https://zapier.com/blog A blog about productivity, workflow automation, company building and how to get things done with less work. Sun, 08 Nov 2026 21:03:50 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/notion-vs-onenote I can't think of many apps that inspire the kind of devotion that Notion does. Its fans organize meetups all around the world to chat about productivity systems, from Aruba to Poland to Pakistan. Heck, you can buy Notion onesies for your baby. My theory on Notion's popularity is this: because you can use it to organize pretty much anything, it's become the software equivalent of a self-help book. Whether you're struggling with school, work, or your personal life, there's a Notion template design Ryan Kane Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/notion-vs-onenote https://zapier.com/blog/how-much-should-ai-decide-without-asking Any AI product that does things, not just says things, runs into the same decision problem sooner or later. The AI assistant can ask before acting, or act and tell you afterward. Both easy answers are wrong. If it asks every time, you stop reading the questions and click yes on reflex, so the questions end up protecting nobody. If it never asks, everything is fine until the first time it does something you didn't expect, and that single surprise is enough to end your trust in it. We've been work Jay Ayinla Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/how-much-should-ai-decide-without-asking https://zapier.com/blog/ai-automation-examples-sidekick A few months into our internal pilot, the Sidekick team noticed that most of what reached them was bug reports. Someone started a channel just for wins, a place where people could post what Sidekick had done for them. It filled up faster than anyone expected. We read through it, along with the pilot feedback threads and our own team channels, and picked five stories that made us stop scrolling. Everything below happened at Zapier or with a Zapier customer, and where people measured something, we Jay Ayinla Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-automation-examples-sidekick https://zapier.com/blog/what-we-learned-watching-claude-read-zapier TL;DR SEO feedback loops take weeks. We wanted something faster for agents, so we built a tool that runs the same Claude Code task against production and a preview variant of a page, with the URL held constant. The first real test surfaced three things we didn't expect: our Markdown mirrors are already in the agent's request path, WebFetch hands the page to a separate model before the calling model ever sees it, and that model has its own instructions shaping what survives. The problem One of th Ben McAdams Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/what-we-learned-watching-claude-read-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/kpi-dashboard-excel A car's dashboard displays vital information in an easily understandable format, assists in decision-making, and alerts the driver to potential issues. (Although the check engine light, with the specificity of a horoscope, treats a loose gas cap and a full-system meltdown with the same level of urgency.) Like a car's dashboard, an Excel KPI dashboard shows you the vital signs of your business, but without the cryptic hints and not-so-subtle threats—just cold, hard data served up in a way that's Allisa Boulette Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/kpi-dashboard-excel https://zapier.com/blog/best-calendar-apps-for-windows I would be completely lost without my calendar, and I bet the same is true for you. That's why I don't want to leave my calendar in some browser tab, alongside the hundreds of other things I happen to be researching at the time. This is where dedicated calendar software comes in. There are so many great Mac calendar apps, to the point where a Windows user might feel left out. You shouldn't, though, because Windows comes with a decent calendar app out of the box, and there are a few solid ones to Justin Pot Thu, 05 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-calendar-apps-for-windows https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-courses Upskilling in AI is just about the most productive thing you could do with your free time right now. With every day that passes, AI technology is making strides, and the demand for AI-related skills increases along with it. In fact, a Zapier survey found that 35% of enterprise leaders say AI skill gaps among their employees are a barrier to AI adoption at their company. To help close the knowledge gap, big tech companies have been publishing high-quality AI learning content. Whether you're looki Katie Paterson Thu, 05 Nov 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-courses https://zapier.com/blog/best-survey-apps Without surveying your customers or clients, how do you know you're making the right business decisions? Even if you have tons of market knowledge and years of experience, data can add an extra angle to help keep you grounded. This is why companies, researchers, and feedback-driven people turn to survey apps to tap into the insights and opinions of their target audiences. But it's hard to choose the best-fitting survey app for you, especially considering the ocean of software at your disposal. T Kiera Abbamonte Wed, 04 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-survey-apps