When folks visit your website, click through a social media ad, or email your sales team for a demo, it's usually because they have a problem that needs solving—and they're hoping your product does the trick. 

But you don't want those prospects to leave your site without their contact details. Capturing that key data means you can follow up, answer their questions, and turn them into paying customers. The question is: how?

Enter: Zapier Chatbots. With it, you can build your own AI-powered chatbot for your website that can answer questions on your behalf, collect contact information, and even qualify leads before they reach your sales team. 

Jump ahead

• Set up your chatbot template

• Give your chatbot role-specific instructions

• Add product knowledge to your chatbot

• Collect contact details through chat

• Set up a schedule button for meetings

• Embed your chatbot on your site

Set up your chatbot template

To start building your lead-generation chatbot, open the template below and click Use template.

This will open up your chatbot in the backend, where you can finish setting it up.

You'll see that the panel on the left is where you can set up your chatbot instructions. The panel on the right is what your bot will look like once it's ready.

Give your chatbot role-specific instructions

First you'll want to give your chatbot instructions. Also known as a "directive," it's the prompt you give ChatGPT so it knows exactly how to respond to any leads that interact with it. It's important to remember that the more detailed and clear your instructions are, the better the chatbot will respond. 

Because you're using our chatbot template, you'll see that Zapier has included placeholder instructions. Some of these are already filled in for you, but others need to be filled in and personalized by you. These include things like the chatbot's objective (you can add information about your own product), context (include your product's history or background), and audience (add your ideal customer profile). 

To set up your own instructions, follow these steps: 

• Click the Instructions tab in the top-left corner of your screen.

• Under the Directive field, click the Edit directive button. This will expand the box so you can tweak your instructions.

• Once you've finished customizing your directive, click Done to exit the pop-out window, and remember to click Save changes.

The Instructions tab also allows you to adjust the following aspects: 

• Under Greeting, click Static (for the chatbot's greeting to stay the same) or Generated (AI will create a new message every time it's opened).

• Next, add any text that will show in the message box for leads to ask questions.

• Next, set up your OpenAI authentication and follow the instructions for connecting your account. You can select GPT-3.5, or GPT-4 or GPT-4o if you have access.

• Click Save changes once you're done.

Watch the video below to get more details on authenticating your OpenAI account:

Add product knowledge to your chatbot

To talk about your company's products with any degree of knowledge, your chatbot needs to draw that information from somewhere. (And the instructions alone won't cut it.)

This is where the knowledge source comes in. You can upload up to 20 PDFs and other static files (up to 2MB), use information stored in a Zapier Table, or even add website URLs for the chatbot to scrape information from. That means you can upload files like product specifications, FAQs, user manuals, marketing materials, sales data, and customer feedback surveys to ensure your chatbot has a comprehensive understanding of your products and services. 

To add your knowledge sources, follow these steps:

• Click the Knowledge tab in the top-left panel of your screen.

• Select Crawl Webpage to add a URL, Upload File for a static file, or Connect Table to use data stored in a table.

• Once you've added your knowledge sources, they'll save automatically.

Collect contact details through chat

It's one thing to have a chatbot that can assist your leads at scale—that's already a win for your team. But capturing their contact information at the same time is even more valuable.

Not only does it give your chatbot a personalized touch (as it will address each lead by their name), but it's an easy way to collect that info and share with your sales team. That includes the prospect's name, email address, phone number, and company name. 

You can choose at what point in the conversation your chatbot requests that information, too. Options include at the beginning, after a few messages have been exchanged, or when certain keywords are used. 

Wondering where those contact details are saved? Zapier will automatically create a new table for you, including the info fields you choose to collect. (You can also create Zaps with your new table to automate lead nurture.)  

To collect leads, follow these steps:

• Click the Logic tab in the top-left panel of your screen.

• Select Collect leads.

• Choose when to collect your leads. You can select at the beginning of the conversation, after a few messages, or when certain keywords are used. (You'll need to add which keywords to prompt the chatbot if you select this option.)

• Next, select which fields you want to include in your chatbot, like name, email, phone, or company. (You can also add new fields if you want to collect other information by clicking Add field.)

• Click Create logic to save your preferences.

Add a schedule button for meetings

Want your prospects to be able to book a call with your sales team while chatting to your bot? You can add a scheduling button directly to your chatbot that lets them check your availability and book calls with you. (You just have to provide a link to your scheduling tool's calendar.)

To add a schedule button, follow these steps:

• Click the Logic tab in the top-left panel of your screen. 

• Select Link button from the list of options. 

• Choose when to show the link to your user in the conversation. (We recommend selecting when certain keywords are used).  

• Add your keywords (like "meeting," "call" or "schedule call").

• Finally, add the text which will display in the link button, the icon, and the URL. 

• Once you've finished customizing these fields, click Create button.

Embed your chatbot on your site

Now that you've built your chatbot, you'll want to put it somewhere. The most logical place will be your website, as that's where your leads will land looking for more information. 

You can either embed your chatbot directly into a web page or as a pop up, which lets you overlay the chatbot and fix it to the bottom-right of a webpage.

Once folks start using your chatbot, you can see their full conversation history in your Zapier account. That way, you can refer back to conversations to analyze data, spot trends, or qualify promising leads. 

To embed your chatbot, follow these steps:

• Click Embed in the top-right hand of your screen.

• Select Standard to embed the chatbot as part of a page or Pop up to overlay and fix the chatbot to the bottom right of a page. 

• If you select Standard, you can copy the code snippet type (Script or iframe). If you select Pop ups, they can only be used with Script.

• Click </> Copy embed to copy the code to your clipboard, then follow your own site's instructions to embed the snippet.

Start automating your lead collection with chatbots

With Zapier, you can create your own custom chatbot in a matter of minutes, helping you streamline the way you collect—and follow up with—leads. 

Whether you need to support leads at scale with their questions or qualify leads faster, Zapier Chatbots can do the heavy lifting. Start experimenting today. 

This article was originally published in May 2024 and was most recently updated in January 2025.

At Zapier, we believe that AI is the fastest and easiest way to solve any automation challenge. Whether you need to turn vague ideas into automated systems or build chatbots that support customers 24/7, AI can give you automation superpowers to scale your business. 

And Zapier's AI products, from Chatbots to Agents and beyond, can help you bring your most innovative ideas to life so you and your team can get more strategic work done.  

But if you're wondering which AI tool is right for you—or when you should be using them—fear not. We've broken down your options below.

Jump ahead

• I need to pull AI into my workflows

• I need AI to help me automate workflows

Pull AI into your workflows 

With Zapier, you can choose how AI operates for you, interacts with your data, and helps you drive your business forward. 

You might want to respond to customers at scale, for example. (Hello: Chatbots.) Or perhaps you want to create agents with access to your data that can take internal tasks off your plate. Or maybe you want smarter Zaps that solve unique business problems (over and over) with AI and automation. 

Whatever your need, these are the AI products that can have a real business impact: 

Build chatbots that interact with customers

Zapier Chatbots lets you create AI-powered chatbots in a matter of minutes that better serve your customers and leads. 

Chatbots can draw from your live knowledge sources to answer questions, schedule calls, and capture contact information from your leads with the power of automation—freeing up your sales and support teams to do the work that matters most. (Though there are plenty of other use cases, too.)

Train your chatbots on web pages like your website, tables, or help center, and set a schedule to sync any online updates. Chatbots are the ideal option if you want to create a tailored AI experience for an external-facing audience. 

Think of it this way: If you need a stand-in for support and sales chats, Zapier Chatbots is your best bet as they can work 24/7 behind the scenes.

Build AI-powered agents to help you perform tasks with Zapier Agents

Zapier Agents lets you train AI teammates to work independently across Zapier's 7,000+ apps. They can access your business data, perform actions across your entire tech stack, and handle tasks on demand or independently once you've shown them the ropes. 

You can chat with these digital teammates like you would with a coworker in Slack, ask them questions about your company knowledge, and even take them anywhere you go in your browser so you can get more done.

Note: While Chatbots support external audiences and are ideal for after-hours customer support or lead capture on your website, Zapier Agents is more suited for teams looking to streamline their internal processes. That includes analyzing data, accessing the web for external info, and learning about leads. 

Build Zaps that integrate with AI apps 

You can make any Zap smarter by connecting AI tools (like Fathom) and large language models (like ChatGPT) to the apps you use every day. 

Zapier has the largest AI ecosystem on the market (300+ AI apps), allowing you to build customized workflows that power your day-to-day work and move your business forward. 

Imagine adding a ChatGPT step to your Zaps, for example. Whenever a content brief gets added to your project management tool, the AI step can create an outline for you, and the Zap will automatically add that to a Google Doc. Or you can generate meeting summaries with Fathom and send them to your team in Slack.

Alternatively, you can use our AI by Zapier integration to pull the power of GPT-4o mini into your Zaps (without a ChatGPT API key) to carry out similar tasks. The difference? This integration will write a detailed prompt for you—based on what you want your automation to do.

Essentially, when your AI tools and the rest of your tech stack work together, you can build better processes that free up your team to focus on more complex problems that require a human touch. 

Note: While both Zaps that use AI apps and Zapier Agents are great ways to automate tasks, you should use Agents when you need to chat directly with AI or if you need to connect to a live data source. You should use Zaps when you need to automate a workflow that works the same way every time.

Use AI to help you automate workflows

So now you know which tools can help you pull AI into your work processes. But what about the AI tools within Zapier that can help you bring your automation ideas to life? Here are two AI-powered tools that can help you build workflows faster and easier—even if you have zero automation experience. 

Diagram processes from start to finish with Canvas

Zapier Canvas is a diagramming tool that uses AI to help you visualize, plan, and automate business-critical processes from start to finish. 

If you and your team have a process in mind, you can map it out with a flowchart and ask Canvas for suggestions on optimizing each step—even those that require human interaction. You can even use AI (through Zapier Copilot) to help you map out an idea you have from scratch by just describing the process you want. 

Think of Canvas as a bird's eye view of how your workflows, apps, data, and teammates all fit under one roof. That includes any Zaps, tables, interfaces, and chatbots you create. 

Canvas is for you if you want to gain clarity over key processes, identify bottlenecks, and keep your team aligned on the way your business operates.

Automate simple workflows with Copilot

Copilot is an AI-powered assistant that helps you build individual Zaps—inside the Zap editor. Like within Canvas, Copilot can suggest the right apps for the job, but it will also outline the trigger (the event that starts your Zap) and any subsequent actions (the events your Zap will perform). 

Copilot will guide you through each step of building a Zap, like testing each step, connecting your accounts, and mapping the data fields—no automation experience required from you. 

Copilot's the right tool for you if you need a shortcut to building Zaps fast without getting stuck—and can even help you build custom actions if you need more flexibility over a workflow. 

Note: Both Copilot and Canvas are AI assistants that work hand-in-hand to help you build automations faster. While you can use Copilot inside Canvas to visualize entire processes, Copilot in the Zap editor helps you build individual Zaps within that process.

Scale your impact with AI and automation

Now that you've seen what our tools can do, it's your turn. 

Whether you need to personalize emails, automate support, and more, you can choose one (or all) of our AI products to start scaling. See what AI can do for you today. 

This article was originally published in May 2024 and was most recently updated in January 2025.

Between juggling meetings, analyzing business data, chasing leads, and hitting deadlines 24/7, it's easy for your daily schedule to get overwhelmed—even if you are already using automation to help you scale.

That's exactly where Zapier Agents comes in. You can think of Agents as your new coworkers who work independently across your entire tech stack. These AI-powered assistants can access your business data, work in all your favorite apps, and handle tasks whether you're there or not. 

Table of contents

• What is Agents?

• Why we love it

• What you can do with Agents

• How to get started with Agents

What is Zapier Agents?

Zapier Agents is where you can teach AI-powered agents to work and automate tasks across Zapier's ecosystem of 7,000+ apps. Remember how exciting it was to get a new teammate who could take work off your plate? That's exactly what Zapier Agents brings to your team—but these teammates never sleep, don't need vacation days, and can work across all your apps seamlessly. 

Each AI agent can help you with specific tasks, like processing leads, managing support tickets, or drafting responses to customers. 

You can trigger those tasks whenever something happens in other apps.

For example, say you receive a new lead through Facebook Lead Ads. That's the trigger. In your instructions, you can tell the assistant to summarize that lead data, then send an email to your sales team via Gmail. 

You can set up that behavior to repeat anytime you receive a new lead in Facebook Lead Ads (or even on demand), meaning you're getting things done even when you're not around. You could even provide additional control by adding more details to your behavior instructions—like asking the agent to always check the lead's LinkedIn profile for additional information for your sales team. 

Zapier Agents gives you a simple chat interface, where you type out your queries and interact with your assistants, and an activity screen, which lists out all the tasks they have completed.

Key features include:

• Flexible operation modes: You can trigger behaviors on command or on a set schedule, or let it work automatically in the background after training. 

• Customizable behaviors: Tell your agent what to do when it's triggered, how to process or summarize data, and which actions or data sources it should use. 

• Access to 7,000+ apps: Let your agent work across your entire tech stack by giving it access to specific triggers (events that initiate an assistant's behavior) and actions (tasks it can carry out). 

