7 Zapier alternatives for workflow automation

in this video you'll learn about seven alternatives to zapier that will help you with workflow automation now i love zapier but i get the need for alternatives there are usually two reasons people are looking for an alternative one is maybe it's too expensive and two maybe they can't achieve what they want in zapier now if you're in that first camp the zappy is too expensive generally i find that uh price isn't always the best reason to shift tools if it's prohibitively expensive maybe but zapier saves me like 150 hours a month at this point and it costs me 50 bucks or 60 bucks a month and when you do the maths on that we're talking 30 cents an hour of time saved so it's pretty easy to justify the cost but i do get it like sometimes costs add up and also maybe you can't achieve what you want in zapier so maybe you're looking for an alternative i'm jimmy from jimmyrose.me and contentsnare and if you'd like to learn more ways to automate your business hit that subscribe button below bear in mind when you're going through this that youtube doesn't let me edit videos right so some of the user interfaces might have changed a little bit maybe my opinion has even changed so just have a look at the video description below i'll keep that updated with any changes to uh what i think about each tool and also any discounts or coupons that apply to any of the tools so if you're looking for a cheaper way in have a look at the video description so let's dig in and have a look at some of the zapier alternatives just for comparison's sake i have zapier open here so you can see what a workflow looks like so if you're new to workflow automation we generally have a trigger that initiates the workflow followed by actions and you might have some other types of things in here like filters so you can stop the workflow under certain conditions but yeah so this is a trigger and the actions you can click into any of these and see how it's all set up so i really like the fact that it's uh collapsible and you know so you can get an overview of what your workflow looks like pretty quickly and if you've got some conditions in here um it doesn't actually display that well so this is a zapier's paths feature so if you have certain conditions that are true it'll run this like sub-zap so the way that works is a little bit clunky in my opinion but overall it's pretty nice to look at and the interface is pretty simple so let's move on to integra map this is my favorite zapier competitor at this stage i often use integromat to achieve things that i cannot do in zapier if you'd like a more in-depth explanation check out my video on zapier verse integromat i'll link that up below overall it's much more powerful but much harder to use some parts of it are quite intuitive like if you're going to add more steps you know you can add things pretty simply but i just find some things are a bit of a pain in the ass so you know if i was to start mapping in obviously that's not an email but if i would start to map things in and click off you'll find that that's actually disappeared and i lose work like that all the time in integromat so there's just some small things about it that uh i'm not a big fan of but overall a workflow like this is almost impossible to create in uh zapier just the fact that you can branch and and actually see it all laid out really nicely um you know and if i was to run this um actually i don't think there's any reason why i can't run this right now so i like the the way that um as it runs hopefully we've got some updates to trigger on maybe not but what happens is a little bubble comes up and you can actually watch the workflow progress through with each new item which is super cool i like that um if you check the description below there is a link that will get you one month free on the basic plan of integromat so i would recommend hitting that link and signing up for your plan there is a free tier as well so you can get started with no risk at all but still use that link below um yeah it's an affiliate link but it also gets you a free month on the basic plan so next up is ifttt this stands for if this then that and this is one of the ogs in this space it has been around for a long time it used to be free but they changed to a paid model but it's extremely cheap like we're talking single digit dollars per month and it's mostly focused on home automation and internet of things so i use ifttt regularly for you know google home alexa type things this account i don't have anything active just because this is my testing account but you can see like this is a list of the workflows that i've currently got and when you're creating one it looks like this you can see it's made to be a lot simpler than the others really big text really big things going on ifttt used to be really limited in what you can do and you couldn't have multi-step workflows but they've recently added the ability to create filters and uh to be able to query data now i haven't used this a whole lot yet i was trying to set up one today and um it was actually white screening on me and i couldn't even finish the workflow so i know this part of iftgt is quite new so i expect it to get better but generally for business use cases ifttt is pretty limiting it's getting better for sure but it is worth checking out and especially because it's so cheap you might be able to do what you need with it and if that's the case then you get away with a cheaper automation platform but for now i don't use it for a whole lot the most the thing i use it for the most are creating custom google assistant commands and i'll link up to that video as well it has a really good system for being able to create custom voice commands to use in google assistant but yeah i don't use it much other than that so moving on let's go to integrately now this one's interesting it is a newer competitor to zapier and i get asked about it a lot because they did a lifetime deal and that makes it very popular among lifetime deal groups and freelancers so there are thousands of people that have signed up for this on the on their lifetime account and they often ask me about it now if you have asked me one month ago what i thought about integrately it would have been very different like there was absolutely no way i was even considering it as an alternative to zapier the ui was super clunky and because it was new uh you couldn't accomplish as much but i think it has come a long way in a few months so i'm now keeping my eye on it again so if we have a look at a workflow that i've created you can see it's quite slow so that actually kind of annoys me when i when i'm building automations