What does Zapier do?
Zapier is a tool that helps business people make custom integrations between their favorite tools, without needing to write any code.
Last updated: March 3, 2025
The TL;DR
Zapier is a tool that helps business people make custom integrations between their favorite tools, without needing to write any code.
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Most SaaS tools rely on some sort of integration to get the data you need in the place you need it (e.g. Salesforce data in Hubspot)
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Tools have native, built-in integrations for popular stuff, but building custom ones for what you need requires developer time
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Zapier lets you create custom integrations – to share data, trigger workflows, and more – without having to code or rely on your engineers
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Recently, Zapier has been expanding their product line with a tool to create custom forms + a no-code database
Zapier claims that almost 70% of the Fortune 1,000 use the tool in some capacity, so it’s pretty popular. But to understand Zapier, one must first understand the humble integration.
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The core Zapier product: integrations
The Zapier product is very simple – it lets you connect a tool to another tool without writing code. Imagine I want to automatically send an email to whoever cancels their subscription, asking them what I could have done better.
With Zapier, I simply choose my trigger (Stripe, in this case, who knows when people cancel) and then use their UI to hook it up to an email workflow.
With Zapier, you can do all of this without writing a single line of code. There are something in the range of 5,000 different apps on Zapier, some popular and well supported like Stripe and Gmail, and others less so. Some of these apps are built and maintained by Zapier themselves, while others are created by the developers of those apps, and the community.
What’s an integration?
Just about every SaaS tool’s website will, at some point, mention their “integrations ” – what are those?
In short, an integration is just when one system or tool works with another one. In the context of SaaS tools...