• Live data sources: You can give your assistant access to live data (like information stored in HubSpot, Notion, or Asana) so it can find, analyze, and summarize up-to-date info when you ask for it.

• An intuitive chat interface: Working with Agents feels just like chatting with a colleague on Slack. Need something done? Just ask. Want to set up a regular task? Show your agent once, and it'll handle it from there. 

• Web browsing: Agents can search the web for you to find key information. With it, you can conduct market research, gather news articles about specific topics, or find online information about prospective clients.

• Zapier Agents Chrome Extension: Bring your assistants anywhere with you on the internet so you can take action in the apps you use without leaving the browser tab you're viewing.

All in all, Agents gives you a way to combine the best of AI chat, automation, and advanced data analysis in one place. 

Why we love it

At Zapier, we're convinced that AI automation is the future of work for everyone—from automation power users to non-technical folk. 

Yet most AI tools fall short when it comes to automation, as they need constant instruction to work and struggle to integrate with other apps. 

Agents aims to bridge that gap, so that everyone can automate and scale faster.

What you can do with Agents

When it comes to Zapier Agents, there are endless possibilities for AI automation. Most use cases will depend on what you need help achieving in your day-to-day, but here are a few quick examples:

Lead enrichment

Teach your AI agents to get background on new leads and keep you up to date. Ask them to enrich new lead data from LinkedIn, add it to your CRM, and draft personalized outreach to leads most likely to convert. 

• Behavior: Add triggers and actions for database apps (like Google Sheets), CRM tools (like HubSpot), or email apps (like Gmail). 

• Data source: Upload lead storage data from Tables, Notion, Google Sheets, or Airtable. 

• Web browsing: Add more context to lead records in your CRM by searching online for company information.

Customer support

Queue up messages for customer support, provide your agents with common FAQs and route tickets to the right teams to resolve issues faster. 

• Behavior: Add triggers and actions for support apps (like Zendesk), project tools (like Jira), or email apps (like Outlook). 

• Data source: Upload your help documentation as a reference from Google Sheets, Zapier Tables, Notion, Google Docs, or Airtable. 

Email management

Tame your inbox with agents that draft replies, create tasks for urgent requests, and archive any spam or marketing emails. 

• Behavior: Add triggers and actions for email apps (like Gmail) and project management apps (like Trello). 

• Instant actions: Add direct actions (like Create Draft or Reply to Email) in apps like Gmail so you can send messages the moment your assistant drafts them.

Calendars and meetings

Create meeting agendas, update meeting notes based on criteria, and prioritize tasks based on your notes.

• Behavior: Add triggers and actions for calendar apps (like Google Calendar), video conferencing tools (like Zoom), and file storage apps (like Google Docs). 

• Data source: Upload your strategy docs as a reference for prioritizing tasks from Google Sheets, Zapier Tables, Notion, Google Docs, or Airtable.

Customer queries

Get answers about customer sentiment or order volume, sort customers by value, and send emails based on customer queries.

• Behavior: Add triggers and actions for forms apps (like Typeform), email apps (like Gmail), and eCommerce tools (like Shopify). 

• Data source: Upload order tracking files from Zapier Tables, Google Sheets, Notion, Google Docs, or Airtable so your assistant can answer questions correctly. 

Project management

Nudge tasks towards a resolution, remind teams about deadlines via email, track task progress, and celebrate wins. 

• Behavior: Add triggers and actions for task management apps (like Asana), email tools (like Gmail), or team communication apps (like Slack). 

• Data source: Upload project brief files from Google Sheets, Zapier Tables, Notion, Google Docs, or Airtable. 

Content generation

Create up-to-date content for your blog and email newsletters with your assistant by pulling research from the web and adding it to a database. 

• Web browsing: Carry out online searches for the most recent articles on a specific topic.

• Instant actions: Add Zapier Tables as your action app so you can create a record with that online research in a table to refer back to later.

• Zapier Agents Chrome Extension: Summarize, translate, and explain page content directly in your browser without switching apps.

Expense tracking

Stay up to date via conversations with your assistant on tracking expenses, checking invoices, and logging sales.

• Behavior: Add triggers and actions for accounting apps (like QuickBooks), payment processing apps (like Stripe), or spreadsheet apps (like Google Sheets). 

• Data source: Upload your order logs as a reference from Google Sheets, Zapier Tables, Notion, Google Docs, or Airtable.

How to get started with Agents

Want to see it in action?

• Head over to agents.zapier.com and sign up.

• If you haven't created an agent yet, click Create my first agent.

• If you already have agents, hover over the + icon on the left sidebar and click + New agent.

• A window will appear where you can either set up an agent from scratch or select one of the pre-made templates in the left-hand panel:

• To start from scratch, click Start from scratch. The settings panel will appear where you can give your agent a name and a description.

• Chat with your agent using the message field at the bottom of the chat screen. It can give you an overview of its capabilities and help you set up the kind of agent you want.

• To add or edit the agent's behavior, click the Run behavior tab and + Create behavior. A dialog box will open.

• First up, you can click the three dot icon next to the Trigger field to trigger actions on demand, on a set schedule, or from another app.

• In the Instructions field, describe what you want the agent to do. (You can also use a slash (/) to initiate a command to trigger an action or to find information from a data source.)

• To give your agent a data source, click the Find data tab then + Add data source in your Instructions field.

• In the dialog box, select the app for the data source from the available options.

• Select an existing connection for the app.

• Next, select a document or other type of file to use as the data source.

• Click Add data source. After that, it will be saved inside your agent.

• Next up, click the Take action tab to give your agent an action. You can add multiple actions.

• In the dialog box, search for and select the app for the instant action from the available options.

• Select an existing connection for the app.

• Add the available action(s) you require by clicking on them. They'll then appear in your Instructions field.

Note: You can also add data sources and actions directly from your agent's chat panel, too.

• Once you've tested your behavior in the right-hand panel, click Save. You can now start using your agent in the chat panel.

Need more help? Read our Zapier Agents quickstart guide for step-by-step instructions on creating your first agent.

Teach agents to work on their own with Zapier Agents

With Zapier Agents, we're bringing you the future of work today—where AI teammates handle routine tasks across your entire tech stack while you tackle the strategic work that grows your business.

Ready to try it out yourself? Give it a go and start powering your business today. 

This article was originally published in March 2024. It was most recently updated in January 2025.

Videos are a big part of the modern internet, whether they're short viral clips on TikTok, stories on Instagram, or in-depth video essays on YouTube. While social video platforms like these are great for content creators and influencers, businesses looking to share a sales demo or how-to tutorial can have different needs. Still, the benefits of video are much the same: it can humanize you and your product, engage your customers, and build brand loyalty.

Of course, once you've shot and edited your videos, you'll need some way to display them. If you've got a team of developers, the coding chops, or use a popular website builder, you can look at hosting them directly on your own website (and in that case, an open source player like MediaElement.js or Video.js will be the easiest way for you to control how videos appear and play). Otherwise, a dedicated video hosting service can make things a lot easier by handling all the optimizing and resizing necessary to get videos playing properly on smartphones, tablets, and computers. You can then embed the videos directly on your site, or share them to social media and other online platforms.

Modern video hosting platforms have evolved from their beginnings as a simple piece of internet real estate for your videos. Now, they help you customize the look and feel of your video player, ensure your videos play smoothly across all devices and browsers, and provide marketing options from within your videos.

I tested dozens of video hosting sites, and these are the five I recommend.

The best video hosting platforms for business

• YouTube for its existing viewership

• Vimeo for easy video hosting for professionals

• Wistia for video marketing

• Spotlightr for quizzing your audience

• Uscreen for video monetization

What makes the best video hosting service?

I've been producing, editing, and sharing videos for more than a decade as part of my career as a tech writer. For me, the most important part of any video workflow—including hosting—is that it's user-friendly and consistent. Overly complex tools aren't necessary for most situations.

In addition to that aspect, the best online video hosting services offer a few make-or-break features that are essential for businesses:

• Basic analytics tools to measure how many people see your videos, and whether or not they're your target customers

• SEO tools to make your videos search-engine friendly

• The ability to embed your videos on external websites—especially your own

• A focus on business needs, not just the needs of independent content creators

While those are the dealbreakers, I also considered other features, such as the option to customize your video player or add closed captioning, a big plus. They weren't necessary for inclusion, but at the end of the day, I was looking for a business video platform that offered the kind of complete package a business needs. Modern platforms that stay up-to-date with the latest developments are always going to be preferable to older platforms that don't adapt. 

Obviously, AI has been one of the biggest trends over the past couple of years, and it has started to appear on some video hosting platforms. Sometimes, existing features like optimization are rebranded as AI, but you can also find platforms that use AI to automatically generate closed captions, video descriptions, and more. Where these features added to the overall experience of using an app, I've noted them, but they didn't really have a massive impact on the list. A well-thought-out app that enables you to host your business videos was what I was looking for—AI features or not.

Because video is so popular online, I had to draw a couple of hard lines. I haven't included video platforms that primarily support live streaming or social media apps, such as TikTok (if it's still legal when you read this), Facebook, Instagram, X, or Snapchat, on this list. Yes, these apps allow you to upload and host videos, but that's an add-on feature and not the core function of the app. That's not to say you shouldn't upload your marketing videos to these sites—just that they don't have the same flexibility as other options.  

I also excluded software like Brightcove that offers more robust, advanced video capabilities (like video communications, digital content management, and virtual events) because those apps can be overwhelming if you're just looking to host and share a video. Similarly, apps like Dailymotion—that are primarily for content publishers—also didn't make the cut.

Finally, I haven't included any bad apps. As ridiculous as that sounds, some of the apps I tested were just unpleasant to use, so even if they technically had all the features I was looking for, I didn't include them. 

I tested each app by uploading and customizing a video to get a feel for the general user experience, as well as checking out any headline features. After spending time with each app, I also researched it to make sure it had a good track record hosting videos—this isn't the kind of service you want to suddenly stop working.

The best video hosting sites at a glance

Best video platform for free video hosting and an existing viewership

YouTube (Web, Android, iOS)

YouTube pros:

• Everyone is already familiar with YouTube

• Free and fast to get started with

YouTube cons:

• Not the most customizable or professional-looking option

YouTube allows you to upload videos for free, and creators can even earn money for their content through ads, channel memberships, merch shelf, Super Chat, Super Thanks, Super Stickers, and YouTube Premium views. Thanks to its popularity and built-in audience—it has well over 120 million active users per day—YouTube is often the default choice for business owners to host their videos. And it helps that its videos are often given prime spots in Google search results.

YouTube Studio is where you'll manage all your channel and video details. Log in with your Google account and launch a channel under your personal name or business name. Once you've customized your channel, you can start uploading videos. You can automatically add subtitles, an end screen to promote related content, or cards to highlight content during your video. 

If you're more concerned with getting your videos in front of the right people than just embedding them on your website, YouTube is a great option. You have a built-in audience of millions of people already interested in video content. So if you optimize your videos for search or encourage fans to get notifications when you add a new video to your channel, you may be able to build a native audience. Of course, you still have the option to add the videos to your website with a simple embed code—but every YouTube video embedded on an external website looks like a YouTube video.

Also, if you intend to monetize your YouTube videos using ads, you won't have control over exactly what companies get associated with your brand. Unless you take particular steps to block them, for example, a competitor could advertise on your video. You're also at the mercy of Google's content moderation policies and will have no access to customer support. For these reasons, while YouTube can be a great place to host certain videos you want an audience to discover—and even be a reasonable default—it may not be the right choice for all your video needs. Or, at least, not the exclusive choice. Many major brands share their videos on their social media, YouTube, and their own websites using different tools, depending on what audience they're trying to reach and what purpose the videos serve. So, even if you also use one of the other services on this list, don't write off YouTube as an additional option. 

YouTube also integrates with Zapier, helping you automate marketing and promotional activities for your videos across thousands of apps. Discover some popular ways to automate YouTube, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

YouTube pricing: Free for uploading and hosting videos.

Best easy video hosting service for professionals

Vimeo (Web, Android, iOS)

Vimeo pros:

• More business-focused than YouTube

• Great AI and collaboration features

Vimeo cons:

• No real built-in audience

Vimeo began as a video-sharing platform, similar to YouTube. And while the platform still allows users to post videos and follow their favorite creators, it also has business-focused features like team collaboration, analytics and marketing features, a (lightly) customizable embedded video player, and even an OTT platform that you can optionally use to monetize your content with subscriptions or sales.

Vimeo is also leaning hard into AI. It can automatically generate video descriptions and chapters, automatically cut any ums and uhs out of the video, or translate your video to another language. There are also AI-powered tools you can use to create a script that you can then read from a built-in teleprompter while recording a video, and you can chop and change your video transcript and have the results mimicked in the actual video. 

Is Vimeo the right video hosting for your business? Maybe. Its collaboration and AI features certainly make it useful for creating and editing videos, and its customizable player means you can embed its videos on your website without a Vimeo logo, or even rely on the OTT options to monetize your videos. You can also use it to collect leads by collecting email addresses or adding interactive features like links to your videos.

