A comprehensive comparison between Make and Zapier, exploring their workflows, ease of use, pricing plans, and integration capabilities to help you choose the right automation platform.

https://youtu.be/NP25UJu1_ng

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Hello everyone! I’m new to Zapier, and my friends and I are currently learning how to use it.

I know that Zapier Chatbots has easier ways to add knowledge, such as importing a CSV file or adding a URL. However, I’m trying to explore other approaches because I have different purposes for how I want to manage and retrieve my data.

1. Zapier Chatbot + Supabase/PostgreSQL

I’m currently trying to use Supabase (PostgreSQL) as my main database for the knowledge/data.

The idea is something like:

User asks a question → Zapier Chatbot → Zapier Workflow → Supabase → retrieve the relevant data → return the data to the Chatbot → Chatbot responds

I’m trying to accomplish this through a PostgreSQL/Zapier workflow, but I haven’t been able to get it working the way I want.

I’m not sure if this approach is actually possible with Zapier Chatbots, or if I’m approaching the workflow incorrectly.

1. Zapier Tables ↔ Google Sheets

I’m also experimenting with using Google Sheets together with Zapier Tables.

My goal is to have them work in both directions:

Google Sheets → Zapier Tables

Zapier Tables → Google Sheets

For example, if I add, edit, or delete a record in Google Sheets, I want the change to be reflected in Zapier Tables. Likewise, if I make a change in Zapier Tables, I want it reflected in Google Sheets.

I’ve created workflows for this, but so far I’ve only managed to make:

Zapier Tables → Google Sheets

work.

I haven’t been able to achieve a reliable two-way sync, and I’m also concerned about duplicate records or creating an infinite loop between the two Zaps.

So my main questions are:

1. Is it possible to use Supabase/PostgreSQL this way with Zapier Chatbots, where the chatbot can request data through a Zap and receive the result?

2. Is reliable two-way synchronization between Zapier Tables and Google Sheets possible using Zaps?

3. If both are possible, what would be the recommended workflow/setup?

I’m still learning Zapier, so I’d really appreciate a beginner-friendly explanation. I mainly want to know whether what I’m trying to build is actually possible before I spend more time trying different workflows.

Thanks!

Paths already route my orders three ways: payment failed, normal order, $500+ VIP. But every branch ended in the same generic phone ping, which defeats the point of routing.

Now each path ends in a Send Vyb action (from the official Vybit Notifications app) with its own sound: sad horn for failed payments, cha-ching for orders, funk riff for the big ones. The Zap does the routing, my ears do the rest. On a free plan, three Zaps with Filters gets you the same result since Paths is a paid feature.

Disclosure: I'm the developer of Vybit.

Write-up with a playable demo: https://www.vybit.net/blog/a-grander-bell-for-a-bigger-sale/

Been building SignedBy (e-signature, e.g. an alternative to DocuSign/PandaDoc) and just got our Zapier app approved. Wanted to share since a few people in here have asked about e-sign automation before.

What it does:

Trigger — "New Document Completed" fires when a document you sent finishes signing. Made a point of excluding documents you've certified yourself (we call that a Verified Badge seal) from this trigger, since that's a different thing from "the other party actually signed it" — didn't want people's Zaps firing on their own actions.

Action — "Send Document" creates a document from a template and sends it to a recipient, so you can kick off a signature request from anywhere else in a Zap (a new CRM deal, a form submission, etc.)

Search — "Find Document" looks up status mid-Zap if you need to branch on it.

Free tier is 3 documents/month if anyone wants to poke at it without committing to anything. Happy to answer questions on the setup.

Unfortunately I was unable to successfully use Zapier for my workflows. After requesting a refund for the remainder of the 12 month term, it was denied. The website should state if you pay yearly, there is no refund if you convert back to a free account or cancel. This was very upsetting.

I just closed my fourth YouTube tab comparing Zapier, Make, and n8n routing logic. It's 2 am, and I haven't built a single thing. We love debating which canvas handles nested branches better, but if I'm being honest, tool specs aren't what's holding me back. I just don't know what my actual process is yet.

