Right when I perfected my AI chatbot workflows, I found out all the cool kids had already migrated to building with AI coding agents. So I made the switch. And luckily for me, technical builders, and fellow vibe coders everywhere, Zapier SDK launched right on cue.
Zapier SDK is a resource that gives AI coding agents access to more than 9,000 pre-built app integrations in the Zapier directory. They all run through Zapier's governance layer, so you can build safely while you carry out more than 30,000 actions in your other tools. Keep reading to learn what Zapier SDK does and how to equip your code editors and coding agents with it today.
Zapier SDK is in open beta, and billing is free during the open beta window. By default, Enterprise and Team plan accounts aren't included in this rollout. To submit feedback or other requests, contact the Zapier SDK team.
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Tip: Zapier SDK is one of three ways to give your AI access to Zapier's app ecosystem. Use Zapier SDK when you're working in code files. Use Zapier CLI when you're working in a terminal. And use Zapier MCP when you're working in an AI chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT. You get the same secure access to 9,000+ apps in every option. It's just that the surfaces differ.
What is Zapier SDK?
In case you're not a developer, let's take a beat to untangle the terminology. SDK stands for software development kit, and anyone can build one. It's a collection of pre-built resources like APIs, sample code, and debugging tools that make it easier to write code.
Zapier SDK is our flavor of that. It gives you connections to more than 9,000 apps in our ecosystem, so you can carry out actions in your other tools from your coding agent, or directly from a terminal and text editor. It also comes with authentication (verifying that your app has permission to access others), token refresh (auto-renewing those permissions before they expire), retries (re-running failed requests, so you don't have to), and error handling (catching and managing what goes wrong, so your script doesn't just silently break).
Without something like the Zapier SDK, developers would have to wire up a separate API for every app they wanted their coding agent to work with. They'd also have to manually handle authentication: a process that takes time and could expose sensitive data or break integrations if anything's misconfigured.
And you know how AI chatbots and agents sometimes interpret the same prompt in different ways or shift in behavior over time? Zapier SDK nixes that. It makes sure your coding agent always executes your script exactly as written. For compliance-sensitive teams like HR, that consistency matters: offer letter generation, background check triggers, and I-9 initiations need to fire the same way every time, with no model drift.
On top of the standard integration catalog, Zapier SDK gives you raw API endpoint access to around 3,000 additional apps. So if you need to go beyond pre-built actions, that path is there for you.
Key features of Zapier SDK include:
More than 9,000 app integrations: Access Zapier's full app ecosystem from your code. And if you need to go beyond pre-built actions,
fetchgives you raw API endpoint access to around 3,000 additional apps.
Note: Direct API calls to raw endpoints aren't yet subject to org-level app and action restrictions.
Flexible logic: Write scripts with loops, conditionals, and error handling so your coding agent can make decisions, repeat tasks, and recover from failures without you babysitting it.
Built-in authentication: Zapier verifies your app's permission to access other apps automatically, so you never have to handle auth manually.
Built-in governance and interoperability: Zapier acts as the safety and oversight layer across every standard API call, making sure your integrations stay within defined permissions and policies. Your code runs against Zapier's governance layer, not the model's. Switching coding agents doesn't change what your integrations can do.
Type-safe actions: Full TypeScript support with generated types for every app and action gives you autocomplete and catches errors before runtime.
Automatic reliability: Zapier SDK handles token refresh, retries, and API differences across apps, so your code doesn't have to.
What you can do with Zapier SDK
Here are some ideas for putting Zapier SDK to work:
Run a nightly reconciliation
You're a founder who needs to match Stripe charges to HubSpot deals every night, flag mismatches, and route exceptions to Slack—across hundreds of records, with branching logic, hitting a Stripe endpoint Zapier doesn't have a pre-built action for.
With Zapier SDK, you can use this prompt: "Every night at 2 a.m., pull the last 24 hours of Stripe charges, match each to a HubSpot deal by customer email, tag matches as 'reconciled,' and post mismatches to #finance-exceptions with the deal owner tagged."
Build auth into your AI product without building auth
You're a developer shipping an AI product and you need your users' apps to talk to each other. But building and maintaining auth infrastructure for every integration is a project in itself.
With Zapier SDK, you can use this prompt: "When a user connects their project management tool, automatically sync tasks to their calendar and send a Slack summary at the end of each day."
Get your vibe-coded creations to actually do things
You're using AI to vibe code a tool. The problem is it's running in a vacuum, disconnected from your other apps.
With Zapier SDK, you can use prompts like these:
"I built a morning briefing script. Make it pull from my email, calendar, and task manager and post a summary to Slack every day at 8 am."
"My project status dashboard captures updates but doesn't act on them. When the status of a project changes, automatically notify the right people in Slack."
"Hook up my content calendar so every time I add a new entry, it creates a draft in my CMS and adds a task to my project management tool."
Automate HR workflows without exposing sensitive data
You're in HR and you want to automate recruiting pipelines, onboarding workflows, and employee data syncs. But your data is too sensitive to hand off without guardrails. Zapier SDK runs inside Zapier's governance layer, so your automated workflows can touch HRIS and ATS data without exposing it to unauthorized models or personal accounts.
With Zapier SDK, you can use this prompt: "Build me something that pulls new hire data from our ATS when a candidate is marked hired, creates their profile in our HRIS, and kicks off the onboarding sequence—without routing any of it through personal accounts or unapproved models." Zapier SDK connects the apps, and Zapier's governance controls make sure the data stays where it's supposed to.
How to get started with Zapier SDK
If you're new to Zapier, before you do anything else, create a Zapier account. You'll have access to Zapier SDK on the free tier. Then head to the app connections page in the Zapier member home and connect at least one app. And make sure Node.js 20+ is installed on your device.