The lack of ads for videos uploaded by paid subscribers and a few other features certainly make it more business-friendly by default than YouTube—though without the built-in audience. If you want a flexible, easy option that's a bit more professional than Google's platform, it's definitely worth a look.

You can automate your processes with Vimeo as well, using Zapier's Vimeo integration to automatically take actions in other apps whenever you upload a video to Vimeo. Discover popular ways to automate Vimeo, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Vimeo pricing: Free for basic Vimeo features; $20/user/month for the Starter plan that includes 100GB of video storage, automatic closed captions, player customization, and more. Most AI features require theStandard plan from $41/user/month or Advanced plan from $108/user/month.

Best video hosting service for video marketing

Wistia (Web)

Wistia pros:

• Great lead capture and other marketing features

• Easy to set up and use

Wistia cons:

• Best features only available on paid plans

Wistia is packed with marketing features that help businesses track a video's progress, collect leads, and get the best ROI on their content.

One of its flagship features is Wistia's Turnstile email collector, which helps you generate leads by getting people to enter their email address before they can play your video. You can add the form at any point in your video—so you can get them engaged before hitting them with the marketing pitch—and customize the text to suit your needs. Once a viewer enters their information, they're added to your email list using Wistia's email marketing integrations, including platforms such as Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact.

If you don't want to add a Turnstile to your videos, Wistia still offers powerful marketing features. You can A/B Test different videos. You can use annotation links to guide viewers to a website of your choice (these links appear on an upper corner of your video, for as long as you like, without disrupting a viewer's experience). You can also add a call-to-action or link to another video or web page at the end of a video. And tying it all together is the Analytics page that lets you gauge the performance of each of your videos at a glance: how long your viewers stick around for, and if they fill in your form or click your link, is tracked here.

Wistia also automatically generates a transcript for your videos, and from that, you can create closed captions for more accessible videos, or automatically generate social media posts. You can also upload your own audio descriptions, but Wistia can't automate them.

It's important to note that Wistia's marketing features are only available when you embed them in a webpage, marketing email, or the like. If you export your videos to social media, you'll lose any customizations, Turnstiles, or other marketing features.

Wistia's Zapier integration allows you to trigger actions in thousands of other apps whenever new videos are uploaded or users take certain actions on your videos. Or you can automatically create an embed code and send it to the app of your choice whenever you upload a new video. Here are a few examples for inspiration.

Wistia pricing: Free for 10 videos and standard features, such as a fully customizable player and basic video analytics; from $24/month for the Plus plan that includes lead generation tools, 20 videos, and no Wistia branding.

Best video hosting platform for quizzing your audience

Spotlightr (Web)

Spotlightr pros:

• Quiz feature is very clever and can be used to capture leads

• In-depth analytics

Spotlightr cons:

• Requires more engagement from viewers to participate in a quiz or follow a link

While Spotlightr (formerly vooPlayer) is now marketing itself as a video hosting solution for online courses, it's also a great all round video hosting option. If you're looking for a deep dive into your videos' performance, including who views them, where, and for how long, Spotlightr gives you all the data you need. The platform offers numerous reports based on viewer location, engagement, play rate, conversion, and completion.

One of the most interesting features is Spotlightr's quizzes, which let you overlay and stop videos with interactive questions. If you create courses, you can use them to quiz your students, but you can also use them as an opportunity to collect marketing information. You can also create custom overlays that link to other videos, offer coupons, or otherwise engage your audience. Similarly, at the end of a video, you can automatically send viewers to a landing page or another video, or show an end card with anything you want.

If you want to do a bit more with your videos than just demonstrate your products, Spotlightr is a great option, though obviously, convincing someone to give you their email address or use a coupon can be a larger challenge than getting them to play a video on YouTube. But if they do, Spotlightr integrates with Zapier, so you can also do things like send captured leads to a spreadsheet, CRM, or email marketing tool.

Spotlightr price: From $15/month for the Light plan that includes 25 videos, a brandable player, and hybrid hosting. Quizzes are available on the Premium plan at $65/month.

Best video hosting site for subscription videos

Uscreen (Web)

Uscreen pros:

• Create your own video-on-demand subscription service

• One of the best ways to monetize your videos online

Uscreen cons:

• Very expensive and not the most suitable tool for general video hosting

Uscreen is a little different from the other apps on this list. Instead of allowing you to host videos somewhere, so you can embed them on your website or share them on social media, it enables you to monetize your video content by selling it or even creating a Netflix-like premium subscription service. While not the best option for general video hosting, it's perfect if you have a small business—like a yoga studio or gym, or some kind of craft shop—and want to monetize instructional videos. It's kind of like Shopify, but specifically designed for video content.

This means getting set up with Uscreen takes a bit of time. Not only do you have to upload your videos, but you need to create a website (from one of the included themes), configure your subscription or payment plan, link it to a payment processor like Stripe, and do lots more before launch. It's a lot, but the interface is easy to use, there are great tutorials, and you get a one-to-one onboarding call as part of any plan. 

Perhaps the most interesting feature is that you can create your own iOS, Android, and TV apps using Uscreen—though only on the $499/month App Essentials plan. It's not a feature that most businesses are likely to need, but if your cooking courses or whatever subscription you're selling takes off, the option is there.

Uscreen also integrates with Zapier, so you can automatically add new Uscreen customers to your marketing automation software or add new eCommerce customers to Uscreen, among endless other options.

Uscreen pricing: From $199/month plus $1.99/subscriber/month for the Growth plan, which includes a customizable website and 100 hours of video storage.

Other ways to host your business videos

While the best business video hosting services definitely have their place, there are alternative options out there if you don't need the extra features they bring. Here are some other options to consider:

• If you use a site builder like Squarespace or Wix, or even a blogging platform like WordPress or Ghost, you can just upload videos directly to it. 

• While I wouldn't recommend you exclusively share videos to TikTok, Facebook, or X, it's still worth reposting most of your content there—if only to reach a wider audience. 

• If you have a team of developers (or can code yourself), the big cloud hosting platforms like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all offer video hosting. 

• There are also a handful of other apps, like Muse.ai, Streamable, and Dacast, that almost made this list but fell short for a number of smaller reasons that might still suit your business needs.

• And if you really want to go rogue or just need to share things internally, you can host videos in Google Drive, Dropbox, or even on something like Notion.

What are the best video hosting platforms for business?

If you're looking to earn money from your videos, opt for a video hosting service that supports ads or lets you set up a subscription plan. If promoting your business is your main goal, you might look for a service with robust marketing and analytics tools. The most important thing is that you're getting your videos in front of the people you want to see them.

This article was originally published in March 2019 by Farheen Gani and has also had contributions from Emily Esposito. The most recent update was in January 2025.

People love Mailchimp. And for good reason: it's one of the best email marketing platforms out there. So much so, in fact, that it's on five of Zapier's best apps lists:

• Best email newsletter software

• Best email drip campaign software

• Best transactional email services

• Best free email marketing services

• Best marketing automation software

Of course, that doesn't mean it's the exact right tool for everyone, and you might be looking for Mailchimp alternatives.

Depending on what you're planning to use Mailchimp for—newsletters, drip campaigns, transactional emails, or just as a free email marketing service—you can take a look at those lists for dozens of paid and free alternatives for Mailchimp. But we've also done some extensive testing for head-to-head comparisons of Mailchimp and other email marketing software. Here, we'll share that list of Mailchimp alternatives with you to help you decide which one is best for your business.

The best Mailchimp alternatives

• ActiveCampaign for advanced marketing automation

• Kit for creators

• Constant Contact for more email templates

• HubSpot for an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service platform

• Klaviyo for eCommerce email marketing

• SendGrid for high-volume transactional emails

• Flodesk for a simple pricing structure for large lists

• Benchmark for email newsletters

• Brevo for a free Mailchimp alternative for marketing automation

• MailerLite for a free Mailchimp alternative for email marketing

What makes the best Mailchimp alternative?

Unless you're looking for a particular feature, it can be hard to find a tool that beats Mailchimp—especially for beginners and small businesses. It's easy to use, relatively affordable, and has enough advanced features to help you build an audience. It also has a cartoon chimpanzee as its mascot, and who doesn't love that? 

To be a legitimate alternative to Mailchimp, an email marketing platform needs to have all the core features Mailchimp offers—like email templates, automated customer journeys, and audience segmentation. On top of that, it should offer something Mailchimp doesn't—such as:

• Better pricing

• More robust analytics

• More advanced marketing automation tools

• Better deliverability

• A niche use case (like creators or eCommerce brands)

After all, if you're considering a switch from Mailchimp, the new app needs to be worth your while. Now—on to the apps.

The best Mailchimp alternatives at a glance

A Mailchimp alternative for more robust features and advanced marketing automation

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign pros: 

• Extremely customizable 

• Advanced automation and testing for email, SMS, and website

ActiveCampaign cons: 

• No free plan available

• Steep learning curve (but lots of advanced features) 

ActiveCampaign has been on the block almost as long as Mailchimp (it's only two years younger), and it has some pretty advanced features. For example, its lead scoring options are extensive and give you much more control over personalization and segmentation than you get with Mailchimp.

But it's the marketing automation features in ActiveCampaign that really set it apart. You can do things like include SMS blocks and website messages as steps within your automated campaigns, which isn't possible in Mailchimp. ActiveCampaign's automation map is also nifty: it allows you to view multiple automated journeys on one map to see how they work together, giving you a much more holistic view of your campaigns.

Mailchimp offers a free plan and feels a lot simpler than ActiveCampaign, but with that simplicity, there are tradeoffs. So if you're ready to graduate from Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign is a solid next step.

ActiveCampaign also offers a number of native integrations. But you can unlock thousands more when you connect ActiveCampaign with Zapier. From there, you can automate your most repetitive ActiveCampaign tasks. Learn more about how to automate ActiveCampaign, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

ActiveCampaign pricing: Starts at $15/month (billed annually) for Starter, which includes email and marketing automation for up to 1,000 contacts. 

Read more: ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp

A Mailchimp alternative for creators

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Kit pros: 

• Flexible tagging allows for easy search and segmentation

• Intuitive email editor that works like a web builder

Kit cons: 

• A/B testing limited to only subject lines 

• Emphasis on minimal, text-forward newsletters can be limiting

Where ActiveCampaign is for Mailchimp graduates, Kit is better for folks who don't yet need a tool as robust as Mailchimp.

Kit is pretty barebones when it comes to email building, and more advanced marketers will probably feel like there's something left to be desired. It lacks advanced testing options, and compared to a tool like Mailchimp, it also doesn't offer much in terms of reporting. And its small number of template designs and customization options (unless you know HTML) are a bit limiting.

That's not to say it doesn't have its strengths, though. Kit offers flexible contact management, impressive automation capabilities (especially given the simplicity of the app overall), and a ton of landing page templates. And because the focus is really on solo creators and small eCommerce businesses, it offers some unique features that you won't find in most other email marketing apps (looking at you, tip jar.)

When you integrate Kit with Zapier, you can automate even more of your email marketing workflows. Learn more about how to automate Kit, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows. 

Kit pricing: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers, unlimited landing pages and forms, and audience segmentation; cost of paid plan depends on the number of subscribers but starts at $25/month (billed annually) and includes free data migration and other advanced features.

Read more: ConvertKit vs. Mailchimp

An alternative to Mailchimp for more templates

Constant Contact

Constant Contact pros: 

• Robust library of design templates, suitable for nearly every occasion 

• Easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder 

Constant Contact cons: 

• Can only A/B test subject lines 

• No free plan available

Compared to Mailchimp, Constant Contact is better for email marketing beginners who need simple features and ready-to-send templates. Even though its email builder isn't quite as robust as Mailchimp's new version—it's more comparable to Mailchimp's traditional email builder—it has about twice as many (over 200) email templates that cover nearly any campaign you're sending.

Constant Contact's automation features aren't as deep as Mailchimp's, but it can automate welcome, birthday, anniversary, and resending emails—and you can set up workflows for eCommerce websites. Similarly, the testing and reporting options aren't as advanced, but if you need only the basics, it has you covered. For example, you can test subject lines, and you can see opens, clicks, bounces, and conversion rates. 

Plus, Constant Contact offers live chat and phone support on every plan. If that's how you like to get your customer support, that could be the deciding factor.

With Zapier, you can also connect Constant Contact with your other apps. This way, you can automate every step of your email marketing workflows. Here are a few Zap templates to get you started. 

Constant Contact pricing: No free plan available; cost of paid plans depends on the number of contacts but starts at $12/month. 

Read more: Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp

A Mailchimp alternative for longer buyer lifecycles and an all-in-one tool

HubSpot

HubSpot pros: 

• Generous free plan, which includes unlimited contacts and 2,000 email sends a month 

• AI features available across all platforms (Mailchimp's is limited to the email builder) 

HubSpot cons: 

• Sub-par email templates

• Full suite can be overwhelming

The main difference here: HubSpot is an all-in-one tool that combines marketing, sales, content management, operations, customer service, and commerce into one platform, while Mailchimp is more purely marketing software.

For example, the automations you can set up in HubSpot are highly advanced. This makes it much more suited for longer buyer lifecycles because you can trigger automated email sequences that nurture people all the way through the funnel and segment your list based on all sorts of factors, including their behavior and their stage in the customer lifecycle.

