Unified APIs vs Zapier

February 7, 2023

We get a lot of questions on why Zapier isn't a direct competitor to our Unified APIs.

The simple answer is that Unified APIs are useful for developers to build their products. While Zapier, and other no-code solutions, are not for developers nor for building products. Let's take a look deeper.

A great homepage should tell you exactly what the solution is and who it is for. Zapier is a great example.

Right off, Zapier is telling the read that they "automate" (the what) for "salespeople" (the who). There are other messages, but they are all for non-developers.

The other clue that Zapier is not for developers building their products is this static messaging:

"Your work" is targeting the business processes that you need to accomplish to run your business. That could be automating your sales funnel, marketing campaigns, support systems, or data analysis pipelines.

As a developer, what you need are tools that help you build your product quicker, cheaper, more scalable and meets the product requirements defined by your product manager, CTO or CEO.

Unified.to (and Unified APIs in general) allow a developer to build integrations into 3rd-party vendors so that their products could gain access to their customer's data in these 3rd-party vendors. Instead of building (and maintaining) these integrations in-house, Unified APIs allow the developer team to focus on their core-features instead.

Unified APIs are not no-code. They could be considered low-code but that is because they are so easy to build once and forget. But in reality, they are a strong component of the developer tools that you use to build great products.