Item: Zapier
Rating: 10
Author: Kai Crow

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zapier across a number of departments. Mostly it's to link apps or systems that don't have pre-built integrations to each other. For some cases, we also use Zapier to build workflows that can't be achieved in other apps, using Zapier utilities like storage, formatter and equations to update data or trigger other processes and then send back to the same application.
In general, this helps us scale faster because we don't have to wait for lengthy dev builds using APIs to achieve a similar result.

Pros and Cons

Nicely thought out, simple interface - quick to learn and easy to understand.
Zapier utilities are brilliant - allow you to make much more complex workflows.
Lots of apps and services that Zapier works with.

Would be nice to be able to create multiple branches within one zap, rather than just using a straight yes/no continue logic filter.
Would be nice to be able to filter zaps at the trigger stage - so where we filter out all but one of the triggering events, we wouldn't have all the rest count against account limits.

Return on Investment

Big savings in helping us build more efficient processes.
Lets other teams in the business work more autonomously in crafting completed solutions to help with their day-to-day work without having to pull time away from our dev team.
Helps us build processes that make data handling more effective - reducing duplicates and mistakes.

Alternatives Considered

IFTTT and PieSync

Better range of integrations. Easier workflow building.
More B2B focus than IFTTT and faster time from trigger to action.
The Zapier utilities like formatter and data storage also have become a big differentiator for us - they've evolved since we started using but have become highly valuable.

Other Software Used

Marketo, Slack, ReadyTalk

Likelihood to Recommend

We've used it for a range of applications from simple syncing of activities, leads or data between two systems to building more advanced processes, like round robin distributions. One frequent use is for triggering Slack notifications from different systems that don't already have integrations with Slack, or who's integrations don't do exactly what we want.
Less appropriate cases, are where the only available trigger events fire off frequently, eg a salesforce activity, where we might have tens of thousands per day - you can easily filter the zap at the second step, but it quickly chew through usage limits.

A highly valuable business tool for us

Overall Satisfaction with Zapier