Having said that, it's not quite as easy to build an email in HubSpot. The builder is excellent, but Mailchimp has more templates and makes the process a lot smoother. Because HubSpot is very CRM-focused, there are a lot more moving parts—so it's natural that emails would be a bit more complicated.

Finally, you'll get more advanced analytics in HubSpot than you will in Mailchimp—again, it makes sense given all the integrated features you're working with.

HubSpot is just built to do a lot more than Mailchimp can do, so be sure you need all of its extra features before making the switch—it's harder to set up and, naturally, it'll cost you more.

When you use Zapier to connect HubSpot, you can practically set everything from your email marketing workflows to lead management on autopilot. Learn more about how to automate HubSpot, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows. 

HubSpot pricing: Free plan available; cost of paid plans depends on which parts of the software you use—Marketing Hub Starter starts at $15/month/seat for 1,000 marketing contacts.

Read more: HubSpot vs. Mailchimp.

A Mailchimp alternative for eCommerce

Klaviyo

Klaviyo pros: 

• Intuitive platform 

• Advanced features, including segmentation, automation, and analytics 

Klaviyo cons: 

• Marketing channels limited to email and SMS 

• Paid plans can get pricey fast 

The quick version: Klaviyo is more suitable for larger brands doing eCommerce email marketing.

For starters, you can add automated alerts for people shopping at your store—things like abandoned cart reminders, order updates, and alerts for price drops. And it's all a lot more customizable than in Mailchimp. You can also set eCommerce-specific benchmarks that help you compare how you're doing against other brands in the industry.

Klaviyo doesn't have as many digital marketing channels as Mailchimp, though—it's limited to email and SMS. Mailchimp, on the other hand, lets you do landing pages, postcards, social posts, ads, and surveys. 

Overall, Klaviyo offers more granular customization and more in-depth options for segmentation, automation, and analytics, with special attention to the eCommerce side of things. So if you sell products online and want to see a solid and fast ROI, Klaviyo is a great option.

Klaviyo also integrates with Zapier, allowing you to automatically do things like add leads and subscribers from forms and ads. Learn more about how to automate Klaviyo, or get started with one of these workflows. 

Klaviyo pricing: Free plan includes up to 250 contacts; paid plans start at $45/month.

Read more: Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp

A Mailchimp alternative for transactional email and deliverability

SendGrid

SendGrid pros: 

• Drag-and-drop feature to create and design emails easily

• Deep reporting options, focusing on deliverability metrics 

SendGrid cons: 

• Steep learning curve 

• It might be expensive to scale after you cross the 200K email mark—price jumps from $89.95/month to $249/month

SendGrid focuses on high-volume sending, especially for transactional emails. For that reason, it tends to be more geared toward IT/developer folks, with words like "inbound parse" and "IP access management" popping up all over the place. You can choose no-code, low-code, or full-code, which is a serious amount of flexibility. That's not to say beginners can't use it—it'll just have more of a learning curve (though the documentation is great).

SendGrid is also known for its deliverability (reports will vary a bit, but you're looking at around 97% for SendGrid and 86% for Mailchimp). It has all sorts of important things happening in the background to achieve this level of deliverability, and if you're dealing with transactional emails, that number matters. You'll also get analytics focused on optimizing that deliverability.

In the end, SendGrid is more technical than Mailchimp and may require a steeper learning curve. If you're just working with a small list, SendGrid may not be the right choice. But if you're looking for a Mailchimp alternative to improve email deliverability, it's a great app to check out.

Connect SendGrid with Zapier to streamline even more of your email marketing workflows. Learn more about how to automate SendGrid, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

SendGrid pricing: Free for up to 100 emails/day; starts at $19.95/month for the Essentials plan, which includes up to 100,000 emails/month.

Read more: SendGrid vs. Mailchimp

A Mailchimp alternative for a simple pricing structure

Flodesk

Flodesk pros:

• Minimalist, easy-to-use editor

• Option to add eCommerce features

Flodesk cons:

• Limited native automations

• High starting price with no free plan that includes email marketing features

Mailchimp's pricing structure can get complicated—and depending on how many subscribers and emails you have, the costs can increase pretty quickly. Flodesk offers a solution: a straightforward pricing plan of $35/month for unlimited everything. (You can use the tool to build forms, landing pages, or a link in bio for free. But if you want any email marketing features, you'll need a paid plan.)

Flodesk isn't quite as robust as Mailchimp simply because it isn't that same kind of all-in-one marketing tool. The focus here is on email, and it shows through things like its modern templates and an extensive selection of fonts. It also has some other really nice perks, like customizable and attractive signup forms.

If you don't want to have to worry about what to expect for your budget, and your focus is on email marketing, Flodesk is a great choice.

When you connect Flodesk with Zapier, you can automate everything from adding leads to building email lists. Learn more about how to automate Flodesk, or get started with these pre-made workflows.

Flodesk pricing: Free for forms, landing pages, and link in bio; email marketing plan for $35/month (billed annually), which includes unlimited everything. Add eCommerce features for an additional $24/month.

Read more: Flodesk vs. Mailchimp

A Mailchimp alternative for email newsletters

Benchmark Email

Benchmark pros:

• Full set of email marketing features

• More than 200 attractive templates

Benchmark cons:

• Might be more feature-rich than some newsletter senders need

If you're most interested in newsletters, you need a tool that makes it as easy as possible to create well-designed emails. Unlike Mailchimp, where the editor options can sometimes feel restrictive, Benchmark gives you complete freedom to tailor your email creation process from the start of each campaign.

The platform comes with over 200 beautifully crafted templates, a blank canvas option, or the ability to pull in past emails for quick edits. The drag-and-drop editor is straightforward, and its layout keeps the focus on your design, not buried in menus. 

Benchmark also offers landing page creation, email automation, and dynamic subscriber segmentation. These features might be overkill if you're just looking for a newsletter tool, but if you want the flexibility to grow beyond newsletters eventually, Benchmark could be a great choice.

Benchmark also integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like importing leads from forms or ad campaigns automatically. Here are a few popular workflows to get you started.

Benchmark Email pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts and 3,500 emails/month; the Pro plan starts at $13/month (billed annually) for email automation and A/B testing.

A free Mailchimp alternative for marketing automation

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo pros: 

• Good feature set for a free plan 

• Advanced reports, including standard heat maps, and conversion and deal tracking

Brevo cons: 

• Email templates are slightly outdated 

• Reporting features are limited and scattered throughout 

The first thing you'll notice is Brevo's generous free plan, so if you're looking for a free Mailchimp alternative, it's a good place to start. It offers unlimited contacts for free, and while it's not as robust as a true CRM, you can use it like one if you want. Plus, its segmentation options are impressive, and you can do transactional email—all on the free plan.

Brevo also allows you to create a customized live chat window to embed on your website, which you can then manage inside Brevo.

While Mailchimp offers a lot of channels that Brevo doesn't, if you're looking for an inexpensive (or free) marketing platform, it's a strong contender.

Brevo doesn't have as many native app integrations—65ish compared to Mailchimp's over 300—but when you connect Brevo with Zapier, you can unlock thousands more. Learn more about how to automate Brevo, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.  

Brevo pricing: Free plan includes up to 300 emails per day; from $8.08/month (billed annually) for the Starter plan, which includes 5,000 emails/month and unlimited daily sends. 

Read more: Brevo vs. Mailchimp

A free Mailchimp alternative for email marketing

MailerLite

MailerLite pros: 

• Pre-built content blocks make building emails super quick

• Generous allotments for segmentation and automation

MailerLite cons: 

• No pre-made email templates on the free plan

• Basic AI features 

If Brevo isn't quite doing it for you, or if you've been in the email marketing game for a while, MailerLite is another solid option. While its pre-made design templates don't match up to Mailchimp, it more than makes up for this with dynamic, pre-designed content blocks. Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There's a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It's a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.

Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows—or you can hit the ground running with a pre-built flow. Create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.

Plus, MailerLite integrates with Zapier—meaning you can automate things like adding new MailerLite subscribers from Google Sheets. Here are more ideas for how to automate MailerLite, plus some pre-made workflows to get you started.

MailerLite pricing: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month; $9/month (billed annually) for the Growing Business plan, which includes unlimited monthly email sends and advanced features. 

Read more: MailerLite vs. Mailchimp

Which Mailchimp alternative should you use?

As ChatGPT might say, "ultimately, the choice between Mailchimp and another tool will depend on the specific needs and priorities of the user." I don't mean to sound like the robots, but it's true: figure out what your biggest pain point is with Mailchimp, and then take a few of these Mailchimp alternatives for a spin to see which one does the trick.

Related reading:

• How to set up marketing automation with Zapier

• Email marketing automation ideas to enhance your campaigns

• Ways to automate your email newsletters and drip campaigns

This article was originally published in January 2023 by Deb Tennen. The most recent update was in January 2025.

It seems like every productivity app lives in the browser these days, but there are still good arguments to be made for native software. Apps that run natively on your Windows desktop perform better, integrate into the operating system with tray icons and widgets, and won't get lost in the sea of tabs in your browser. And to-do list apps are no exception.

There are a bunch of great Windows to-do list apps out there, if you know where to look. I spent a couple weeks testing all the top options to see how they stacked up.

Based on my experiences with the apps, these are the best to-do list apps for Windows.

The best Windows to-do list apps

• Microsoft To Do for the best all around option

• Todoist for cross-platform syncing

• Singularity for organizing a chaotic schedule

• TickTick for blending simplicity with power

• WeekToDo for a focus on privacy and minimalism

• Lunatask for keeping everything in one place

• sleek for the best free text-based to-do list app

What makes a great to-do list app for Windows?

In my decade-plus of reviewing software across all manner of platforms, I've tried my fair share of to-do list apps. While none of them can put in the work of organizing your life for you, a good to-do list app can make all the difference. There's no perfect organizer for everyone, but there are apps that excel within their chosen systems of organization and at different price points.

In my testing, I put these apps through their paces by adding both work and personal tasks; organizing them into lists, projects, sub-projects, and various levels of importance; and assigning them due dates, time blocks, and similar criteria. I then based my final decision on the experience of using the app, the feature set, and the value it provides in terms of both money and time you'd need to put in to get the most out of it.

Regardless of which to-do list app you choose, my favorite choices all have some basic things in common. 

• Easy to use, with an uncomplicated interface and easy onboarding.

• Multiple ways to organize your tasks, using different lists or projects; by adding priorities, tags, and labels; or with more advanced options like assigning tasks to individuals. 

• Accessible across multiple devices via cloud syncing (unless there's a really good reason not to offer this, like privacy).

• Some degree of customization, from appearance to behavior.

• Provide something a little extra, like habit trackers or integrations with other apps you use to make them even more powerful and accessible.

With these criteria in mind, here are the best Windows to-do list applications. Some are free, and all paid apps offer free trials, so try a few and see what works.

The best Windows to-do list apps at a glance

Best all around Windows to-do list app

Microsoft To Do (Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone and iPad, Web)

Microsoft To Do pros:

• Plan daily tasks with "My Day" view

• Add tasks with natural language and get suggestions based on usage

• Collaborate with others by sharing lists and assigning tasks

Microsoft To Do cons: 

• Not many customization options

Microsoft To Do comes bundled with Windows 11, so you don't even need to download anything to get started. The app combines a friendly user interface with powerful features in a package that should suit most users.

Microsoft takes a straightforward approach to organization. You can create lists, complete with custom icons. You can add due dates for tasks, then view your tasks for the day. Tasks can be added using simple natural language prompts like "email Deb tomorrow at 9am," and To Do will create a reminder at the relevant time.  

Microsoft To Do uses a My Day system to help you plan your time. After populating your various lists with tasks, click the plus icon next to each task to add it to your day. You can schedule tasks in advance, so they automatically appear in the My Day view. Best of all, the app will suggest items to add here so you can quickly plan out your day based on your outstanding items.

Tasks sync via your Microsoft account with Outlook and other instances of the To Do app on Mac, Android, iPhone and the web. You can pin individual lists to your Start menu, meaning you'll see them throughout the day. You can also share lists by right-clicking on them, then assign tasks to the folks you've invited. And To Do integrates with Microsoft Planner for use in the workplace.

If you want to connect to apps outside the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft To Do integrates with Zapier, which makes it easy to do things like add new tasks based on Google Calendar events or from saved messages in Slack—or send your To Do tasks to another app like Notion. Learn more about how to automate Microsoft To Do, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Microsoft To Do price: Free

Best Windows to-do list app for cross-platform syncing

Todoist (Windows, Android, iPhone, iPad, Watch, macOS, Web)

Todoist pros:

• Great cross-platform syncing

• Incredibly powerful without being overwhelming

• Works well for tracking lots of projects and collaboration

Todoist cons: 

• Limited free version

Todoist is one of the most prominent to-do list apps out there for a few reasons. It's available for basically every platform on earth (even wearables like the Apple Watch). Todoist also offers a nice blend of power user features with a relatively uncluttered interface. Tasks can be organized using projects, due dates, labels, and filters, meaning you'll have all kinds of tools for keeping organized—yet it never quite feels overwhelming.