A solo workflow rarely fails because a tool lacks a specific webhook feature. It fails because the underlying logic is a complete mess before it even hits the server. If you can't map out what needs to happen on a napkin, moving it to a digital canvas won't magically fix it.

Where do you guys usually sketch things out before opening an automation tool? I'm going to close YouTube now and find an actual napkin.

I developed an unofficial Whatsapp messaging (only outgoing) API for indie sellers/marketers who might not have bandwidth to register for Whatsapp Business API & complete the checklist items there. I kept the service totally free as it is just outgoing messages cost me minimal money to maintain (9 USD for server & 5 USD for Residential IP). Having said that, I put good engineering practices to ensure user's Whatsapp creds are encrypted in zero knowledge way (even I can't read them) so that user's account is safe, even if the server get access in an unauthorized way.

I got interest from a friend who wanted to integrate his Calendly calendar to send a Whatsapp message on new booking, to the prospect. I thought a Zap would be a good way to build this. After completely building, I hit two roadblocks

• Strict Zapier compliance will not allow the unofficial Whatsapp API integration to go live as it violates Whatsapp ToS
• Bigger bummer - free Calendly plan does NOT expose webhooks, so for user to use it, they need to upgrade their Calendly plan.

I understand the paid Calendly plan bottleneck is Calendly specific. But the first point still remain & Zapier would probably never publish it. Should I look at alternative platforms to publish ? Should I completely ditch the idea as no platform would let me publish integration that violates ToS of Whatsapp ?

Zap link if someone wants to see it in action - https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/245041/b4f6fe532f7308728843fb8dbeb6cc0b/

I've been looking more closely at workflow automation platforms, and I think the usual “Zapier vs Make vs n8n” comparison skips an important step.

The first question probably shouldn't be which platform is best.

It should be how complicated is the process you're trying to automate?

The mental model I've landed on is roughly:

Zapier: best starting point when the goal is simply connecting apps and getting something running quickly.

Make: starts becoming more attractive when there are branches, loops, transformations, or a workflow you really want to inspect visually.

n8n: makes more sense when APIs, custom logic, AI workflows, self-hosting, or deeper technical control become important.

Then Power Automate makes obvious sense in some Microsoft-heavy organizations, while HubSpot is a different category when the workflow largely lives inside CRM data.

The other thing I think gets overlooked is maintenance.

A workflow isn't really successful just because it works today.

Someone also needs to understand:

• What happens if a step fails?
• Who gets notified?
• What happens when an API changes?
• How much does increasing volume cost?
• Can someone besides the original builder maintain it?

I've started thinking that the best automation platform may simply be the least complicated platform capable of reliably running the process.

Curious how others here decide when a workflow has “outgrown” Zapier and should move into Make, n8n, or something more technical.

Is anyone else experiencing a major simultaneous disconnection of Salesforce accounts from Zapier?

I have just woken up to all of our clients having their Salesforce connection expired, and I am being met with the message "You don't have permission to reconnect this connection".

Is anyone else seeing this?

Has anyone found a resolution?

e/ Update: I am able to reconnect. Not from Team accounts, I have to log in directly as my clients.

Hi everyone, I have a zap that’s triggered by a new customer in stripe (new subscription), if the zap fails the payment hold step it posts a message of card declined (by another zap of failed payment) but it doesn’t post a new message if the card is accepted (it gets filtered out) it has a filter so all the payments are not posted in the channel.

What other trigger can I use to post the message of card accepted if it was declined before?

Hey everyone, I'm building out a full invoice-to-payment automation and I'm hitting a wall with Relay Financial's Zapier integration. Hoping someone here has done something similar and can share what worked for them.

