Integromat is a terrific platform that most of us love. In 95% of cases, Integromat is the vastly superior tool to use over Zapier. But when comparing Zapier vs. Integromat, it’s not always a clear victory in favor of Integromat. Zapier has a couple of advantages over Integromat, which sometimes makes me choose Zapier over Integromat.
Now, Integromat definitely has some key advantages over Zapier:
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For one, Integromat is significantly cheaper — and many businesses can get away with the 100% free Integromat plan for life.
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Integromat has way more advanced functionality than Zapier — and much more functionality than Zapier, too. For example, Integromat has the ability to have unlimited conditional criteria (known as “filters” in Integromat), Integromat lets you iterate through arrays in a loop, Integromat lets you perform advanced transformations on your data, etc. Most of this stuff is not available in Zapier, and if it is available, it usually comes with major restrictions (for example, only 3 conditional paths are allowed in Zapier, but there are unlimited conditional filters in Integromat) or it only works with a small handful of apps (but not Airtable).
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Integromat has a significantly better Airtable trigger than Zapier does — it triggers on updated records, and it will trigger repeatedly for the same record. Zapier is a complete failure in these regards, in that the “New Record in View” trigger only triggers upon new records in a view & only triggers ONCE for the ENTIRE LIFETIME OF THE RECORD (in that view). This is completely unhelpful for the majority of real-world business scenarios. Since the Zapier trigger seems to have been created by the Airtable Team, it would be really awesome if the Airtable Team could revisit & improve their Zapier support. Luckily, we are extremely fortunate to have On2Air Actions to fill in the missing gaps with Zapier, but that costs an additional $50 per month.
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The built-in scheduling support of Integromat is significantly more robust than Zapier. Based on your pricing plan, you can schedule a scenario to automatically run every 1 minute, every 5 minutes, or every 15 minutes. With Zapier’s “Schedule by Zapier” module, you can only run your zap every 60 minutes at most. UPDATE: There is an undocumented workaround in Zapier to schedule every few minutes, but it requires a paid plan (and is a workaround). See my next post in this discussion thread.
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In my personal experience, Integromat has significantly more responsive support & way more knowledgeable support people than Zapier does. Integromat’s support is extremely responsive & always super helpful, whereas sometimes it will take Zapier days to respond to an email with an answer that isn’t very helpful.
But here are some of the advantages of Zapier:
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If you accidentally rename a field in Airtable that is used by your automations, Zapier always recognizes the renamed field and continues running perfectly fine. Integromat does not recognize any renamed fields, so your Integromat scenario will break & stop running from that point forward. So Zapier is way more reliable in these regards.
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Zapier has full support for Airtable’s single-select and multi-select fields. In Zapier, you can always add/modify values in single-select and multi-select fields. On the other hand, Integromat can only update single-select and multi-select fields if you’re using a value that has already been pre-defined in your Airtable base. If you use a different value, your Integromat scenario will break & stop running from that point forward. So Zapier is more robust & more reliable in these regards. UPDATE: It turns out that Integromat CAN add new values to single select and multi select fields, as long as you turn on the option for “Smart Links” at the bottom of your update/create action by typing the word “true” for Smart Links.
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Even though Zapier doesn’t have as many features as Integromat, it is an older platform that has been around for longer than Integromat, and it supports developers creating their own Zapier modules. So, as a result of this, Zapier has support for hundreds (thousands?) of apps that Integromat doesn’t yet support.
I’m sure that there are some more advantages & disadvantages to both platforms.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