The Windows version builds on that with an interface that feels right at home on modern Windows computers. Native notifications let you know about upcoming deadlines. You can quickly add new tasks by right-clicking the taskbar icon. You can even pin any list to the Start menu, meaning you'll see what's there regularly. All this makes Todoist's Windows version well worth checking out, especially for folks who need to sync to other platforms.

Todoist's organization features are also some of the best around. Tasks can be added to projects, with sections to keep different aspects separate. You can clone these projects, save them as templates, archive them, and dig them out of the archive at a later date. Use the handy calendar layout on the Today screen to quickly organize your day using timeblocking. There's even a nifty little Productivity tool that keeps track of daily and weekly tasks, celebrates progress, and awards "karma" points to keep you motivated.

Todoist's most useful standout features are limited to the Pro plan, so it best suits folks who are happy to pay a premium for a to-do list manager that goes the extra mile.

Zapier's Todoist integration opens the app up to tons of useful automations, like adding Outlook events as Todoist tasks or importing cards from Trello as tasks in Todoist. Here are more popular ways to automate Todoist, plus a few pre-made workflows to get you started.

Todoist price: Free for up to 5 active projects, 5 guests, and limitations like no reminders. $4/month (billed yearly) for the Pro plan to unlock up to 300 active projects, 25 guests, and greater upload limits.

Best to-do list app for chaotic schedules

Singularity (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone)

Singularity App pros:

• An all-in-one tool for managing everything from tasks and projects to calendars and checklists

• Unique paper planning features work great for teams

• Built-in habit tracker and Pomodoro timer

Singularity App cons:

• Free plan is fairly limited (10 projects, 3 habits, no calendar view)

On first glance, Singularity appears to be just another to-do list app. Its interface is familiar in that it looks a lot like Todoist or Lunatask, with an inbox-first approach to triaging incoming tasks. This is a good thing, since this tried-and-tested system makes it easy to load up the app with tasks that need to be completed.

Lists take the form of projects that live in the sidebar, and you can get deep into organization by nesting projects within projects and sections within sections. Tasks can also have sub-tasks (called checklists), deadlines, and tags. There's even the ability to mark an item as Cancelled rather than completed. Drag tasks onto your projects, or right-click to assign priorities and deadlines.

But Singularity has one standout feature that I didn't see in any other app of its kind: paper planning. Using a desktop version of the app, you can organize and then print out a day plan using the File > Print Day Plan option. From there, work through the list on paper by ticking things off as you go. At the end of the day, use the mobile version of Singularity to scan the sheet and keep the app up to date. Just keep in mind that you'll need to sign up for the Pro plan to use this feature—and many others (including the Pomodoro timer and calendar view for your tasks).

Singularity price: $2.99/month or $30/year

Best Windows to-do list app for blending simplicity with power

TickTick (Windows, macOS, Android, iPhone and iPad)

TickTick pros:

• Desktop widgets for viewing tasks and calendar, plus integration with Gmail and Outlook

• Great for managing lots of projects, including archiving tools

• Includes Eisenhower matrix, Pomodoro timer, and habit tracker

TickTick cons:

• Calendar view limited to Premium subscribers

TickTick is probably most similar to Todoist in its approach to task list management. Like Todoist, the app is absolutely packed with features but keeps things simple with a clean interface that feels responsive and right at home on the Windows desktop. This simplicity is bolstered with native Windows widgets for showing your task list and calendar view—and there's even a sticky note widget.

Tasks can be added to the Inbox and delegated to separate lists or added to lists directly. These items can take the form of tasks with nested sub-tasks, or notes, which you can convert back to tasks at any time. Right-click on a list and archive it to remove it from the list, then unarchive it from the Archived Lists folder when you need it again. You can further organize your tasks with tags and filters, bringing tasks together by category, due date, and other metrics, regardless of which list they appear on.

TickTick integrates with third-party calendars, including Google and Outlook, meaning you can see your tasks and your appointments in the same place. It also includes a few extra nice-to-have features like a habit tracker, Eisenhower matrix organization, and a Pomodoro timer (which you can trigger by right-clicking a task). All of this means TickTick is well worth a spin for Windows users, with versions for other major platforms and mobile too.

You can do more with TickTick by integrating it with Zapier, so you can connect TickTick to all the other apps you use for task management and beyond. Discover the top ways to automate TickTick, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

TickTick price: Free with some limitations, like no calendar view, no reminders, and limited themes. Pay $35.99/year to unlock the full functionality.

Best privacy-focused Windows to-do list app

WeekToDo (Windows, Mac, Linux)

WeekToDo pros:

• Free, open source, and privacy-minded

• Focus on planning tasks rather than simply making lists

• Good for viewing everything at once

WeekToDo cons:

• No syncing between devices will be a deal breaker for many

WeekToDo is a to-do list planner that uses days of the week and custom lists to lay all of your tasks out in front of you. You can move items from your own lists onto a week plan, give them a time, set an alarm, and assign them a custom color. Set up recurring tasks and plan your schedule months in advance, and tasks can have both a detailed description and a set of sub-tasks nested within them.

WeekToDo is different in that it doesn't support syncing between devices, and that's seemingly by design. You can export and import data at any point (to create a backup), but the app is supposed to live on your computer. That means there's no mobile access, which may restrict WeekToDo's usefulness. But if all you're looking for is an app for local planning on your computer, it's a great solution.

WeekToDo is simple, with only a light and dark theme to choose from and a few basic behavior toggles within the settings. The idea here is to stop making endless lists and instead start planning when you're going to complete them. The app is free and open source, and you can even try out a web version of the app (complete with data export when you're ready to go desktop-only).

Some will look at WeekToDo and see an app that feels way too limited to be useful. Others will let out a sigh of relief that such an app still exists in an era of everything-as-a-service and premium subscriptions.

WeekToDo Price: Free

Best Windows to-do list app for keeping everything in one place

Lunatask (Windows, Mac)

Lunatask pros:

• Goal-oriented task management

• Extra features like note-taking, journaling, habit tracking, and the ability to log mood and relationship information

• Multiple ways to achieve your goals

Lunatask cons:

• Free version limited to two "Areas of Life" (lists)

• Additional features may be superfluous to some

Lunatask organizes your to-dos into "Areas of Life" (lists), with the option of creating goals within these areas. Add tasks to goals, and you'll see the progress bar next to your goal slowly increase.

Tasks can have priorities, estimated durations, progress counters, due dates, and can become recurring. Customize colors and icons to keep things separate, with useful options for aspects like what status a newly created task should have. You can even set up list-specific email forwarding or connect calendar platforms like Google and Outlook, and do much more with Zapier or the app's public API.

Lunatask includes a bunch of extra features, including an encrypted note-taking platform, habit tracking, a journal, mood tracking, and the ability to log your connections with others in a bid to build better relationships. In addition to having a place for everything, Lunatask's focus on well-being makes for a surprisingly "human" take on task management.

Connect Lunatask to Zapier, and you can automate your task management. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started, but Zapier will connect Lunatask to thousands of other apps.

Lunatask price: Free plan available, with limits of 2 "Areas of Life" and 7 habits. Pay $8/month for Premium to remove these limits, with a lifetime plan available for $220.

Best text-based to-do list app for Windows

sleek (Windows, Mac, Linux)

sleek pros:

• Keep your entire to-do list in a single text file, or link multiple text files (and share them if you want)

• Add tasks quickly with a single command

• Free and open source

sleek cons:

• Some adjustment required; you'll need to set up sync yourself with a cloud storage provider

• Text-only approach may be too simple for some

sleek is the simplest and most straightforward to-do list app for Windows. It's a multi-platform client that uses the Todo.txt formula of keeping your entire task list in a single text document. It's completely free and open source, and though sleek is a strictly desktop app, there are mobile clients for iPhone and iPad or Android (just keep your master Todo.txt file in cloud storage, so it syncs between devices).

The app and philosophy are simple. Tasks are added using single lines of text with a priority ranging from A to Z, a due date, recurrence interval, a context (like @work), a project (like +Zapier), and a description. sleek will help you with the formatting to start with, but before long, you'll be entering to-dos into the New Task box like: "(A) Work on spreadsheet due:2025-01-21 +Zapier @Work."

sleek takes these to-dos and lays them out by priority, with icons to symbolize due dates, contexts, projects, and recurrence. You can filter by these criteria, search your list, and even split tasks into different text documents using a tabbed interface. The app also lets you customize basic behaviors like task prioritization, notifications, and your choice of light and dark themes.

Don't expect sleek or the Todo.txt method to drastically evolve: the appeal is in its simple platform-agnostic approach.

sleek pricing: Free

Other options for a Windows to-do list app

I tried dozens of Windows to-do list apps, and while the ones above are my picks for the best, there are a handful of others that came close to making the cut, but just didn't quite meet my criteria. So here are a few more options to consider:

• Trello isn't a to-do list, per se, but you can use it to organize your life, and there's a solid Windows app.

• Amazing Marvin is a to-do list manager that tries to help you avoid procrastination.

• ZenKit To Do and Nozbe are a bit more team-focused, but they're worth investigating if you'll be collaborating on your to-do list.

• Vikunja is a collaborative to-do list manager with a free self-hosted option or a hosted premium plan.

• Notion is a personal organizer that's much more than a to-do list manager.

• Workflowy is a simple cross between an organizer, a note-taking tool, and a to-do list manager that lets you organize your life however you want.

Related reading:

• The best email clients for Windows

• The best calendar apps for Windows

• Your keyboard doesn't have an em dash symbol—here's what to do

This article was originally published in February 2019 by Justin Pot. The most recent update was in January 2025

When you're raising a tween daughter, having conversations about puberty can be tricky. And all the "answers" from Dr. Google and r/girlmom just pile on to the overwhelm.

Thankfully, there's Girlology. An app created by doctors, it empowers moms and their daughters by answering life's most complicated questions about growing up. 

With more than 600 educational videos, Girlology needed a way to help moms quickly locate the content they needed. Enter Dave Bayless, an automation expert and Zapier superuser. Working with Jonathan Long, Chief of Strategy and Innovation at Girlology, Dave knew just the trick:

An all-on-Zapier chatbot. 

Challenge: Create a simple bot to answer tricky questions

That chatbot—now called Dr. Momfidence—could do more than just guide moms to the right videos. It could supply Girlology with a database of user questions for shaping future content.

But there were two key challenges to overcome.

To start, the Girlology team needed to help folks understand how to best use the chatbot. 

"People don't always use chatbots correctly," Dave said. "They enter keywords and key phrases like they do in a search engine."

Plus, although gathering tons of user questions would give Girlology valuable insights, they were unsure how to collect and analyze them efficiently.

Solution: Build complex functionality with ease

The team tackled these challenges systematically.

First up was designing an intuitive landing page for Dr. Momfidence. The chatbot answers questions through ChatGPT and uses various types of Girlology content as its knowledge base: a SmartSuite database of "Mom Tips" video content, a CSV of blog data, key pages from the Girlology website, and a Zapier Table containing a partner's PDF patient handout information.

"We wanted to make it easy for users to get an idea of how to start," Dave explained. So he made sure the landing page clearly displayed suggested prompts—plucked right from the knowledge base itself.

To solve the second problem, gathering responses, the team focused on their user data collection.

The chatbot captures leads through Mailchimp, but with a twist: When asking for key information right away, Dr. Momfidence makes it clear that sharing is optional. When certain keywords trigger the chatbot to recommend a resource like an eBook, then Dr. Momfidence asks for a name and email, allowing for specific engagement signals to strengthen their lead capture.

When conversations end, a Zap automatically logs conversation data (like the date of the interaction, the user messages, and the conversation ID) in a table and summarizes what was covered. After the transcripts are logged in the table, Zapier Central analyzes the various conversations and extracts key insights about how people interact with Dr. Momfidence. And with that info, they can create new content tailored to those topics.

Dave's innovative finishing touch? Using Python's pandas library—a powerful data analysis tool—to link the chat data with the lead data.

"It's astounding how the chatbot can even know to utilize pandas in a merged data table to allow the chatbot to do an analysis between two data sources," Dave said. 

Results: More meaningful relationships

Dr. Momfidence isn't just a tool for fielding questions.

"One of our goals […] is to build meaningful relationships with prospects," said Jonathan. "With this chatbot, we're able to provide high-quality conversations, which in turn create immediate value for prospects and qualified leads for our brand."

What's even more impressive is how quickly this value was created. "I built a similar chatbot for a friend and client that took me probably 60 hours to do," said Dave. "With Zapier, setting up this chatbot for Dr. Confidence initially only took 30 minutes." 

By using Zapier, Girlology can continuously improve the chatbot, using newly acquired insights to deliver smarter, faster, and more timely follow-ups. "The Central bot allows us to listen carefully, synthesize, and ultimately act," said Dave. "We don't have to guess what people are interested in. We know what they are interested in."

Closing the feedback loop ultimately drives the creation of new content for the chatbot's knowledge source. As they continue adding content to the knowledge base, Dr. Momfidence becomes exponentially more capable and useful to girl moms.