New to Node.js? It's a software platform that lets you run code. To install it, go to nodejs.org/en/download, scroll down to "Or get a prebuilt Node.js," and download the installer for your operating system, which the page should detect automatically. If you run into trouble, you can ask your coding agent to walk you through the installation process.
Once those prerequisites are taken care of, you can get started with a one-command setup or through manual steps.
Choose the one-command path if you want to get started fast and don't mind letting your AI coding agent handle the details. It uses browser login and walks you through each step.
Use this prompt
Paste this prompt into your IDE agent, whether that's Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Claude Code, Windsurf, or something else:
Set up the Zapier SDK for me. Work through these steps one at a time, running each command in the terminal and telling me what happened before moving on:
1. Check what folder I'm in and whether a package.json already exists. - If there's already a package.json, use this project as-is. - If there's no package.json, create one, run: npm init -y
2. Check Node.js is installed and is version 20 or higher: node -v - If Node is not found: tell me to install it from https://nodejs.org or run brew install node, then stop. - If Node is older than 20: tell me to upgrade it, then stop.
3. Install the SDK: npm install @zapier/zapier-sdk - An EPERM error on ~/.npm/_cacache usually means the command sandbox is blocking npm's cache writes, not a file permissions issue.
4. Install dev dependencies: npm install -D @zapier/zapier-sdk-cli @types/node typescript
5. Log in to Zapier: npx zapier-sdk login - This opens a browser window. A permissions or sandbox error here typically means the command sandbox is preventing credentials from being written to disk. - If login fails for another reason, try again.
6. List my connected apps: npx zapier-sdk list-connections --owner me --json 2>/dev/null | head -n 1000 - Read the output and show only the first 10 results as a markdown table with columns: ID, App Key, Expired. Do not show Title. Always tell me how many total connections there are, and if there are more than 10, note that you are only showing the first 10. - The page size is 100. If the output contains exactly 100 connections, there may be additional connections beyond this first page. Just note that and move on — do not fetch additional pages. - If the list is empty: tell me to connect at least one app at https://zapier.com/app/assets/connections and come back.
Once all steps are done, tell me I am ready and explain:
Zapier has pre-built connectors for 9,000+ apps — Slack, Google Sheets, Salesforce, GitHub, and thousands more. The Zapier SDK and CLI expose that same integration layer to code. Instead of building OAuth flows, handling token refresh, and reverse-engineering each app's API yourself, you get a single consistent interface that already knows how to talk to all of them. Your users' existing Zapier connections are authenticated and ready to use.
- **CLI — explore, run one-offs, or let an agent act:** the CLI is for exploration and ad-hoc action. Use it to see what an app can do, inspect the exact inputs an action expects, and run actions interactively — whether that's you in a terminal or an agent executing a task on demand. See the CLI reference: https://docs.zapier.com/sdk/cli-reference - **TypeScript SDK — build production integrations and agent tools:** the SDK is for shipping. Use it when you need something repeatable, embedded, or in production — a scheduled workflow, a backend service, a tool inside an AI agent. It's type-safe, handles token refresh and retries automatically, and uses the same app keys, action keys, and input shapes you already discovered via the CLI. See the SDK reference: https://docs.zapier.com/sdk/reference
**Want to run a quick test?**
If I have a Slack connection, offer to send a DM to yourself on Slack. Describe the steps that will happen and end with: "Want to run this quick test?" Then STOP. Do not output anything else. Do not continue to the next section. Wait for my reply before proceeding.
When I reply to the quick test, only proceed if my response is a clear, unambiguous affirmative (e.g. "yes", "go ahead"). If ambiguous or unclear, skip the test and continue.
If I don't have a Slack connection, skip the test and continue.
---
When I reply yes to the quick test, run these exact commands in order:
1. Look up my Slack username: npx zapier-sdk run-action slack search user_by_email --connection-id ID --inputs '{"email":"ZAPIER_EMAIL"}'
2. Send a direct message to yourself using the username from step 1: npx zapier-sdk run-action slack write direct_message --connection-id ID --inputs '{"channel":"USERNAME","text":"Hello via Zapier SDK 👋"}'
Replace ID with my Slack connection ID from the table above. Replace ZAPIER_EMAIL with my Zapier login email. Replace USERNAME with the username returned from step 1.
If user_by_email fails, ask me for my Slack email and try again.
---
After the test completes (or if I skip it, or if there's no Slack connection):
Pick 1–3 apps from the connections table and show me the commands I could use to explore what actions they support. Do not run these commands — just display them so I can try on my own. For example: npx zapier-sdk list-actions APP_KEY
**All set! Now, a few ideas to start exploring what the Zapier SDK can do:**
Suggest 3 ideas worth exploring — good starting points based on my connected apps. Each idea reads from one app, optionally processes it, and writes to another. Do not suggest anything event-driven. Keep each idea to one sentence. Examples: "get all your Jira issues still In Progress and DM yourself a tidy table on Slack"; "pull every HubSpot deal that closed this week and drop it into a Google Sheet". Make the ideas specific to my connected apps — not generic.
If you want more control, especially over how the SDK authenticates, go manual. In addition to browser login, this path covers two non-interactive options for situations where no one is available to click through a browser window: client credentials (for server-side apps) and direct token. This is also the better path if you're not using an AI coding agent, since you only need a terminal and a text editor. The manual path uses Zapier's CLI, so you'll run commands like npx zapier login and npx zapier init directly in your terminal.
For the full manual setup instructions, visit the Zapier SDK Quickstart guide.
Install Zapier SDK in your AI
Zapier SDK gives you programmatic access to our full app ecosystem, with auth, governance, and reliability built right in. If you're ready to start and want more guidance, head to our SDK help docs.
Related reading:
This article was originally written in April 2026. It was most recently updated in May 2026.