https://zapier.com/blog/claude-duet Claude Duet is Anthropic's answer to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's dots. It's an always-on AI agent, which means that instead of waiting for you to type a prompt, it sends you a morning brief, checks your connected apps to see where it can be helpful, and works on tasks in the background. Terrifying? A bit. But before it sends, pays, signs, or deletes anything, it asks you first. It's still in research preview, but I got early access and spent some time with it on my phone. Here's what Claude Duet is Wade Burrell Wed, 04 Nov 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/claude-duet https://zapier.com/blog/best-wordpress-booking-plugin I've been going to the same barber for years. He has his own shop now, and everything is great, but booking at his old shop was a mess. I'd click "Book now" and get transported to a completely different site with a strange logo, which asked me to enter every shred of personal information I had. It felt like walking down a dark alley where every turn could be a virus, a credit card scam, or a guy in a trench coat selling counterfeit watches. That's why a lot of businesses invest in a WordPress bo Ben Lyso Wed, 04 Nov 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-wordpress-booking-plugin https://zapier.com/blog/best-no-code-app-builder You're vibing with your AI coding agent, and your prototype is working well in the preview window. Brimming with excitement, you hit publish to share your creation with the world. Everything is great for one or two days, but then the problems start: your users report broken features and clunky app behavior.  So, you go back to Lovable or Cursor and ask to fix the bugs, adding a motivating "no mistakes!" to the end of the prompt. What should be the path to making everything right instead leads yo Miguel Rebelo Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-no-code-app-builder https://zapier.com/blog/google-drive-vs-google-photos Google has two apps you can use to upload and share photos: Google Drive and Google Photos. That might seem like one too many, especially since they pull from the same storage. But the goal of each app is different. For everyday photos and videos you take on your phone, Google Photos is fantastic at organizing and editing them, backing them up, and making it easy to find what you're looking for. For professional-quality photos, videos, and project files from apps like Lightroom or Photoshop, Goo Ryan Kane Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-drive-vs-google-photos https://zapier.com/blog/free-project-management-software Everyone has a different way of managing projects. Some people like to use their inbox to keep track of tasks. Others prefer to visualize work on a Kanban board or in a calendar view, while some even prefer the old pen and paper system. That's fine on an individual level, but when you collaborate on projects as a team, you need a flexible and capable project management tool that works for everyone. And with so many teams working remotely, there's an even more pressing need for a task management Kiera Abbamonte Fri, 30 Oct 2026 14:44:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/free-project-management-software https://zapier.com/blog/ai-transformation It can feel impossible to escape the pressure to "do something" with AI. Maybe your CEO just asked about your AI strategy in an all-hands, or your competitors are shipping faster thanks to automation. Or maybe you're just tired of watching your team lose hours every week to tasks a bot could easily handle. You know AI is a big deal—but figuring out where to start is where most teams get stuck. You don't need another one-off pilot project that fizzles out after a few weeks, or a massive consultin Nicole Replogle Fri, 30 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-transformation https://zapier.com/blog/automate-grok Grok has a very specific edge over other AI models: live access to X, so your agents can keep their finger on the pulse a little more easily. But outside of that, Grok models and agents are still solid alternatives to what OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have on offer. And if you're using Grok for work, you'll want to connect it to the rest of your tech stack. The most secure and easiest way to do that is with Zapier. There are two main ways to automate Grok with Zapier. You can add Grok to the wo Nicole Replogle Fri, 30 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-grok https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-agent-builder AI agents have matured fast, and I've been in the weeds the whole time. These days, AI agents are running a lot of my processes in the background. And it's not just me or the Zapier team: 84% of enterprises plan to boost AI agent investments. Agents can run complex, org-wide workflows across your entire app stack. I work at Zapier, and I think it's the best option to make that happen, but I also know that's not a universal truth—and I'd rather help you figure out which one actually fits than ju Nicole Replogle Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-agent-builder https://zapier.com/blog/grok-bot Working with AI is getting weird. Two years ago, I used to do most tasks by myself and then jump into a chatbot task to solve a problem four or five times per hour. These days, I