Manager at Grammarly, saves 42+ hours per week with just one workflow: "With engineering, it's always 'what sprint will this be a part of?' With Zapier, I can just block off an hour and figure it out myself."

Celigo isn't designed for organization-wide use. It's targeted at NetSuite admins, integration architects, and developers. While it does have low-code and no-code features, Celigo is focused on making implementation faster for developers rather than making it easy for anyone to use.

Celigo does offer a broad selection of templates in its marketplace, but apart from that, there aren't many shortcuts; most workflows need to be built manually by technical specialists.

That's not to say Celigo's developer-only approach is wrong. When you're creating workflows that sync thousands of records per day between Shopify and NetSuite, it makes sense to have a technical team manage that sensitive process. But if you only take this approach and don't roll out an additional automation platform that's accessible to business teams, the opportunity costs are high. With a small team of specialists working on highly technical integrations, you can expect long implementation times and limited bandwidth to support the rest of your organization's automation needs.

Zapier's AI orchestration platform has far more features

Zapier and Celigo are often complementary, which becomes especially evident when you do a feature-by-feature comparison. Zapier is a comprehensive AI orchestration platform that generates full apps, agents, and workflows for business teams with a couple of prompts. Celigo aims for a much narrower goal: heavy integrations for enterprise processes.

Zapier's suite of products is expansive:

• Zaps for creating workflows

• Tables for storing and organizing data

• Forms for building custom forms for internal or external use

• Canvas for visually mapping and connecting business processes

• Agents for designing AI assistants that can take autonomous action

• Chatbots for automating customer interactions

• MCP for triggering workflows directly from your AI apps

These products work together seamlessly, with Zapier's AI coordinating multiple products to create full business systems that handle tasks autonomously.

Remote, a global HR and payments platform, orchestrates Zapier Chatbots, Agents, Tables, and Zaps into an AI-powered help desk that resolves 1,100+ IT tickets per month. Over a quarter of those tickets are resolved automatically: Zapier Agents reference past ticket resolutions stored in Tables, and a Zap notifies the requester and provides the AI-suggested solution.

Celigo focuses primarily on its Flow Builder, which includes enhancements like reusable components, AI code assistants, an AI knowledge bot, and AI-powered error resolution. Celigo also recently launched an MCP server. But for forms, data storage, agents, chatbots, and cross-product orchestration, Celigo isn't the right platform.

Both offer enterprise-grade security and compliance, but each has different strengths

Celigo and Zapier both offer SOC 2 Type II compliance, GDPR compliance, SAML-based single sign-on, role-based access controls, audit logging, and data encryption (AES-256). For the security and compliance needs of most enterprises, you can't go wrong with either platform.

Where Zapier has an edge is its comprehensive oversight features. Business teams can create their own AI workflows within IT-approved guardrails, with granular permissions that control which apps and features are available to which users (like disallowing AI usage for certain teams) and approval workflows that require the review of sensitive automations before they go live. Zapier Enterprise also has a unified admin center that gives admins a single global dashboard with real-time analytics and full visibility into what everyone is building.

Since Celigo is designed for small teams of integration specialists rather than self-service across multiple departments, it's missing some of Zapier's oversight and governance features. If you want to empower dozens or hundreds of employees across multiple departments to create their own AI workflows and business apps, only Zapier has the robust admin controls you need.

However, if your implementations require FedRAMP authorization or HIPAA compliance, Celigo is a better fit since Zapier doesn't offer either. Celigo also offers on-premise agents, which means it often makes sense for highly-regulated industries (like healthcare, finance, and government), legacy systems that aren't cloud-based, and any businesses that must comply with data residency requirements.

Zapier is more affordable than Celigo and scales transparently

Celigo doesn't publish pricing. To get a custom quote, you'll need to go through their sales process. Most deployments average in the mid-five figures per year, putting Celigo firmly in the "premium enterprise" iPaaS category—usually less expensive than Workato or Boomi but far pricier than Zapier. Celigo's contracts vary based on the number of endpoints and workflows you have. Its pricing might be advantageous if you have a single endpoint (like Shopify to Netsuite) and just a handful of order-syncing workflows, but costs can quickly balloon if you need to connect lots of platforms and data flows.

Zapier offers transparent pricing, making it easy to understand how much you'd need to budget. Rather than charging per endpoint or workflow, Zapier gives you unlimited access to its platform and 8,000+ connectors from day one. You can start with Zapier's $19.99/month Professional or $69/month Team plans, experiment to understand how Zapier works for your use cases, and scale up gradually as your needs expand. Once you're ready for a broader rollout in your organization, you can chat with Zapier's enterprise team for a custom quote.

It's also worth examining the hidden costs inherent with any new software deployment. With Zapier, there's no need for expensive external consultants and almost no learning curve, so your team can start creating AI workflows and business apps immediately. Celigo takes longer to implement and is more complex to use, meaning you'll need to budget for a more protracted rollout, plan internal training sessions, and consider hiring consultants if you don't have the right development resources internally.

Celigo vs. Zapier: Which is best?

Celigo is often a good fit for heavy ERP integrations, especially when NetSuite is involved. It's a strong choice if you need to sync NetSuite with retail or eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Amazon, or Magento for high-volume order processing and fulfillment.

Zapier makes more sense for everything else. With 8,000+ integrations and AI-powered tools that let anyone build workflows, agents, and apps, Zapier quickly scales the benefits of AI and automation across your entire organization.

Choose Celigo if:

• NetSuite is at the center of your operations and you need to sync high-volume data flows

• You have a team of developers focused on managing complex integrations

• You're comfortable with mid-five-figure annual contracts and per-connection pricing

• You need specialized compliance like FedRAMP or HIPAA

• On-premise deployment is a requirement

Choose Zapier if:

• You need access to 8,000+ integrations without paying per-connector fees

• You're looking to scale automation across your organization without burdening your IT team

• You want comprehensive AI capabilities, including agents, chatbots, and AI-powered apps

• Your goal is to launch automations in hours or days, not months

• You need granular IT governance controls that allow users to safely self-serve

Connect with the Zapier team to discuss how Zapier fits your needs, or create an account and start building right now.

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