https://zapier.com/blog A blog about productivity, workflow automation, company building and how to get things done with less work. Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:47:11 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/calendly-vs-google-calendar Here's Google's simple (but powerful) software playbook: find products people like, make a Google-ized copy, and give it away for free. Love Dropbox and Zoom? Google Drive and Google Meet are solid substitutes, and you won't pay a thing. Calendly is the next app on Google's radar. Google Calendar's appointment scheduling feature, which started off as a barebones alternative, has gotten better over time. It's not as powerful as Calendly, but it's a reliable way for Google users to create booking Katie Paterson Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/calendly-vs-google-calendar https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-website-builder Building a website is no longer a particularly hard task—but it can be an annoying one. If you look at most sites, there's a fair amount of text, images, and general organization to it all. Even with the best tools, it takes a few hours to put together something good. Wouldn't it be great if you could just create a website from scratch in just a few minutes? That's what AI website builders claim to do.  The idea is that by using artificial intelligence, AI website builders can streamline everyth Harry Guinness Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-website-builder https://zapier.com/blog/claude-ai I've been using Claude long enough to remember when the main selling point was that it was a nicer chatbot to talk to than the alternatives. (That's still true, for what it's worth.) But Claude no longer just talks to you about your work; it also does your work for you. You can give Claude a project, head off to make a coffee, and check in occasionally when questions pop up. For enterprises looking to get real productivity gains from AI, Claude has become the default choice. And Claude is equall Ryan Kane Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/claude-ai https://zapier.com/blog/ai-governance-tools I'll never forget the first time my childhood dog betrayed me. Before the incident, she was completely fine alone, knew every trick in the book, and only barked at the mailman and other potential serial killers.  Then came that fateful night. I left for two hours, returning to shredded magazines, ripped couch cushions, destroyed dog toys, and a wagging tail. Let my canine misfortunes be a lesson for your AI endeavors. AI can be useful, fully functional, and your best friend—until the day it isn' Ben Lyso Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-governance-tools https://zapier.com/blog/generative-ai If you've tried ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Nano Banana, Grok, or any other AI chatbot or image generator, you've used generative AI (also called GenAI). Over the past few years, huge developments in generative AI and computing power have taken these kinds of tools out of research labs and made them a practical part of everyday life. You've almost definitely used generative AI, but let's dig a little deeper and add some more context. Table of contents: What is generative AI? How does generative Harry Guinness Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/generative-ai https://zapier.com/blog/claude-mythos On April 7, 2026, Claude Mythos Preview was officially announced, but it was apparently too dangerous to release. According to Anthropic, Claude Mythos represented a unique cybersecurity threat (they claimed that "the fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe.") Instead of releasing Mythos to the general public, they spun up Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative that also involved some big-name companies. The idea was that they'd be able to deploy Mythos Harry Guinness Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/claude-mythos https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-pivot-table Spreadsheets offer powerful analysis capabilities, but sometimes it feels like they're missing that extra layer of insight. When there's a massive amount of data, it's tough to summarize or draw conclusions from a basic spreadsheet view. That's where pivot tables come in. Most Excel power users use pivot tables as their bread and butter. But you can also use pivot tables in Google Sheets. Here, I'll walk you through how to create and use pivot tables in Google Sheets. Table of contents: What is Jessica Lau Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-pivot-table https://zapier.com/blog/automate-facebook-conversion-api-with-zapier You search for trail running shoes once, and suddenly they're everywhere—your feed, your apps, even your email. Spooky? Maybe. But for marketers, that's just smart data at work. But the real magic happens when you close the loop between customer actions and your ad strategy. Every purchase, sign-up, or webinar registration is a signal, and feeding those signals back into Meta helps you double down on what's working and cut what isn't. The catch? Doing this manually across tools is a nightmare. T Elena Alston Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-facebook-conversion-api-with-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/automate-claude