Think about the last time you were at an event and someone gave you a business card—where did you put it? For most people, they end up taking a picture of it and either throwing the card away or placing it in a desk drawer never to be seen again. 

And yet, paper business cards have inexplicably stuck around despite their limitations in a digital-first world. 

Popl, a leader in in-person lead capture and digital business cards, is on a mission to modernize how people exchange information and make networking more effective and easier.

''At Popl, we're all about connecting companies with their future customers,'' says Jason Alvarez-Cohen, CEO and co-founder. ''Paper business cards just don't cut it anymore in a digital-first world.''

But as Popl grew, they needed to ensure their innovative solutions could scale while maintaining the seamless experience their customers had come to expect. They needed a way to bridge disjointed systems, streamline processes, and keep up with growing demand—all without overloading their team. They turned to automation and AI to make it happen.

​​About Popl:

• Company size: 51-200 employees

• Industry: Technology

• Location: New York, New York

Streamlining operations for scale

Popl's journey with Zapier began with a simple Shopify automation to send email notifications for customers. ''What started as a simple integration has gone beyond that. We now have over 100 Zapier automations, handling everything from lead routing to customer engagement,'' he shares. 

But it wasn't just about automating for efficiency—Popl needed to scale operations without adding complexity.

Take their sales process, for example. Popl's sales team manages hundreds of leads daily through HubSpot and Salesforce. Automating these workflows with Zapier removed bottlenecks and ensured every lead received timely attention.

''Zapier has been a game-changer for us,'' Jason explains. ''Whether it's routing demo bookings or managing billing contacts, we rely on Zapier to keep our operations smooth and scalable.''

Unlocking advanced workflows

Popl uses Zapier to connect multiple apps and automate complex workflows that save time and reduce errors. One standout example is their HubSpot demo booking system:

• Trigger: A HubSpot form submission starts the process.

• Google Sheets: Zapier checks a mini-database for lead details.

• Slack notification: Zapier sends an alert to the sales team.

• Round-robin routing: Routes leads to team members based on pre-defined logic, such as company size.

This workflow eliminates manual work while ensuring prospects are quickly and accurately assigned to the right sales rep.

''It's not just about doing more,'' Jason says. ''It's about doing it better, faster, and with fewer resources.''

Scaling with AI-powered insights

Popl has also integrated OpenAI into their Zapier workflows, unlocking new possibilities for email filtering and data enrichment. One key innovation: an AI-driven tool that categorizes inbound emails, saving team members hours of manual sorting every week.

Popl's AI-driven workflows include:

• Email classification: Uses OpenAI to identify spam, sales inquiries, and cold outreach, automatically sorting them into Gmail folders.

• Lead data enrichment: Combines Zapier and OpenAI to extract company details from email domains, streamlining the lead qualification process.

''With AI, we've eliminated repetitive tasks,'' Jason explains. ''Zapier makes it simple to integrate these capabilities without needing a separate tech stack.''

The impact: Scaling without limits

By automating its operations with Zapier, Popl has achieved scalable growth while keeping costs in check. For instance, they replaced a costly HubSpot-to-Salesforce integration with a Zapier workflow, saving over $20,000 annually.

Popl's results with Zapier include:

• 100+ automated workflows

• ~$20,000 annual savings on custom integration fees

• Scalable systems that support team growth without operational bottlenecks

''Zapier is our go-to tool for solving system gaps,'' Jason says. ''We've automated everything from demo bookings to lead ownership, which lets us focus on scaling our business instead of maintaining processes.'' 

Building the future of networking

With Zapier as the fuel, Popl can use its best resource—its people—to find clever solutions to some of its toughest challenges. By automating and optimizing their workflows, Popl's team is empowered to innovate, iterate, and grow with confidence.

Bookmark managers are helpful tools for saving and sorting valuable content for later. But they can quickly become an overwhelming mess if you're not organized. 

Instead of manually sorting through countless saved items, you can automatically sync bookmarks between apps, convert them into tasks, and even generate curated RSS feeds for your audience. With Zapier's automated workflows—called Zaps—you can simplify your bookmark management, making it easier to find, act on, and share the content that matters most. Here's how.

Table of contents

• Add RSS feed items to your bookmark manager

• Manage bookmarks across apps

• Add tasks from bookmarks

• Add RSS feed items from bookmarks

Add RSS feed items to your bookmark manager

RSS feeds are a powerful way to stay updated on the latest content from your favorite blogs and news sites. But RSS feeds need a place to send and store this content, so you can read and organize it effectively. 

With these Zaps, you can automatically collect new reading material then save it to your preferred bookmarking tool, like Pocket, Instapaper, or Pinboard. That way, you'll never miss valuable content from your favorite sources.

Manage bookmarks across apps

Each bookmark manager has its pros and cons when it comes to reading experience, organization, and aggregating data from different sources. If you need to use multiple bookmark managers for their different features, automating syncs between them can help you stay organized. 

For instance, if you tag a new item in Pocket, you can set up an automation to add that same item to Instapaper. This allows you to benefit from Instapaper's streamlined reading experience or speed reading features while keeping your saved articles categorized in Pocket.

Similarly, if you save an article for later in Feedly, you can automatically add it to Pocket or Instapaper. That way, your bookmarked content is accessible no matter which app you prefer at any given moment. 

These workflows not only reduce the effort of manually transferring bookmarks but also create a centralized and dynamic system for managing your reading materials. Whether you're a casual reader or a content curator, syncing bookmarks across apps can keep you organized without redundancy.

Add tasks from bookmarks

Bookmarks often contain actionable items, like articles to read, resources to explore, or projects to start. Automatically turning bookmarks into tasks can help you stay productive and on top of your commitments. 

Automation makes connecting your bookmark manager with your favorite task management tools easy. You can set up workflows to create a database item in Notion, add a row in Google Sheets, generate a new card in Trello whenever a new bookmark is saved, and more. Whether it's a research article, a helpful tutorial, or a resource for an ongoing project, these Zaps ensure you can act on your saved items without wading through a never-ending list.

Add RSS feed items from bookmarks

Bookmarks don't have to be the end of your content workflow—they can also be the start of a new one. By turning your saved bookmarks into RSS feed items, you can create new opportunities for sharing and repurposing content. 

For example, you can make a curated reading list by generating an RSS feed from your bookmarks. Share this feed with friends, colleagues, or readers, allowing them to follow your top recommendations.

These automations can also streamline newsletter creation. Content creators and bloggers can pull their bookmarked articles into an RSS feed that connects directly to email marketing platforms, simplifying compiling and distributing valuable resources. Or use this setup to build a dynamic "Recommended Reads" section on your website, where visitors can access a constantly updated list of articles and resources you've bookmarked.

Whether you're sharing knowledge, engaging an audience, or building an efficient content workflow, turning bookmarks into RSS feeds offers a flexible and powerful way to maximize the value of your saved items.

Supercharge your bookmark manager

Don't let your reading list get stale. With bookmark automation, you can keep your saved bookmarks organized, accessible, and actionable. Whether you're syncing RSS feed items, connecting bookmark tools, converting bookmarks into tasks, or creating shareable RSS feeds, these workflows simplify your life and maximize the value of your saved content. 

How will you automate your bookmark manager?

You probably use ActiveCampaign to manage your email marketing because you care about automation. The tool has a wealth of built-in AI-powered automations that help you personalize, target, and develop effective marketing campaigns. But those campaigns won't be effective if you don't have the right information in your email marketing tool to begin with.

By connecting ActiveCampaign to the rest of your tech stack, you can tap into the full power of automation to supercharge your marketing strategy. Here are some of the most popular ways to use Zapier's automated workflows (called Zaps) to set everything from lead nurturing to record-keeping on autopilot. That way, your team can focus on work only they can do—like building relationships with customers.

Table of contents

• Add leads to ActiveCampaign

• Follow up on purchases 

• Integrate ActiveCampaign with Google Sheets 

• Use webhooks with ActiveCampaign 

Add leads to ActiveCampaign

The best way to turn new leads into actual paying customers is to make sure you see them fast. And that means getting those leads into ActiveCampaign ASAP so you can start nurturing them. When you add automation to your toolkit, you can instantly send leads from a variety of sources to ActiveCampaign without creating bottlenecks for your team.

From bookings

In marketing, timing is everything. When a potential customer takes the time to book a meeting or schedule a service, it shows interest in your offer. Getting that lead into ActiveCampaign quickly lets you track other interactions and build stronger relationships. 

Use these Zaps to turn meetings into relationships. 

From ads and lead gen tools

Every minute you spend moving leads from various advertising platforms and lead gen tools to ActiveCampaign is time you could have spent A/B testing ads, writing ad copy, or just grabbing that second cup of coffee. These Zaps move leads from your favorite ad and conversion tools to ActiveCampaign automatically—no copy-pasting needed. 

From forms

Visitors who take the time to fill out a form are self-identifying as (at least a little) interested in what you offer. But the longer you wait to follow up on interest, the less effective you'll be. Maximize your chances of turning casual visitors into customers by instantly adding form respondents to ActiveCampaign with one of these Zaps.

Follow up on purchases  

The conversion process doesn't end when customers hit "buy now." In fact, it's just getting started. And because keeping customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones, that follow-up is crucial.

Connecting ActiveCampaign with your eCommerce platform lets you add new customers to your contact list or update contact information automatically—no more double-checking addresses or manually adding new customers. 

Integrate ActiveCampaign with Google Sheets 

Google Sheets lets you slice and dice your marketing data, create custom reports, and share those insights with the rest of your team. It's also a great spot to create an archive of customer data, so you never risk losing it.

But manually copying and pasting customer information can lead to human error and costly mistakes. It also doesn't scale well when you're dealing with a lot of customers. With these Zaps, you can automatically move data between Google Sheets and ActiveCampaign to instantly back up your customer data:

If you use Google Sheets to collect customer data from a variety of sources, you might also need a faster way to move that information from your spreadsheet to ActiveCampaign. These Zaps will get the job done.

Use webhooks with ActiveCampaign 

Although Zapier connects with thousands of apps, there may be a specific tool you use that doesn't yet have a Zapier integration.

Webhooks are a way for different platforms to "speak" to each other, even if they don't both have an integration. Use webhooks to send information to or from ActiveCampaign to another app, customizing your workflow to what works for you.

Supercharge ActiveCampaign

Ever wish you had more time in your day? Automating ActiveCampaign is the easiest way to make the most of your marketing efforts and have more time for fun stuff—like digging into your data or finding out whether emojis help drive open rates. Use these ActiveCampaign workflows to help update your contact lists, streamline follow-ups, and improve customer relationships. 

And this is just the start of what you can do with ActiveCampaign and Zapier. What will you automate first?

This article was originally published in February 2021. It was most recently updated in January 2025 by Nicole Replogle.

Let's set the stage: you and your colleagues just spent months on a lengthy, data-heavy project plan that no one in their right mind would read every word of, and now it's time to write an executive summary for it. The executive summary will be the first (and maybe only) thing people look at when they open your document: it's where you lay out the key takeaways, or golden nuggets, of whatever you've worked so hard on. 

But distilling complex information into a shorter format isn't simple. Here, I'll show you how to write an executive summary—either using a template or with our AI generator—and share some tips to help you get the most out of yours.

Table of contents:

• What is an executive summary?

• Executive summary template

• Executive summary generator

• How to write an executive summary in 6 steps

• Executive summary examples

• Tips to get the most out of your executive summary

• Automate projects and reports with Zapier

• Executive summary FAQ

What is an executive summary?

An executive summary recaps the most important information and takeaways of a document (e.g., a strategic plan, earnings report, or proposal). It lets people—coworkers, bosses, stakeholders, or clients—know what a document is all about without making them dig through pages of text, numbers, and charts with so many variables they make your head spin. 

Executive summaries typically appear at the beginning of a larger document, and they can be as short as a paragraph or as long as a few pages, depending on the length and complexity of what you're summarizing. But no matter how brief, executive summaries should include these key elements:

• Introduction: An executive summary should briefly introduce the plan or report it sums up. In other words, it should share the project’s purpose in a sentence or two.

• Problem statement: If your project aims to solve a certain problem or pain point, state exactly what that problem is and how it's impacting your business, clients, or team. 

• Solution: After introducing the problem, offer a solution. While your plan or report should cover this solution in detail, you can outline it in the summary and note the benefits of implementation.

• Conclusion and recommendations: At the end of an executive summary, briefly restate the main points of your project, then offer some recommendations for actionable next steps. 

You could include other elements in an executive summary, like a research methodology, some (brief) market analysis, a bulleted list of key takeaways, and financial projections. But you're summing up a document, not restating it point-by-point. So you'll have to leave the less-important details on the cutting room floor.

Executive summary template

Unless your idea of fun involves a whole lot of tedious formatting, you shouldn't start the executive summary process from a blank document. I've done all the outline-y bits for you and turned it into an executive summary template. Just fill it in using information from the project, report, or business plan you're summarizing.

Our template has each section in its own labeled column, but you may have seen other executive summaries presented as a seamless block of text. You can always turn our template into plain text by pasting and combining each section in a separate document. The choice is yours (and probably dependent on how long or short your summary is).

