ZAP YOUR WORKFLOW INTO LIFE
With its built-in applets and Chrome extension, Zapier is a godsend for busy users
S implicity is the name of the game with Zapier. Released in 2012, the automation service has become the go-to alternative to IFTTT, being rightly lauded for its clarity, ease of use and huge selection of apps.
While Microsoft Flow can often feel unwieldy, Zapier – according to its website – wants to “empower businesses everywhere to create processes and systems that let computers do what they are best at doing and let humans do what they are best at doing”. It’s an admirable ambition that’s reflected in the speed with which its applet templates – satisfyingly called “Zaps” – can be modified: providing you’re signed up with the necessary web apps, the process can take under a minute. It’s really that simple.
As with both IFTTT and Flow, you can also create your own Zaps from scratch. To begin, sign up at and click the unmissable bright orange “Make a Zap!” button. You can then construct a recipe from a list of apps, triggers and actions, testing each stage as you go along to ensure that nothing goes awry – a useful fail-safe tool.
And the list of supported apps is vast, with over 750 services to choose from. Apart from the usual suspects such as Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, LinkedIn and so on, Zapier offers a selection of its own built-in “By Zapier” applets for, among other things, formatting, scheduling, parsing emails, coding and receiving SMS messages.
All sound too good to be true? Well, the free version of Zapier is rather limited, restricting you to just 100 tasks per month and five Zaps at a time. Moreover, Zaps in the free plan can only work in 15-minute blocks – so if an applet springs to life at 9am, you can’t run another until 9.15. Naturally, these figures increase incrementally as you work up through the paid plans, which range from $20 to a whopping $250 per month for 50,000 tasks.
We’ve sifted through the hundreds of Zap templates to pick out the ones that will become invisible digital butlers, working behind the scenes to make your life easier.