Claude has staked its claim in the AI landscape and keeps drawing in new users all the time with its standout writing, knack for coding, and now, a whole new model class: Mythos. There's power in a quick, off-the-cuff prompt to Claude (especially a good one). But you can accomplish a lot more when you use Zapier to connect Claude to the rest of your apps and let automation carry out entire workflows for you. Ready to try it? Then keep scrolling for easy automation ideas with one-click templates Steph Spector Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-claude https://zapier.com/blog/gourmet-ads-mcp Benjamin Christie runs Gourmet Ads, a digital advertising business that helps food brands reach household grocery buyers and home cooks online. The company has been around for 18 years. Its advertising customers include supermarkets, food and beverage brands, and global advertising agencies. The engineering and product teams are small, which means every operational idea competes with product work, client work, reporting work, and the thousand small jobs that come with running an established adve Rob Ayre Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/gourmet-ads-mcp https://zapier.com/blog/hire-adrian-mcp Adrian Martinez runs a digital marketing agency in Toronto focused on Website Design, SEO, and answer engine optimization (AEO). He and his wife deliver for about twelve clients today. The constraint is time. Each account takes 10 to fifteen hours a month in hands-on work: research, drafts, technical SEO, and reporting. That math caps growth before it caps ambition. Adrian's bet isn't to hire a dozen account managers first. It is to build a delivery engine that maintains high quality while the t Rob Ayre Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/hire-adrian-mcp https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier New AI models launch practically every week, and keeping up with which ones to use for specific workflows is a job in itself. Consider this article your living reference. At Zapier, we run every model through AutomationBench. It's our benchmark for testing how well models carry out multi-step workflows, not just static prompts. Below, I'll walk through every major AI provider available on Zapier, the models you can plug into your Zap workflows today, and what each one is best for based on Zapier Steph Spector Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-marketing-tools Marketers wear all the hats. No matter what part of marketing you work in, it's likely you're asked to stretch your skills into another area. But with more and more AI marketing tools being released every day, it's made this multi-jobbing a lot easier.  The problem is, marketers are drowning in these AI tools. Every app has a copilot, every copilot has a price tag, and the line between "useful" and "expensive novelty" keeps moving. I've spent a lot of time tinkering with these tools. Based on th Juliet John Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-marketing-tools https://zapier.com/blog/best-customer-experience-software I canceled a subscription recently because I started questioning my experience. I'd been loyal for months, but the customer-facing AI agents felt like they were regressing, it took forever to speak to a human support agent, and all of the branding started targeting a much younger audience. They probably logged it as general churn; that's fine, I'm sure "old man yells at cloud" isn't something they would put into a report. Every single touchpoint you have with a customer shapes their experience, Ben Steele Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-customer-experience-software https://zapier.com/blog/docusign-alternatives Contracts, agreements, and other business documents going paperless hasn't meant the end of paperwork—it just means you need to sign things in a different way. You no longer need to find a pen, scrawl your name a few times on a scrap of paper, and send it off with a courier (or hand it to an admin to scan). In most cases, all you need to do is type your name, click a box, or use your laptop's trackpad. And, most importantly, it's just as legally binding.  Whether you're the one sending documents Harry Guinness Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/docusign-alternatives https://zapier.com/blog/tidycal-vs-calendly In the dark ages of scheduling meetings—a mere decade ago—back-and-forth emails were the standard. Then Calendly came along with its "smart scheduling" technology, which blocks out the times you aren't available and lets meeting attendees book whatever time works for them. Over time, it inspired legions of competitors. TidyCal is one of them, offering fewer features but significant cost savings. I'm a long-time Calendly user, and I spent time in TidyCal to compare the strengths of each tool. If Ryan Kane Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/tidycal-vs-calendly https://zapier.com/blog/make-integrations I have a particular brand of curiosity that kicks in the moment I find out another tool does roughly what the one I'm using does, possibly for less money, possibly with more features. It's a fun and emotionally healthy way to spend an afternoon—hunched over my laptop like a gargoyle trying to figure out whether I'm