i don't like um slow apps so this is what a simple workflow builder looks like in uh integrately so we've got a new subscriber in mailerlite we're going to create a deal in active campaign you can see the data that's coming on the left and you can map it in on the right so if i was going to put a description of the contact name you know i might have it there so it actually looks pretty good now it used to be a lot more clunky this is just a simple workflow though if you wanted to add another condition you have to switch it over to what they call the automation builder which looks like this so now we've got the subscriber in mailerlite and i don't believe you can click oh you can't collapse it so you know you can make it look similar to zapier i guess and add different conditions and different apps but at this point i'm not using it a whole lot like i still think it's really just zapier but a cheaper version but obviously because it's newer they don't have as many integrations and you can't do as much i think their entire marketing spiel is to be just a cheaper zapier and like i said before just moving to a different tool because it's cheaper often isn't a good idea you know zappy has been around for a long time so they're going to be a lot more reliable you know they've been through all the teething issues that a new app is going to have but i think integrately is worth keeping an eye on one thing they do talk about a lot in integrately is the one click quote unquote one click automations so you can say i want to integrate uh like calendly with i don't know i'll just say freshdesk here and it comes up with like when this happens when an invitee is created in calendly we're going to create a company in freshdesk so they try to say that this is like a one-click integration you say go so at this point you'd say no i don't want to change anything i'm just going to go live with the integration but in reality you're always going to have to edit things it's very rare that an out of the box integration is going to be exactly what you want so that interface you saw before is what you'll be using most so if you're really worried about the price of zapier you might want to take a look at integrately that said integromat is often cheaper than zapier as well below you will find my link to integrately at the time of recording it includes some bonus tasks on your account each month but just have a look below to see what the current special is now moving on let's check out microsoft power automate this used to be called microsoft flow now immediately you should recognize how microsofty this looks that might not necessarily be a bad thing uh but it's also a really complex tool with a lot of stuff that you can do in it it's quite microsoft centric like if you are heavily in the microsoft ecosystem power automate's probably going to be really good for you like if you're using sharepoint for example right now zapier doesn't even integrate with sharepoint and you can with powerautomate my friends in it who use power automate it's kind of included if you're with 365 up to a very basic limit they say though that it gets expensive very quickly and you have to pay on top of your 365 subscription i haven't used it to its extremes yet so i can't back that up i'm not even going to get into some of these other things like data storage and whatever which is kind of cool like so integromat has this to some level um zapier doesn't really um so you know we're talking really advanced stuff at this point but um you can see you can add parallel branches which is kind of cool you say run this and this at the same time their flow control is so like a conditional statement like an if statement is done like this so you say if these conditions are true then we'll do these if not uh we'll do these and i mean the ui is okay i guess um it is looking a little bit clunky i've got an update shared to uh buffer here and i mean if you've used automation tools before it's pretty intuitive like i've just been playing around with it a bunch and coming from zapier and the other tools it's a similar setup so you know it's okay if you're in the microsoft ecosystem probably a good option and good at manipulating data and that kind of thing whereas some of the other ones aren't as big at like changing data sets if if you need that kind of thing now on that note one that i wasn't going to cover but i may as well is parabola i'm not going into the interface because i haven't used this too much because it's just not something i have a need for but this is basically a data manipulation automation platform so you can see an example there like pull in yesterday's shopify orders show me ones that have been fulfilled and send all the data as an email so it's kind of good for reporting and data manipulation rather than like the when this happens do this kind of thing that you get in the other system so worth a look if you need to do data manipulation now i'm going to move on to pi sync i get asked about this one a lot too but however it is not i don't consider this a zapier competitor at all it is a contact synchronization thing now a lot of people use zapier for syncing contacts like they'll say when a contact's added to my crm also add them to my invoicing tool now zapier is not very good at that you can get stuck in like infinite loops as one system updates the other it'll trigger the update to go backwards but if you're doing one directional things like saying every time someone's uh signs up to uh you know in this case we've got intercom and we want to sync them to active campaign if you're doing it one way it's fine with something like zapier but if you're doing two-way you want like when someone's out of the active campaign you also want to add them to intercom pi sync is much better here but i've also really never found it worked that well for us because there's always some weird thing that just i can't get it to work for me right so if i configure the sync here this is what the interface looks like so we're saying we're going to do a two-way sync between intercom and activecampaign we're saying if a contact is in any active campaign list you know and some conditions you put in different filters here we'll do a two-way sync and then you can map in the fields between each so the name obviously goes to the name and active campaign in intercom you know email sync phone sync but what i've found generally is like with all the tools that i use there's always been some little gotcha where it just hasn't been able to do exactly what i want so for example maybe a custom field that i need just isn't available for some reason or in this example it only syncs active campaign contacts