https://zapier.com/blog A blog about productivity, workflow automation, company building and how to get things done with less work. Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:25:49 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/replit-alternatives My husband and I have very different relationships with starting things. He reads the entire manual before he touches anything. I open the box, press whatever looks most promising, and deal with the consequences later. We've been doing this dance for a dozen years, and obviously my approach works better. That's pretty much the Replit story. It's a browser-based coding platform that lets you skip the manual entirely: open a tab, describe your app, and the agent figures out the rest. It does front Nicole Replogle Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/replit-alternatives https://zapier.com/blog/boomi-alternatives Boomi runs the integration layer for thousands of enterprises, connecting ERPs and legacy systems and on-premises databases that most modern tools refuse to acknowledge exist. If you need SAP talking to Oracle while both of them shake hands with a healthcare system behind a firewall, Boomi says "how high?" But for everyone else, whose stack is mostly cloud apps or who wants their entire team to be able to build without an IT backlog, Boomi isn't where you should go first. I work at Zapier, so y Nicole Replogle Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/boomi-alternatives https://zapier.com/blog/salesforce-alternatives Once you're in the Salesforce universe, it's hard to move out. Part of that is because it's getting the job done: it can do almost anything, it scales to almost any size, and its ecosystem is enormous. If you have a dedicated Salesforce admin, a development team, and a budget, it's the gold standard for CRM, by a long shot. But if you're ready to move on—and lots of people are—there are plenty of Salesforce alternatives that cover a lot of the same ground Salesforce does, at a fraction of the co Nicole Replogle Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/salesforce-alternatives https://zapier.com/blog/rozas-two-minute-lead-response As COO of Rozas, Matthew Rozas oversees the systems behind a firm that receives about 1,800 calls a week on its main line. He owns finance, HR, marketing, and operations, so he sees exactly where a new lead can slow down: in the gap between someone asking for help and the intake team getting that request into Clio Grow. Rozas represents clients nationwide in family-based immigration petitions, asylum cases, removal defense, employment visas, and other immigration matters. The firm also handles m Rob Ayre Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/rozas-two-minute-lead-response https://zapier.com/blog/chatgpt-work ChatGPT isn't really a chatbot anymore. Now, the focus is on agents, which is why the ChatGPT app suddenly looks very different. It's been rebuilt around a feature called ChatGPT Work. ChatGPT Work is basically Codex, OpenAI's coding tool, for regular people. It uses the same agentic foundation but in a friendlier package. You don't have to worry about git, the terminal, or actual code—unless you want to.  The idea is that ChatGPT Work can operate on its own for an extended period of time. You g Harry Guinness Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/chatgpt-work https://zapier.com/blog/just-eat-spain-ruben-del-fresno-restaurant-partner-onboarding Rubén del Fresno, Sales Project Manager, has spent eight years building automation at Just Eat Spain. His latest system earned him a July monthly Zappy Award: it moves a restaurant partner (partner) from signed to online across Sales, Operations, delivery and logistics, and account management—cutting time to online from 13 days to about 5. Before Rubén built it, each team had to find the partner record, check a dashboard, and copy information into the next step. The five-team handoff The problem Rob Ayre Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/just-eat-spain-ruben-del-fresno-restaurant-partner-onboarding https://zapier.com/blog/fathom-vs-fireflies Watching someone take meeting minutes by hand feels like a portal into a bygone era, like rewinding a VHS tape or printing out MapQuest directions. I found a YouTube video called Mock Meeting for Minute Taking—recorded circa 2014—that was intended to train aspiring notetakers on the art of meeting minutes. A decade later, it all seems impossibly old-fashioned. AI handles everything: summaries, transcripts, action items, and conversational AI systems that let you ask questions about what was disc Ryan Kane Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/fathom-vs-fireflies https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-mcp-guide Large language models can extract, classify, summarize, and write for us. They just can't execute those tasks on their own. Or not without some seriously cumbersome technical upkeep, anyway. For AI to do something in an app you use, a developer has to build a complex integration. Or, much preferred