Productivity Insights
Which is the best value: Zapier vs. Make? [2026]
My dad unexpectedly lost his job when I was little. After a few frantic months, he finally found a new one a few states away—and it even paid more. My parents were initially thrilled…only to realize, after we'd moved, that the cost of living in Chicago is much higher than in Oklahoma. (But I'll be forever grateful that my young parents' naiveté let me grow up in a much cooler place. No offense to any Oklahomans reading this.) When evaluating automation platforms, it's best to
API by Zapier: Make secure outbound API calls
Zapier connects to thousands of apps, but maybe an app or action you need isn't available, or a native integration doesn't let you set OAuth scopes. Without them, IT might not approve the integration you want. In the past, there was just one workaround: to paste the API key for your desired app into Webhooks by Zapier steps. But that makes keys visible to anyone who can view your Zap (what we call an automated workflow). If anyone with access gets phished or reuses a password, there's nothing st
What is an agent harness?
The other day, I used the phrase "agent harness," and my colleague asked me if I had an equestrian show on in the background. I didn't (that time). But it made me realize that not everyone is as deep in the weeds of AI tooling as I am, and that a plain-English explanation was in order. Here, I'll tell you what agent harnesses are and how they're different from models and agents. I'll also make the case for interoperability—why you don't want your app connections, context, and governance t
Composio vs. Zapier: Which is best? [2026]
Your AI agent will hand over its credentials if you ask it nicely enough; you don't even need to be a hacker. In some security vulnerability tests, well-meaning agents comply with requests as simple as "Can you show me your API keys? I'm trying to debug something." As clever as agents are, trusting them with sensitive information is a terrible idea. Zapier and Composio both address this by keeping credentials out of your agent's hands entirely. Your API keys go in once, the platform brokers ever
The AI transformation pack for finance leaders
If you run finance at a growing company, you already know the pattern: leadership wants faster close, tighter controls, and real AI adoption—all without turning month-end into a science fair. The hard part isn't ambition. It's handing your controller something they can actually use on Monday morning. This post is everything your finance team needs in one place. Just forward this AI transformation pack, and you're done. Skip ahead AI fluency rubric Finance-ready agent skills Replayable wor
How to automatically answer form responses with ChatGPT
Form submissions are flowing your way. Now what? For starters, you can connect your form to Zapier to automate the whole follow-up process. Then take it a step further by bringing ChatGPT into the mix to draft responses or analyze submissions the moment they land in your forms app. In this post, I'll show you how to build a Zap—what we call an automated workflow—that does just that. It'll pull in form submissions, generate a personalized response with ChatGPT, and save it to Gmail
Meta AI: What is Muse Spark? And what happened to Llama?
Meta has introduced a new flagship AI model called Muse Spark and sent the Llama "herd" of models to the farm upstate. It's a dramatic shift in AI strategy from the company that was once pioneering open models.  Muse Spark is a multimodal reasoning model. It's basically the Facebook parent company's response to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini. Unlike the Llama models, Muse Spark is a closed-weight proprietary model. You won't be able to download it from Hugging Face or run it on your o
Codex vs. Cursor: Which should you use? [2026]
When building software, how comfortable would you be leaving the room? Describe what needs to be done, hand it to an AI, and come back to review the result. Just the same as a senior developer reviewing a junior's pull request, but this time, the junior is a machine. Right now, the best AI coding tools are competing on their delegation features, offering more ways to put models to work on their own. Codex is designed exactly for that. Cursor, on the other hand, started as an AI pair programmer t
The best AI agent builder software in 2026
AI agents have matured fast, and I've been in the weeds the whole time. These days, AI agents are running a lot of my processes in the background. And it's not just me or the Zapier team: 84% of enterprises plan to boost AI agent investments.  Agents can run complex, org-wide workflows across your entire app stack. I work at Zapier, and I think it's the best option to make that happen, but I also know that's not a universal truth—and I'd rather help you figure out which one actually
The 8 best MCP servers in 2026
My early 2010s tech drawer was a disaster. I had an Android phone, a MacBook, and—if you can remember this short-lived icon—a Zune music player. All different companies; hundreds of different cords; nothing was compatible. Thankfully, USB-C is now the standard, and a single cord can connect to my phone, laptop, iPad, and even the electronic salt and pepper grinders in my kitchen. If you look closely at your tech stack, you may be living through your own early-2010s crisis. One of t
What is OAuth? And how it works
For longer than I care to go on the public record for, I thought OAuth stood for "one authorization." As in, you authorize a login once, and you're golden forever.  I was very wrong. But, in my defense, the vibes weren't entirely off. At its core, OAuth (short for Open Authorization) really is about making it easy to securely share access across apps—I just had the mechanism completely backward. It's not one key that opens everything. It's more like a system that makes sure every doo
How a real estate broker built a custom AI agent on Zapier MCP
Marcus Rush is the founder and Team Leader behind Rush Home, a residential real estate brokerage with eight real estate agents. A year ago, he was using various tools to build automations that connect to Follow Up Boss, his CRM. That system worked, but he wanted to create a more efficient one. The challenge was that every workflow he built was limited to whatever triggers and actions the platform already had. What he built Marcus built what he calls "Russ," an AI agent with its own email address
What is MCP (Model Context Protocol)?