with intercom users and i needed to sync with companies and it didn't have that ability yet so that was a deal breaker for me but it is worth a look if you're just wanting to keep contacts in sync so check out pysync.com but otherwise let's move on the next one is now i don't even know how to say this n8n dot io now it's a attractive option because it is open source so you can actually download it and set it up on your own server for free of course that means you have to install it and maintain it yourself which can be a big turn off something like this i really don't want to have to be maintaining it myself but they do have a cloud version which you can see if you click there but it is not free pricing is actually pretty good though as they only charge for your entire workflow execution versus how many tasks run all the other ones generally track your tasks so every single action that happens they'll classify that as something that they charge for whereas this one it executes your entire workflow for the one price they don't have as many apps the ui on the surface is pretty nice like it looks good but i've just been playing around with it and honestly i find it extremely difficult to use and there are just some small things like i found uh connecting to trello for example uh normally you would have an oauth system where you just basically um click a button to authenticate with trello and you're ready to go but with this one you have to go and create an app and get your opi key token and secret you know and that's getting pretty advanced for most people so i mean i know a lot of advanced people uh use i don't know how to say this but to be honest i'm not going to be spending much time with it just because it's a bit more complicated than it needs to be at this stage you know i even had trouble trying to get an item to link to this false node here like i don't know why that didn't link so i don't know i am not the biggest fan but i will be keeping my eye on it because i've seen some people i respect talk about it uh really well so and if you'd like to self-host your automation platform for you know data privacy or for whatever reason it is basically the only one you can do that with so worth checking out and it's one to keep an eye on and finally let's look at tray tray.io now i don't even have an account with this one because this is clearly for the big end of town if we look at the pricing you'll see it starts at 695 per month so for most people watching this is probably prohibitively expensive but you know for enterprise companies this is one to look at i know that some sas companies actually use tray as like an embedded automation product so they can integrate with all the apps that trey integrates with without having to build them themselves so that's kind of a use case for tray that's i believe it's called their embedded there it is there tray embedded so that's the one where you can embed it into a sas product without having to create integrations yourself so if you are an enterprise client looking for enterprise type features then check out tray dot io now that's it for the main ones i wanted to dig through but i do have a few bonus ones just in case uh you want to have a look through them in your own time again these will all be linked up below but we've got automate.io now i don't know a whole lot about this one it is pretty reasonably priced and seems to do a good job i don't hear many people talking about it i'm pretty sure i played with it years ago and found it just kind of too similar to what i was already doing in other automation tools so just didn't really bother setting it up but it's another one to look at workato is another super expensive one that's probably going to be out of the range of most people but yeah if you're in that enterprise market check that one out zoho flow i get asked about quite a lot now i hear very mixed reviews about this the i've heard the flow tool is quite good itself but i know a lot of people that have used zoho products in general like zoho one uh which is like their project management crm and everything rolled into one it's basically a series of hacked together apps that almost feel like they are built by different developers so flow is almost necessary to make them work together but obviously it also talks out to other things like gmail and slack but yeah for the most part i've been sticking away from zoho and finally one sas which actually just got acquired i saw this announcement like two days ago and it's big in e-commerce i believe it's kind of it could be worth looking at if you have an e-commerce business this one's been around for a very long time and i'm surprised i don't hear about it more often but yeah if you're in e-commerce that is another one to check out now if you just want to know which ones you should use personally i'm going to stick with zapier and integromat these are the two that i continually use extensively integromat for some of the more advanced workflows i am leaning to integromat more and more these days it does have kind of nice pricing but there are a few things you kind of have to learn about the system and and it is pretty easy to blow out your task usage on your plan if you don't know what you're doing but yeah it's my favorite so have a look below for a link to get integromat for on the basic plan for free for a month the only other one i use is ifttt and that's just for some smaller workflows like using google assistant i do plan on keeping my eye on n8n hopefully that gets a bit easier to use i like what they're doing with it and we'll see how it progresses over time that's it i hope you have found a great zapier alternative in this video if you have any questions please drop in a comment below and remember to have a look at the video description for any updates you know if i've changed my opinion on any of these tools i'm going to post it down in the description along with any discounts and coupons for any of these tools and if you would like a more in-depth explanation on any of these tools go ahead and drop me a comment on that as well i'd be happy to create a follow-up video if enough people need more information all right again i've been jimmy from jimmyrose.me and content snare if you'd like to learn more ways to automate your business hit that red subscribe button and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: JimmyRose - Automation & Productivity

Views: 4,315

Rating: 4.9560437 out of 5

Keywords: zapier alternatives, zapier alternative, alternatives to zapier, cheaper alternative zaper, best zapier alternatives, zapier free alternative

Id: owW2nQn1v3k

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021