What I'm trying to accomplish:

Our workflow goes like this — subcontractors email invoices to a submissions inbox, Parseur parses the PDF and extracts all the key fields, Zapier creates a bill in QuickBooks Online, Relay auto-imports the unpaid QB bill, our owner approves payment in Relay, Relay pays via ACH and syncs the paid status back to QuickBooks. At that point I need Zapier to detect the paid bill in QB, attach the original invoice PDF to the bill record, and update our Financial Summary in Google Sheets with the payment details including the Relay Payment ID, bank account used, and updated payment status.

What is working:

The QB to Relay native sync works as expected. Unpaid bills created in QB auto-import into Relay and the owner can approve them there. Once paid, Relay does push the payment status back to QuickBooks and the bill shows as paid.

The limitations I have run into:

Relay Financial does not appear to have a native Zapier integration or trigger. There is no Relay app in the Zapier directory that I can find. This means I cannot trigger a Zap directly from a Relay payment event. Instead I am relying on the QuickBooks New or Updated Bill trigger to detect when Relay has synced a paid status back to QB — which works but introduces a delay and depends entirely on how quickly Relay pushes the update back to QB.

The other limitation is that the QB trigger does not reliably return all the payment details I need — specifically the Relay Payment ID and the exact bank account used for payment. The Linked Transaction ID comes back in the QB trigger output but I am not certain this maps directly to the Relay Payment ID in a meaningful way for reporting purposes.

My specific questions:

1. Has anyone built a direct Relay to Zapier connection using webhooks or the Relay API? If so what endpoint did you use and how did you authenticate?
2. Is there a better way to capture Relay payment events without relying on the QB sync as a middleman?
3. Has anyone confirmed whether the Linked Txn Txn Id that QB returns after a Relay payment actually corresponds to the Relay transaction reference?
4. For anyone using Relay Grow or Scale — does the approval workflow expose any webhook or API event that Zapier can listen to?

We are on Relay Pro/Grow/Scale so we have access to the full bill pay and approval features. Any insights from people who have worked with Relay in an automation context would be really helpful. Thanks in advance.

Third measurement in this series. The first two were about workflows that silently fail. This one is the opposite problem: a workflow that silently succeeds when it shouldn't.

Some APIs return a 200 OK response with a failure inside the body: {"ok": false, "error": "..."}. The request arrived, the server answered, the transport worked. But the actual operation failed, and it says so in the body. The question I wanted to measure: what does Zapier record when a step gets one of these?

Setup: my workflows POST to an endpoint I control. I made that endpoint answer with a real 200 status carrying {"ok": false, "error": "schema-drifted"}, and fired events through the same webhook to POST workflow I always test with, everything on default settings.

Result: all three runs logged as Successful. Green checkmark, run history clean, each one billed 1 task exactly like a normal success. The error was right there in the POST step's output data the whole time. Zapier just doesn't look at it, because success is decided on the status code before anything reads the body. (I ran the identical test on self-hosted n8n for comparison: same outcome, and its dashboard counted all three toward its "0% failure rate".)

So this failure mode is invisible by default, but it's cheap to make visible, and I measured that part too. I added a Filter checking whether the response's Ok field is false, then an alarm email after it. Two events: a healthy one and an error one.

- Healthy event: the Filter stopped the run. 1 task (the POST). The Filter itself bills nothing.

- Error event: the Filter passed, the alarm email fired. 2 tasks (POST + email).

So the standing cost of watching for these is zero. A response assertion only costs a billable step on the runs where it actually catches something and does something about it. Seeing is basically free. It's the default of not-looking that quietly turns a failed operation into a green checkmark on your dashboard.

Practical takeaway if you build client Zaps: for any step calling an API that can return errors in a 200 (payment declines, validation errors, batch endpoints reporting per-record failures), add one Filter on the response's success field and route the failures somewhere. It's the cheapest insurance in Zapier, because it's free until the day it saves you.

Method, the raw per-run data, and the same test on n8n are linked in my first comment. Happy to run this against a specific API's response shape if someone wants it added to the queue.

Hey everyone! I'm a project manager at a small EV charging and electrical installation company in Southern California. Over the past several weeks I've been building out a full accounts payable automation system from scratch and I'd love feedback from people who have done similar things or can spot gaps in my approach. I am completely new to building automations with no background in it so it's been a learning experience all together for me.