Executive summary generator

Template or no template, trying to condense a 57-page document into a brief summary can be a mammoth undertaking. This is one of those times AI can give you a massive head start on an otherwise daunting task. While any AI writing generator worth its salt can handle this for you, you'll save even more time if you use our chatbot (built with Zapier Chatbots) to generate an executive summary. Here's how to use it:

1. Copy and paste your document into the text box.

2. Click the Submit button or press the Enter/return key.

The bot will write you a summary that includes an introduction, problem statement, solutions, and conclusion. Of course, you'll want to review, fact check, and edit what gets generated to ensure it's good enough to go before the board.

How to write an executive summary in 6 steps

If you'd rather tackle your executive summary without leaning on AI, it'll help to have a guide to every part of the executive summary process. Here's how to get yours boardroom-ready in six steps.

1. Review the document you're summarizing 

Whatever you're writing an executive summary for—a document, a business or project plan, an annual report—you should know it like the back of your hand. Even if you've gone over it a half-dozen times before, reread it again, and this time, jot down the key info you'll include in your summary.

2. Create an outline 

If you're using our executive summary template, we've already done this step for you. For everyone else, you'll want to draw up a tidy outline with sections for an introduction, problem statement, solution, and conclusion. This is the bare minimum, but feel free to add other sections as needed.

3. Write the introduction

The introduction is where you briefly tell the audience what your project or document is all about. Try to answer two questions: what are you summarizing, and who is it for? You can also provide some background and context for how the document came about.

Depending on the length of what you're summarizing, your intro could be anywhere from a few sentences to a couple of paragraphs long. But shorter is usually better—you don't want your CEO's eyes to glaze over before you get to the meat of the summary.

4. State the problem

Next, share the problem your document will address. This tells the audience why they should care about what you're summarizing. This could be something like a decline in sales leading to reduced revenue and market share, an unsuccessful product launch that needs pivoting, or a drop in customer retention. 

However, not every problem statement has to address an issue or crisis. Your "problem" could also be an opportunity for growth and evolution or a new initiative. Either way, you'll want to be clear and concise. 

Also, include relevant data if you've got it: "sales are down 23%" is a lot more effective than "sales are down."

5. Propose solutions  

An executive summary should never raise a problem without offering one or more solutions to that problem. Of course, the solutions should be in the document or plan itself, but you still need to summarize them at the outset. 

Don't get lost in the details. Outline the critical, actionable steps needed to solve the problem at hand. You can even put them in a bulleted or numbered list to distinguish them from the rest of the text. And just like in the problem statement, it's worth sprinkling in some data (like a revenue projection) if it supports your proposed solutions.

6. Look ahead in your conclusion

In your conclusion, quickly restate the main points of your write-up and then move on to suggestions for what to do next. What actions do you want your audience to take after they flip (or scroll) through your document? 

Try to make your recommendations as actionable as possible. For example, if the project needs approval or you need another meeting scheduled, come right out and say that. If you're in a position to set deadlines, set them. Call out decision-makers and tell them what you want them to do with your document.

Executive summary examples

Not all executive summaries look alike, and half the time they might not even be labeled as executive summaries. Still, you're bound to find them at the beginning of most reports and other major business documents. Here are some examples from the real world to clue you in on what to look for.

Meta's annual human rights report

This executive summary from Meta is too long for me to reproduce here, but it can give you an idea of how they might be structured for larger documents (57 pages, in this case). 

It begins with a crystal clear overview of the report and Meta's commitment to human rights, then moves to discuss the risks associated with AI. After that, it covers the steps Meta is taking to mitigate these (and other) risks before closing with a look toward future initiatives. 

If you're keeping track, that's an introduction, problem, solution, and conclusion—all in three short pages.

Google's environmental report

Sometimes, an executive summary doubles as a statement by executives. Google's 2024 environmental report begins with an introduction co-written by their CSO and VP of Learning and Sustainability.  

Not only does it cover all the bases of an executive summary, but it also gets a major credibility boost since it's authored by members of Google's C-suite. But you don't have to be an exec to pen an effective summary.  

This one works because its solutions are data-backed and because it focuses clearly on one problem: the challenge of running a global business sustainability. 

Spotify's equity and impact report

This example from Spotify's equity and impact report shows how you can play with your summary's formatting. Instead of one big chunk of prose, they've opted for neatly labeled boxes highlighting key parts of the document. Because it's a PDF, you can even click the Read buttons to jump ahead to different sections.

The little text blurbs tell us what each section's focus will be. You'll notice they also introduce problems and solutions. Under "Climate Action," for instance, Spotify points out an issue (climate change) and quickly sums up what they're doing about it (aiming for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions). 

Tips to get the most out of your executive summary 

The point of an executive summary is to share it with people who may not even read the rest of the document it's attached to (like your boss, and their boss). On top of keeping your summary concise, engaging, and informative, here are some things you can do to help it make a splash.

• Prepare it for presentation: Instead of presenting your executive summary by reading it word for word, break it down into snappy, digestible bullet points. In other words, summarize the summary.

• Tailor it to your audience: You may need to tweak your write-up if you're presenting or sharing it with different audiences. Consider creating an internal summary for your team and an external summary for clients, stakeholders, or investors.

• Perform updates as needed: If your business plan changes, update the executive summary to account for new information, adjusted timelines, and expanded or reduced scope.

• Break it into a separate document: Because executive summaries usually come at the beginning of a large document, consider creating a separate, standalone version with a smaller file size. This will make it more shareable and allow you to easily send it to anyone who doesn't need the full version. 

Automate projects and reports with Zapier

Writing an executive summary shouldn't be a painful experience. Remember: you're summing up all the hard work that goes into a business plan or other document—stuff like market research, data collection, financial projections, and writing—not repeating it. 

Zapier can make that hard work easier by connecting all the apps you use and building fully automated systems for your projects. Whether you're crunching data for a report, drafting a project proposal, or even launching a startup, Zapier streamlines everything from simple tasks to complex workflows. Learn more about how to start automating today.

Executive summary FAQ

Looking for more info on executive summaries before you put your nose to the grindstone and write one? Here are some quick answers to commonly asked questions. 

How long should an executive summary be?

Executive summaries can range from one paragraph to multiple pages, depending on how much info you're summarizing. A good rule of thumb is that they shouldn't make up more than 10% of the document they're included in. 

What should an executive summary include?

An executive summary should state the purpose and key takeaways of a business's plan, project, or report. It should also cover solutions to any problems raised in the report and provide actionable recommendations for next steps.

What is the difference between an executive summary and a business plan?

An executive summary summarizes the content of a business plan, which is a detailed outline of a company's goals and the strategies they'll use to accomplish them. A business plan is just one example of a document that could include an executive summary. 

Related reading:

• 4 free strategic plan templates

• 9 free SOP templates

• How to create a goal-crushing project plan 

• The 5 sales forecasting spreadsheets you really need

When I started my email newsletter a few years ago, it was exciting. I felt a little late to the party but could still see the upside. Of course, the landscape has changed. It's now more expensive to acquire subscribers, the value isn't quite as high, and there's competition entering from every angle.

But that doesn't mean you should avoid newsletters—quite the opposite. It simply means you need to manage your expectations and adjust your tactics. I still believe newsletters are one of the best business models and customer acquisition strategies, but only when executed properly. 

Here, I'll share my top predictions for email newsletters in 2025.

Table of contents:

• The benefits of starting an email newsletter

• Creators will push their email newsletters before products

• Newsletters will switch to better-suited platforms

• Co-registration will become the most popular way to grow 

• More large companies will prioritize their newsletter—or start one

• Newsletters will struggle to monetize despite more subscribers

• Low-effort newsletters don't stand a chance

• Complex newsletters will publish books

• Newsletter publishers will focus on building a community

• What's next for newsletters?

The benefits of starting an email newsletter

But first, why are folks still so interested in email newsletters?

Email newsletters are great lifestyle businesses. They're easy to start, cheap to run, location-independent, mostly fun, and owned media. Not to mention, if you figure out a lucrative way to monetize, you could end up exiting for millions of dollars. 

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri run my favorite podcast: My First Million. Sam Parr sold The Hustle to HubSpot for ~$27M, and Shaan Puri sold Milk Road for an estimated eight figures in 10 months. It's not hard to find other stories like this. Even my own investing newsletter was acquired in less than a year.

8 email newsletter predictions to watch closely in 2025

1. Creators will push their email newsletters before products

I've noticed a lot more links to email newsletters from creators on X, Instagram, and YouTube. I think this year, creators will start pushing their newsletters before products.

There are four key reasons I think this will happen:

• Platform risk is real. Without a social media account, creators won't have a business, and we've seen how fragile platforms can be.

• The value of subscribers. In the long run, an email subscriber can be more valuable than a follower.

• You can sell more. Influencers will be able to sell higher-ticket items to an email list than they can on social media.

• It's defensible. A newsletter allows influencers to leverage their audience to build a long-term, defensible business.

You don't need to look hard to find examples. A simple scroll through my Instagram and YouTube resulted in finding six creators that push their newsletters:

• Eric Hinman (fitness influencer)

• Peter Attia (health and longevity influencer)

• Dr. Rhonda Patrick ( health influencer)

• Alex Costa (fashion influencer)

• Pat Walls (founder of Starter Story)

• Ali Abdaal (productivity YouTuber)

2. Newsletters will switch to better-suited platforms

New newsletters are hitting the market every single day, and they all face similar problems: hard to grow, harder to monetize. 

Typically, a newsletter operator would find advertisers on their own or rely on affiliate partnerships to drive revenue. Not only is this time-consuming and difficult, but it's also more competitive now.

Most newsletter platforms have recognized this, but only a few have built helpful solutions. beehiiv is one of the few that's quickly acquiring new customers by focusing on the newsletter segment. It helps newsletters grow through beehiiv Boosts and monetize through their native ad network. Kit (previously ConvertKit) also offers a native advertising network and a referral network, but the requirements seem more stringent. 

I think we'll see more newsletters switch from traditional email platforms to those with features designed specifically for newsletter operators.

3. Co-registration will become the most popular way to grow 

Co-registration (also called "co-reg") is when users sign up for one newsletter and are simultaneously offered the opportunity to subscribe to additional newsletters from partner sites. 

It's not a new growth strategy, but it's quickly becoming popular among newsletters—especially with many advertisers reporting the cost of ads increasing. Marketers need to find alternative sources of growth that are sustainable over the long run. 

This is where companies like SparkLoop, After Offers (that's what I use), and beehiiv Boosts come in. Newsletters can easily integrate and start getting paid for every new subscriber they refer to other newsletters. It's a great way to grow a newsletter without paid ads.

4. More large companies will prioritize their newsletter—or start one

Creators aren't the only ones who see the value of newsletters. I think we'll see more and more large companies prioritizing their newsletters. Here's why.

• It can reduce the customer acquisition cost (CAC).

• If ad costs skyrocket or traffic drops, companies still have an engaged list.

• If a company wants to exit, then an engaged, profitable newsletter will make it more attractive—it's an asset.

Some of my favorite B2B newsletters include Ahrefs' Digest, I'm Telling HR, and Litmus Weekly.  

Matt Paulson, the founder of MarketBeat, is leading the way when it comes to newsletters. He's not new to the game, but his commitment to growth shows how bullish he is.

P.S. Matt Paulson wrote a book called Email Marketing Demystified, which I think is incredible. If you're not sold on creating a newsletter, this book will change your mind.

5. Newsletters will struggle to monetize despite more subscribers 

beehiiv has over 400,000 publishers on their platform—impressive for a company that was founded in 2021. And Backlinko found that Substack has over 500,000 active paying subscribers to newsletters. 

With so many newsletters hitting the market, it's safe to say the supply of ad space has increased as well. Naturally, this means it'll be harder to monetize. If I were to launch an email newsletter again, I would map all the ways I could monetize before I started, instead of focusing only on paid ads.

The same applies to launching a newsletter as an acquisition channel for your business. You need to map out exactly who your audience is, the problems they have, and how you can convert them into paying customers from your newsletter.

6. Low-effort newsletters don't stand a chance

I wish I didn't need to say this explicitly, but after scouring the internet for newsletters, I realized it's not obvious. Newsletters are a way to make a lot of money, and that invites a lot of people to the game. There are folks who will spin up newsletters and try to automate every aspect of it without offering any value. All in the hope they can get some advertisers or a quick exit. 

If you're thinking about relying on AI to create and grow your email newsletter, don't. I'm not saying you can't use AI tools to help—that's exactly how you should use them—but if you outsource everything to AI, you won't win. Low-effort newsletters will have low engagement, which will mean you can't sell ad space or exit.

At Ticker Nerd, we spend a lot of time (and money) ensuring our newsletter is outstanding. Low-quality emails don't make it out, poor-performing emails are updated quickly, and our writers are thoroughly screened. We don't take any chances. Not with the level of competition we have.

7. Complex newsletters will publish books

I've noticed that newsletters on complex or niche topics—think: investing, health, self-help, and politics—have started collating their work into books. And it makes sense: they have the audience, trust, and a deep understanding of their topics.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

• What's Our Problem? by Tim Urban: Urban's Wait But Why newsletter (and blog) was super popular and led to a book being published in 2023.