these days, you can fast-track the process with the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It's a translator between AI tools and apps that lets your AI act on your behalf. Most MCP servers connect to a single Steph Spector Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-mcp-guide https://zapier.com/blog/best-android-calendar-apps Most of us are lost without our calendars, which is why Android phones come preloaded with them. But you don't have to stick to the built-in calendar app: there are a ton of Android calendar apps on the Google Play Store. That also means there are a lot of options to wade through, and they can all start to feel really similar. To find the best, I put several dozen of the top-rated Android calendar apps through their paces and found seven that I felt excelled in their categories.  Based on all th Shubham Agarwal Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-android-calendar-apps https://zapier.com/blog/customer-data-platform My wife has roughly 2,300 contacts in her phone, and I would estimate that maybe 40 of them are real, distinct human beings. The rest is a hall of mirrors. When she needs to text someone, she scrolls. She scrolls for a truly upsetting amount of time. I am, functionally, the identity resolution layer of our household. I'm the one who knows that "Rebecca work," "Becky H," and "🐍 do not trust" are the same person. This is exactly the problem every company on earth is drowning in. Except the stake Allisa Boulette Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/customer-data-platform https://zapier.com/blog/inspect-element-tutorial There's a powerful tool hiding in your browser: Inspect Element. Right-click on any webpage, click Inspect, and you get a live view of that site's underlying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—the source code, images, fonts, animations, load times, and exact color values that make it tick. And you can temporarily edit any of it, right there in the browser. It's a perfect way to learn how websites are built, debug something broken on your own site, mock up design changes without touching a staging envir Jessica Lau Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/inspect-element-tutorial https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-log-streaming When your security team investigates suspicious access or an unexpected configuration change, they need the full timeline in one place. They should be able to see when someone logged in, shared an app connection, changed a Zap, or created an MCP server alongside activity from the rest of your stack. Log Streams can now send Zapier Audit Log activity into the SIEM your team already monitors. It's got more than 45 event types that cover admin and configuration changes across Zaps, MCP servers, app Joe Stych Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-log-streaming https://zapier.com/blog/audit-linkedin-conversion-tracking-setup After setting up the Conversions API for LinkedIn Ads, most marketing teams do the same thing. They monitor it for a while to ensure it’s working as expected, adjust as needed, and move on to the next priority. After all, there's no shortage of work to do. But then something breaks, and it catches them by surprise.  Don't fall into the set-it-and-forget it trap. Here's a quick framework you can use to help audit and troubleshoot your conversion tracking workflows when something breaks—and help y Hannah Herman Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/audit-linkedin-conversion-tracking-setup https://zapier.com/blog/linkedin-capi-for-marketers So you want to close the loop between LinkedIn Ads and your CRM. Great! But now you have to convince your team. Most marketing teams already know their attribution has gaps. But often that's where the conversation stalls. Try standing in front of them and explaining why the fix involves a word like "integration," and watch eyes glaze over before you've even made the ask. Making the case for connecting LinkedIn's Conversions API to your CRM just takes the right sequence—lead with cost, back it wi Hannah Herman Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/linkedin-capi-for-marketers https://zapier.com/blog/ai-governance-report Companies have done the homework on AI governance. They've written the policies, built the frameworks, and filed the documentation. And 91% of executive leaders say their organizations have them. Gold star, everyone.  But when you dig a little deeper, it turns out that the rules are a beautiful theoretical object, like a unicorn or a balanced budget. They exist in the document, but they're not in the room with us. According to a new Zapier survey of 548 U.S.