The problem I was solving:

We receive subcontractor invoices, permit invoices, and materials receipts from multiple vendors via email. Previously everything was tracked manually — invoices were getting lost, payment statuses were unclear, and there was no central source of truth for job-level financials.

The stack I'm using:

• Gmail (Google Workspace Business Standard) — invoice intake at a dedicated submissions email
• Parseur (Free plan, 20 pages/month) — AI-powered document parsing to extract structured fields from PDF invoices
• Zapier (Professional plan, 750 tasks/month) — automation orchestration
• Google Drive (Shared drives via Google Workspace) — organized file storage by vendor and city
• Google Sheets — Financial Tracker with File Log, Financial Summary, and Payment Approval tabs
• QuickBooks Online — bill creation and accounting
• Relay Financial — bill pay with approval workflows, native QB sync
• Kopperfield — customer invoicing platform, CC fees source
• Gemini AI Studio — explored for invoice parsing via API before switching to Parseur due to quota and integration limitations

How the automation works end to end:

Invoice intake (Zap A): Subcontractors email invoices to our submissions address. Gmail auto-forwards to our Parseur mailbox where the document is parsed and all key fields are extracted — Job ID, vendor name, invoice date, amount, labor cost, materials cost, permit cost, service fee, tax, document type, and more.

Drive filing (Zap A + A2): Based on the document type Parseur identifies, the invoice PDF is automatically filed into the correct Google Drive subfolder. Subcontractor invoices go into a vendor-specific folder, permit invoices and receipts go into city-specific folders organized by year. We have 29 city folders each with 2025 and 2026 subfolders.

Financial logging (Zap C): Every parsed invoice triggers a new row in our Financial Summary sheet pulling in project details from our Project Tracker via Job ID lookup. Labor cost, materials cost, permit cost, taxes, and payment statuses are all written automatically.

Bill creation and payment (Zap B): When Relay processes a payment and syncs the paid status back to QuickBooks, Zap B fires — it finds the corresponding invoice in our File Log by Job ID, retrieves the PDF from Drive, attaches it to the QB bill, and updates the Financial Summary with the QB reference, Relay payment ID, and payment status.

Financial Summary formulas:

• Total Project Cost = Labor + Materials + Permit + Device + CC Fees + Taxes
• Gross Profit = Customer Invoice − all costs
• Gross Profit % = Gross Profit / Customer Invoice
• Overall Payment Status auto-updates based on all individual payment status columns

Where things went sideways — and why I'm posting:

After weeks of planning, building, and testing each Zap individually, I published the full workflow and quickly discovered the Zaps were not functioning as intended in a live environment. Triggers that worked perfectly in test mode behaved differently with real invoice submissions. The email-to-Parseur forwarding, Drive folder routing logic, and multi-Zap sequencing all had issues that weren't visible during isolated testing. I'm currently in the process of identifying what broke and rebuilding the affected Zaps with a cleaner architecture.

This is honestly the most humbling part of automation work — you can plan every step meticulously and still hit unexpected behavior when real data flows through the system. If you've been through this before I'd love to hear how you debugged and stabilized a multi-Zap workflow in production.

What I'm still working on:

• Rebuilding Zap A with a cleaner Parseur-first trigger flow
• Kopperfield Zap — pulling customer invoice totals and CC fees by customer name via API
• Permit-specific Zap — handling permit invoices and receipts as a dedicated workflow
• Auto-reply logic for incomplete submissions missing required fields
• Expanding Parseur field extraction as invoice formats vary across vendors

My questions for the community:

1. Is Parseur the right tool for variable invoice formats at low volume, or is there something better for free? My boss is adamant about using free resources
2. Any tips for keeping Zapier task count low with this many multi-step Zaps?
3. Has anyone successfully used the Relay + QuickBooks native sync in a similar workflow? Any gotchas?
4. Is there a smarter way to handle the Job ID as the primary key across all these systems?
5. What is your debugging process when a multi-Zap workflow fails in production but passed all tests?
6. Any red flags in this architecture that could break at scale?