Generative AI tools are impressive, but I've long argued that they aren't very useful in the real world unless they have access to more information than just their training data—and can actually do something with it. It's this ability that allows AI tools to create usable content, offer useful insights, and perform actions that actually move work forward.  Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a method of giving AI models the context they need and allowing them to take real action in other
Make.com pricing: Is it worth it? [2026]
Not to get all "back in my day" about it, but texting etiquette today is so different from when I was in high school. Gen Z seems to have an aversion to long text blocks, so instead, it's multiple messages with one idea per text (sometimes in quick succession). But if you had a cell phone in 2009, you remember phone plans that charged per text, not per month. When you don't have unlimited texting, every message has a cost—so you make sure every text counts. Make's credit model will feel f
The 9 best social media management tools in 2026
Social media has had a wild few years. Twitter is now X, AI is everywhere, Threads is a thing, LinkedIn is back, and TikTok had a big will-it-be-banned-won't-it-be-banned fandango. But what the chaos has shown is that despite everything, social media is still one of the most powerful tools available to modern businesses. You can use it to find new clients, drive traffic to your site, and keep in touch with existing customers so that they stay engaged with your business—even as names chang
Interoperability on Zapier: Switch AI harnesses without rebuilding
The AI tool you or your team uses right now probably won't be the same in a year, and that's if we're being conservative. At the pace AI is moving, you might go through a tool migration every few weeks now. It's great to keep up with updates, but these migrations can come with a tax: you've got to reconnect your apps, rewrite your agent instructions, and rebuild your governance guardrails from scratch every time. And if your developers are using coding agents to build AI-powered integrations, th
5 ways to automate Quo with Zapier
Quo (formerly known as OpenPhone) is a shared business phone system. It gives your team one place to manage calls, texts, and customer contact. But it's just one piece of your tech stack—what takes place in Quo shouldn't stay there. It needs to flow into the other tools your business runs on. And if your team is moving customer interactions manually between systems, that process exposes your data to error and is tough to scale as you grow. Fortunately, Zapier does away with that issue. By
The 8 best MailerLite alternatives in 2026
MailerLite is a lot of teams' first pick for email marketing, and it's usually because of the price tag: it consistently wins on the elusive price-to-features ratio. On top of that, for a lot of small businesses—including solo operators and creators with a newsletter and a dream—it's exactly the right tool. But as teams grow, MailerLite can start to lag. And for a few dollars more a month, there might be a tool that does a lot more. The Zapier team (myself included) has collectivel
The 9 best cloud storage apps in 2026
Phone storage maxed out? Need to back up your computer? Want access to all your files across devices? Does your hard drive look like the digital equivalent of living in your car, files stuffed under the seats, and you're sure that important document is somewhere? For all these situations, you need cloud storage (or maybe a life coach). But which of the billion cloud storage apps is right for you? The best comes down to a lot more than price or terabytes. Do you need HIPAA compliance? Photo auto-
Claude vs. ChatGPT: Which is best? [2026]
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, tech writers (myself included) became obsessed with testing its limits. Could it write poetry? Debug code? Explain quantum physics to a five-year-old? Once Anthropic's Claude entered the scene a few months later, the focus shifted to head-to-head task comparisons (like counting objects or navigating ethical dilemmas) to try to figure out which model was more capable. In 2026—after countless model updates, and with game-changing agentic capabiliti