-based directors, VPs, and C-suite exe Laura Kutch Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-governance-report https://zapier.com/blog/best-slack-apps Slack has more than 2,600 apps in its app directory. Plenty of them are narrowly useful: for example, Slack's Vercel app is great if you're hosting web development projects, but it doesn't have any appeal outside of that. But most businesses using Slack have the same broad needs: communication, team building, project management, automation, onboarding, and getting work done without lots of context switching. Plus a bit of goofing off, of course. Slack apps can help with all of this. And with emb Ryan Kane Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-slack-apps https://zapier.com/blog/drip-marketing Have you ever signed up for an organization's newsletter and immediately felt out of the loop—like you missed a hundred emails leading up to the most recent one? That's because new newsletter subscribers only see the emails that come after they've signed up. Everything before that is lost to the void. Drip marketing is the solution. It involves sending emails in a particular order based on a schedule or user behavior so that every message feels intentional. In this guide, I'll break down what dr Joe Stych Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/drip-marketing https://zapier.com/blog/automate-calendly I have sent probably four hundred emails in my life that just said some version of "does 2pm Thursday work for you?" Calendly exists so none of us has to do that anymore. Invitees see your real availability and pick a slot without the back and forth. That solves the booking problem. It doesn't solve everything else that comes with a new meeting, like syncing it to your team's calendar or logging the invitee in your CRM. That's where a Zap—our word for Zapier's automated workflows—comes in. Conne Jack Beaudoin Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-calendly https://zapier.com/blog/how-does-chatgpt-work ChatGPT started as a chatbot and tech demo for OpenAI's large language models (LLMs). It's now something closer to a general-purpose AI platform—one that can search the web, generate images, write code, reason through complex problems, and execute multi-step actions across apps. As OpenAI has kept pushing ChatGPT forward with new models and features, a question that sounds simple has gotten surprisingly hard to answer: How does ChatGPT work?  Well, I'm going to do my best to answer. Table of con Harry Guinness Fri, 14 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/how-does-chatgpt-work https://zapier.com/blog/ai-in-worflow-automation My in-laws have wired every light in their house to Alexa. But no one can ever remember if they're sitting in the "living room" or the "family room," so three commands and one accidental playlist later, someone always ends up just leaning over and hitting the light switch. A lot of AI workflows are built the same way—for example, someone calls a model to check if a number is above a threshold. This is something a conditional rule has handled since the early days of Excel. There's no judgment to Jessica Lau Fri, 14 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-in-worflow-automation https://zapier.com/blog/stay-focused-avoid-distractions I find it hard to get work done while watching movies, visiting theme parks, or hanging out with my friends. So why do I think I can get work done online? Yes, the internet is a place where work happens, but distractions are always a click away. You could say this is a matter of discipline, and it is, but the odds aren't in your favor. The internet is a dopamine slot machine. The greatest minds of our generation are working around the clock to "increase engagement," which is a tech term that mea Justin Pot Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:17:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/stay-focused-avoid-distractions 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 Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/ai-model-flexibility Every AI provider comes with models of varying strengths. I'm a Claude stan because it just gets my writing style, but I'll often reach for Sonnet over the higher-tier models because its results are more consistent for me. And for some tasks, Claude's lineup doesn't cut it at all—when I need to process data at scale, for example, I might reach for Gemini. When I need a versatile generalist for classification or routing, GPT might be my pick. Other people across my team and at Zapier have altoget Steph Spector Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-model-flexibility https://zapier.com/blog/klaviyo-vs-mailchimp Pull up the websites for Klaviyo and Mailchimp, and you'll notice something right away: each brand targets a vastly different audience. Mailchimp plasters its friendly monkey logo everywhere and uses accessible language like clicks, sales, and customer loyalty. Klaviyo's website is jet black, features Fortune 500 companies like Unilever, and talks about uniform data, agentic commerce, and omnichannel promotions. Simple enough to choose between them, right? Kind of. Under the veneer of its access Ryan Kane Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/klaviyo-vs-mailchimp 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 latest is the 3.7 series, thoug Harry Guinness Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-gemini