about to save money or accidentally volunteer myself for a part-time job maintaining workflows. That's usually the rabbit hole Make sends people down. On paper, it sounds compelling: Sunny Yadav Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/make-integrations https://zapier.com/blog/workflow-orchestration-tools I went to my nephew's concert a few weeks ago, and quickly realized he has it easy. When I was in middle school band, our "conductor" was the gym teacher. He smelled of cigarettes and did his best, maybe. But someone was inevitably playing a few measures off or squeaking their oboe. My nephew's conductor appeared to be a professional; it was like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra the way she commanded those children and made sure everyone was playing when and how she wanted. At the risk of sounding l Ben Lyso Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/workflow-orchestration-tools https://zapier.com/blog/calendly-vs-acuity Nobody wants to book a meeting or appointment unless they can do it online. That means you need a scheduling app, unless you have a nostalgic love for 2003-era back-and-forth email exchanges. Two of the most recognizable scheduling apps are Calendly and Acuity. Both platforms are intuitive and reliable and allow users to automate booking, sync with calendar apps, and even accept payments. But while the two apps may look really similar at first glance, they each have their own strengths and targe Ryan Kane Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/calendly-vs-acuity https://zapier.com/blog/uipath-pricing Understanding UiPath pricing should take three minutes. It doesn't. Take a few seconds to browse the website, and you'll find a mostly hidden pricing structure filled with attended bots, action center limits, and AI consumption units. If you want any further clarification, buckle in for a sales call.  You've decided to bring automation to your team, and that's an endeavor in itself; you shouldn't have to decipher a riddle or decode a licensing manual just to nail down a budget. In this guide, I' Humna Ghufran Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/uipath-pricing https://zapier.com/blog/microsoft-bookings-vs-calendly Microsoft 365 is a massive suite of tools ranging from household names like Word and PowerPoint to more obscure apps (ever heard of Clipchamp?). Microsoft Bookings, which is included with Microsoft 365, is an alternative to better-known meeting scheduler apps like Calendly. Let's get this out of the way: you probably haven't seen Microsoft Bookings on many best meeting scheduler lists. Rather than competing directly against powerful apps like Calendly, its raison d'être has more to do with offer Ryan Kane Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/microsoft-bookings-vs-calendly https://zapier.com/blog/tray-pricing As a software engineer who's built hundreds of integrations over the years, I demand a lot from integration platforms. In the case of Tray, the promise is that you can orchestrate workflows and enterprise-grade AI agents. That's a claim many other platforms make, but Tray has been in the automation business for more than a decade, so there's some level of credibility there. But no matter how great a platform is, price matters. The company doesn't publish its pricing, but I did some digging to se Adam Hughes Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/tray-pricing https://zapier.com/blog/cursor-vs-copilot Should AI be an extension of software that already works, or should apps evolve to become AI-native? GitHub Copilot and Cursor, while both are AI coding assistants, answer this question differently. The power of extensions is in how quickly they can deliver and integrate AI into a familiar workflow, so you start seeing the results faster. But the case of AI-native is equally compelling: the workflow might have to transform to accommodate a new technology, but that mindset shift could unlock more Miguel Rebelo Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/cursor-vs-copilot https://zapier.com/blog/gumloop-pricing I'm still looking for a cab service that shows the full price range before I even book. Something like: "Base fare $12 + possible surge $0-$4 depending on traffic and demand." Hey, I can dream. Gumloop's pricing gets close to that idea. It's transparent, but since it runs on credits, the total cost can still vary based on how your workflows run and how often you run them. Knowing the possible range makes it easier to plan without mentally refreshing the meter. In this guide, I'll break down how Sunny Yadav Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/gumloop-pricing https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-formatter-guide So near, and yet so far. That's the feeling more often than not when trying to get apps to work together. You export data out of one app, try to import it into another—and it looks perfect, right until it doesn't. Turns out, the text is in the wrong format or order, names are together when they should be split into first and last, dates and phone numbers are formatted incorrectly, and so on. Back to the drawing board. You could manually edit everything, splitting first and last names by hand or Steph Spector Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-formatter-guide