end up staring at my screen while my agents do my research, tear down my drafts, or fix up formatting—mostly to make sure they're not going off-task. Is that what we're supposed to be, now? Glorified babysitters to thinking machines? Grok Bot is SpaceX Super Intelligence's solution to this problem. Instead of a chatbot Miguel Rebelo Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/grok-bot https://zapier.com/blog/meta-ai-muse-spark Meta has shifted to a new family of flagship AI models called Muse and sent the Llama "herd" of models to the farm upstate. It's a dramatic but understandable shift in AI strategy from the company that was once pioneering open models. The newest models are Muse Wonder and Muse Spark, and they're Meta's first real attempt at top-tier frontier models. Unlike the Llama models, both are closed-weight proprietary models. You won't be able to download them from Hugging Face or run them on your own mac Harry Guinness Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/meta-ai-muse-spark https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-project-management-tools When was the last time you looked at your project management app and didn't get a stress level spike? No matter how much you plan or reprioritize, it always feels like running a sprint on a tightrope. But now that AI is in the game, we can pass that stress over to the robots. With AI being added to almost every app in existence, we've seen a surge in AI project management tools. There's still no replacing the human project manager, but AI project management apps can help things move more smoothl Miguel Rebelo Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-project-management-tools https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-presentation-maker The days of spending hours dragging images to just the right place on a slide are far behind us. You can now create a presentation with AI, giving the robots the job of setting the structure, adding the initial content, and executing on the aesthetics of your deck. All you have to do is tweak it with your information, human insights, and flair—and rehearse it a bit before the big performance. I spent a month testing all the best presentation software, focusing on the ones that use AI in a way t Miguel Rebelo Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-presentation-maker https://zapier.com/blog/automate-google-ai-studio Anyone who lives in the Google ecosystem has probably used Gemini for a quick draft or a fast answer. (Or if you're like me, you've been driven to your limit by the Google Docs popups encouraging you to use AI whenever your cursor strays too close to the bottom of the screen.) But a chat window is just the beginning of what Gemini can do. Its real power shows up when you connect it to the rest of your apps and let it do work on your behalf. Gemini's models are available in Zapier, so you can add Nicole Replogle Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-google-ai-studio https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier Staying up to date on the latest AI models is like trying to keep my house vacuumed in the height of my dog's shedding season (a losing battle). New AI models drop practically every week, and it's not exactly obvious which ones deserve a spot in your workflows. This guide is your cheat sheet, with every model you can automate on Zapier right now, sorted by provider. If you just want to cut to the chase and find out which model you should be using for which task, that's what AutomationBench is fo Nicole Replogle Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/best-llm Large language models (LLMs) are what most people think of when they think of AI. They're what you're interacting with in ChatGPT and Claude, they write the code generated by Claude Code and Codex, and they power other AI features like Google's AI answers and Apple Intelligence. If something has a chatbot, some kind of text generator or text summarization built in, or writes code or automates your computer, it almost certainly uses an LLM. LLMs have been studied in research labs since the late 2 Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-llm https://zapier.com/blog/google-gemini Google has been in its "Gemini era" for a couple years now, and while the confusing rebrandings have slowed, everything else continues to improve at a rapid pace. Gemini is the name Google gave to its current generation family of multimodal AI models, but in typical Google fashion, it also applies to basically everything else that's related to AI. It can get a touch confusing since, by my reckoning, Google has: Google Gemini, a family of multimodal AI models. The newest is Gemini 4, though some Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-gemini https://zapier.com/blog/openai-playground ChatGPT can do basically anything you ask, but you really don't have a huge amount of control over its outputs. If you want to do more with OpenAI's models, you need to dig a little deeper.  If you really want to see what the models can do and exert some control over how they respond, you need to get your hands properly dirty and play around with the API. That way, you can really pull the levers that control what they can create. Here's how to go about doing it.  How to use the OpenAI playground Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/openai-playground