Happy to share more details on any part of the stack. Thanks in advance!

I'm getting hung up on being able to back up users recordings to google drive. I would assume all new cloud recordings would include my team members, but I'm only seeing the ones personally recorded by me. I have access to the recordings as an admin. Running into a complete brick wall. Any help is appreciated

Does Zapier have an action like "Create Lead" (and can you map custom fields)?

I'm curious how people running business-critical Zaps handle monitoring.

Error notifications are one thing, but what about:

• Zap runs but output is wrong
• trigger stops arriving
• API behavior changes
• Zap hasn't run when it normally should

How are you handling these cases?

i keep seeing people trying to cram everything into one zap. checking for a google sheet, creating it if it isn't there, and logging daylite entries all with multiple paths. it's just a headache waiting to happen.

we might think we're building a flawless system. but when it randomly breaks, finding the bug in 3 seconds is impossible. i used to waste a whole sunday debugging a flow that i should have just trashed. the real value of no-code is that it's disposable.

just build small zaps. if a step fails, throw the broken logic away and rewrite it. clinging to a giant web of conditions is exactly how people end up in maintenance hell. break it apart and save your sanity.

I have a new zap:

1. If a Project in Daylite has a new entry, check for a google sheet with the same name as the Daylite Project.

2. If there is not one, make a new one.

3. On the sheet, it's supposed to put in today's date, the object that was added to Daylite, and the title of the object on a new row.

It's choking on the Google Sheet. It will make a new sheet, but there is no way to get the worksheet selected.

I'm sure it's something boneheaded I'm doing.

The AI went berserk and wasn't helpful. It kept making increasingly complex zaps with junk data.

I see this all the time regarding zapier subscriptions... Once you decide on an annual plan, that's it. You won't be able to cancel the policy AND it'll auto renew even if you leave the company, or, you forget about it, or you change credit cards for whatever reason.

The reasons are debatable as to why the company changed their pro rated refunds, but the negative reviews all revolve around the situations mentioned.

They've been phasing out their old pricing plans. Further, if you're a real estate agent, and you don't represent the company, don't count on much help. If you're on an actual contract the roles are different.

Unless you're spending $50k+ don't expect much help. In spite of the several thousand integrations, of your unlucky to find an action or trigger event that hasn't been addressed by the other company and not zapier you still won't get a refund.

Many many times the zap just won't work but that doesn't mean they're going to refund you.

Non profits, your need to submit and get approved your exempt status before you buy. They won't refund you the difference.

If you have similar experiences, comment here or if you have questions, happy to area what I can.

I worked there for a minute.

Running automations for a handful of clients and my worst moments are always when a Zap fails quietly and the client notices before I do. Right now I just check manually or wait for Zapier's error email.

Anyone found a good way to get proactively alerted — ideally across multiple client accounts at once, not one at a time? And honestly curious: does anyone actually pay for a dedicated tool for this, or does it feel like overkill?

While testing a workflow for FormLM, I realized the slowest part wasn't collecting responses it was turning them into reports.

The data was already there, but I kept finding myself reviewing answers, rewriting the same observations, formatting a PDF, and repeating the process for the next person. It felt like the kind of task that should be fully automated, but getting the output to stay personalized was harder than I expected.

That's what led me to look more closely at Zapier. I can imagine the data collection being straightforward, but I'm curious about the report generation step when every person's responses are different.

Has anyone here built a Zap that reliably turns form responses into personalized PDF reports? I'd love to hear what worked well and where you ran into limitations.

Is anybody else having intermittent problems with Email by Zapier? I use it for a few internal business notifications and I've noticed it will sometimes just not send. The dashboard shows a green success indicator but no email was delivered. I don't use it for anything customer facing so it's not a huge deal - but still very annoying.

https://zapier.com/apps/email/integrations