• The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo: Zhuo's newsletter on management and product design contributed to her successful book launch.

• Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal: Abdaal is a YouTuber, but he promotes his book heavily in his newsletter, which has over 245,000 subscribers. 

• The No Book by Tim Ferris: Ferris announced his first book in seven years to 1.5 million people in his weekly newsletter called 5-Bullet Friday.

But once again, this will only work for incredibly high-quality newsletters with a built-in fan following. 

8. Newsletter publishers will focus on building a community

Communities are having a moment, and I think newsletter publishers will jump on the bandwagon and actively prioritize community-building in 2025. After all, engaged communities drive high subscriber retention and create powerful network effects. And, of course, a community can't be replicated by AI-generated content. 

The shift from one-way broadcasting to two-way conversations will help publishers differentiate and capture more value from their most engaged readers.

A couple examples to show you what I mean:

• Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story, has grown his newsletter to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and he recently launched a free Slack community with over 2,500 dedicated fans.

• The Ultra Successful newsletter by Dr. Julie Gurner now has an engaged Reddit community.  

What's next for newsletters?

Even though newsletters are becoming more popular, the mechanics have stayed the same. Find a niche, figure out how to monetize, produce high-quality content, and enjoy the ride. 

And if you're looking for more inspiration when it comes to email newsletters, I suggest checking out Starter Story's list of successful newsletters. Each case study has a detailed analysis breaking down exactly how they came up with the idea, launched, grew, and monetized their newsletter. 

Still on the fence? Agora makes $1 billion per year from its portfolio of email newsletters. 

Related reading:

• The best email newsletter platforms

• How to build an email marketing list

• The best marketing newsletters

This article was originally published in January 2024. The most recent update was in January 2025.

This says a lot about my coolness level, but my favorite way to procrastinate is to tinker with a spreadsheet or database. I can easily spend all day building a complicated budget tracker or fine-tuning a graph in my time-tracking spreadsheet. But not everyone finds joy in these aggressively nerdy pursuits. If you use databases in MySQL, you might not have the time or inclination to manage them manually—especially as your business grows.

When you pair MySQL with automation, you can turn your database into a central source of truth that keeps your data streamlined and up to date across your organization—without spending your day trapped in a spreadsheet. Here are the most popular ways to use automated workflows (called Zaps) to build a custom information management system with MySQL.

Table of contents

• Add leads to MySQL

• Connect MySQL to your spreadsheet app

• Send notifications from MySQL

• Add form responses to MySQL

• Connect records across MySQL

• Use webhooks with MySQL

Add leads to MySQL

Your business probably finds leads from multiple places, like social media and paid ads. If you're using MySQL as your lead-tracking database or customer relationship management (CRM) tool, manually copying and pasting new lead information can quickly become a headache—not to mention unsustainable as your business grows. 

Instead, use one of these Zap templates to funnel all new prospects to your MySQL database. From there, you can qualify leads and reach out to prospective customers from a single reference point.

Connect MySQL to your spreadsheet app

Though they're often thought of as interchangeable, spreadsheets and databases aren't the same thing. There are plenty of reasons why your team might use a database like MySQL alongside a simpler spreadsheet app like Google Sheets. 

Whether you're migrating data from an old spreadsheet tool to MySQL or your team just likes to use multiple spreadsheet-based tools, manual information transfer is risky. Human error is always possible, and even if you avoid typos, your team's time could be spent on more high-value tasks.

Instead, send data to and from MySQL with automation. These Zaps let you create a new row in Google Sheets whenever you add a new row or custom query in MySQL. Or if Google Sheets is your central information hub, send new rows to MySQL with every new row in Sheets.

Send notifications from MySQL

No matter your project or department, one thing stays the same: you have to keep your team in the loop.

MySQL is an excellent central source of truth—but it doesn't do much good if the right people aren't informed about important updates. The app does let you create custom notifications, but they can be tricky to set up if you're not a coding expert. 

Instead, configure a custom automated workflow to notify your Slack channel anytime a new row is created in MySQL. 

Or if your team prefers to communicate over email, these Zaps send a new email automatically whenever a new row is added in MySQL. That way, you keep the right people informed of important database updates.

Add form responses to MySQL

Forms can be an incredibly useful way to collect information, no matter your use case. Perhaps you're running customer surveys, gathering employee feedback, or using intake forms for new feature requests or IT tickets.

But if all those form responses are simply sitting in your Typeform or Unbounce inbox, it's easy to let them build up. You can send them to a MySQL table for easier data management and prioritization. 

These Zaps collect form responses from the most popular form builders and send information directly to your MySQL table.

Connect records across MySQL

What happens when your records relate to each other? For instance, if you use MySQL as both a CRM and inventory tracker, both databases should be updated when an existing customer makes a purchase. The more dynamic your databases are, the richer and more reliable your data becomes—which makes it easier to spot trends and make important business decisions.

Whatever your reason for updating one part of MySQL when another record is added or updated, automation can keep your team's workflows running smoothly. Instead of having to remember to manually update rows for new activity in MySQL, use one of these Zaps to set your database management on autopilot.

Use webhooks with MySQL

One of the things that makes MySQL so useful is that it can be customized to suit a wide variety of business purposes. You might use it to manage your eCommerce product catalogs, organize your customer data, or develop web apps. 

So while Zapier lets you integrate MySQL with thousands of popular tools, it's quite possible that—given the diverse and often technical needs of MySQL users—your app of choice might not (yet!) be available. 

In that case, you can use a webhook to push information from your apps to MySQL based on specified triggers. Try this template to get started!

Boost your productivity with automation

MySQL is a powerful tool in its own right—but the best way to take advantage of your database's full potential is to automate it.

Using Zapier's automated workflows, you can position MySQL as your central source of truth. Easily and instantaneously send information to and from the other apps in your tech stack—whether they're advertising platforms, form builders, communication tools, or other spreadsheet apps.

This article was originally published in February 2023 and was most recently updated in January 2025.

Drills, pliers, safety glasses—these are all must-carry tools for contractors. But don't discount the importance of digital tools. Trade-based businesses increasingly rely on software like ServiceTitan to schedule jobs, track finances, and manage their customer base.

And when you link ServiceTitan to Zapier, admin work gets even easier. Zapier can connect the software to thousands of other apps, and then automate your to-dos into workflows called Zaps. Want to learn some of the most popular ServiceTitan workflows? Keep reading.

Table of contents

• Automatically add leads and bookings

• Use webhooks with ServiceTitan

• Connect ServiceTitan with spreadsheets

• Keep calendars connected with ServiceTitan

• Get notifications for new ServiceTitan activity

Automatically add leads and bookings to ServiceTitan

When it comes to the trades, keeping track of your clients and their scheduled appointments can make or break your reputation. If customers get in touch with you through online ads or a form on your website, you need to be prepared to move incoming leads and bookings into ServiceTitan.

To spend less time at the keyboard and more time out in the field, try automating that process. Use automation to connect your online form with ServiceTitan, so that any new responses instantly appear in the app as a new lead or booking. You can even create a similar workflow if you use email to collect leads.

Create custom ServiceTitan workflows with webhooks

What if your favorite app doesn't offer a Zapier integration? With Webhooks by Zapier, you can connect any app to ServiceTitan—as long as it has an API. 

Let's say you want to add customers to a specific mailing list when they book their first job, but your email platform doesn't integrate with Zapier. You can use Webhooks by Zapier to add the job information from ServiceTitan to your email app. Webhooks are incredibly flexible, so you can create custom workflows that meet your unique needs.

Connect ServiceTitan to your spreadsheet tool

Spreadsheets might seem like the domain of data scientists, but they're handy tools for tradespeople too. If your spreadsheets contain up-to-date information, you can use them to organize customer lists, analyze finances, and back up crucial data. But if you're dealing with a high volume of customers, appointments, and transactions, keeping your spreadsheets current can start to feel like a second job.

That's where automation can be an enormous help. With Zapier, you can connect ServiceTitan to your favorite spreadsheet tool and automatically make updates as data changes. For instance, you can create a Zap that creates a new Google Sheets row every time there's a new customer in ServiceTitan.

Keep calendars connected with ServiceTitan

Great customer service matters in every trade. That means letting customers know when to expect you—and then showing up on time. When you're a sole proprietor, managing your calendar is fairly easy, if a bit annoying. When you're working with a team, though, tracking calendar invites can get complicated fast. 

These Zaps will automatically add a calendar event for each new appointment in ServiceTitan. You can fully customize these events, too—and even include the customer as an invitee.

What if you use a tool like Calendly to let people directly book consultations? This Zap is a great way to manage your availability for non-service-related bookings:

Get notifications for new ServiceTitan activity

You want to respond quickly to lead inquiries, especially if someone is experiencing an emergency—say, a busted AC in the peak of summer. If you're working with a larger team, giving everyone visibility into new ServiceTitan jobs is a great way to encourage promptness and collaboration. Teammates can volunteer to take on appointments, discuss complex issues, and make sure no individual request falls through the cracks. 

Whether your team works primarily in Slack or via email, you can use Zapier to automatically share new jobs with your colleagues. For example, you can create an automated workflow that posts new jobs in a dedicated Slack channel—so everyone can see there's a new customer request.

Level up your trade business with ServiceTitan and Zapier

Automation can do so much for electricians, plumbers, and general contractors. When you transform how you find, manage, and schedule in-the-field jobs, your team can spend more of their time on customer-facing work. 

And these are just a few ways to increase ServiceTitan's impact. What task will you automate first?

Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Teams to the world almost 10 years ago. Since then, it's become the chat app of choice for Windows users—from private companies to government organizations. 

But you still need to switch between Teams and other apps to do things like answer emails and check on sales deals. Context switching is a known productivity killer, so this style of working is far from ideal.

With Zapier, you can build automated workflows (called Zaps) to connect all your frequently used tools. Want to send sales data to a Teams channel as a monthly report? You can automate that. And that's just one example. For more time-saving ideas, keep scrolling.

Skip ahead

• Connect Microsoft Teams to other chat apps

• Create custom Teams workflows with webhooks

• Turn form responses into Microsoft Teams messages

• Share deal updates in Teams channels

• Automatically send scheduled Microsoft Teams messages

• Get notifications for new emails

Connect Microsoft Teams to other chat apps

There are three big players in the chat app space: Teams, Slack, and Discord. Most workplaces use just one. But what if you, a Teams user, need to talk with a customer or cross-functional teammate who uses Slack?

Typing the same messages into two separate chat apps slows you down. With automation, you can connect those apps so messages in one also appear in the other. 

Imagine you're working on a long-term project for a customer, and you need your team and theirs to comment on a revision. Instead of copy-pasting your original Teams message into Slack, you can create a Zap that automatically "forwards" your message to the other chat platform.

Create custom Teams workflows with webhooks

Your organization is unique, and so is your tech stack. Zapier already supports thousands of apps, so it likely already connects with your most critical tools. But what if you use an app that doesn't have a Zapier integration? Or if your automated workflows need a custom trigger?

Use Webhooks by Zapier. It lets you connect Microsoft Teams to any app with an API. For example, you can create an automated workflow that "catches" a webhook from a custom source—like a niche or totally bespoke app—and turns it into a message in Teams. That way, your team can access crucial information, even if the app you use doesn't natively connect to Zapier. 

Turn form responses into Microsoft Teams messages

Forms are one of the best ways to collect leads, demo requests, and appointment bookings. But if you don't follow up promptly, you'll miss out on potential revenue from people ready to see a demo or make a purchase. 

Make it easier for your team to stay on top of new form submissions: Create a Zap that automatically sends new entries to a channel.

You can also send form entries to one person as a direct message. That's a great option if you have a rotating on-call schedule or don't need your whole team monitoring every incoming entry. 

Share deal updates in Teams channels

Automating form submissions helps you respond fast to fresh leads, but that's just the start of your sales process. As leads trickle down the pipeline, you'll want to keep everyone on your team informed without piling on more work.

Luckily, you can share important sales milestones right where your team collaborates. Each time a deal stage updates in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, a Zap can post the details to a Teams channel—so everyone knows what's happening without having to constantly check the CRM.

Automatically send scheduled Microsoft Teams messages 

Sometimes, you need to share information with your team on a regular basis—like a roundup of that week's sales numbers or a reminder about how to close down the office at the end of the day. You could do this in a document or a calendar app, but then people would have to remember to check those places. 

Instead, you can automatically share that information in Microsoft Teams. With Schedule by Zapier, you can build an automated workflow that sends scheduled messages in a channel or via DM. And you can customize the Zap to run hourly, daily, or at an interval of your choice. 

Get notifications for new emails

Fifty years after the invention of email, managing your inbox hasn't gotten much easier. You still need to click out of whatever app you're using, open your inbox, triage your unread messages, and compose a reply. And if you're managing a couple of different inboxes—like your personal email and the support inbox for your company—you can easily miss critical new messages, creating a poor customer experience.

Here's where automation shines. Just connect your email inbox with Microsoft Teams, then get notified about new emails either in a channel or in a DM. If you're working with a team, a Zap like that can really help you share the load.

If you're low on time, or answering mail always drifts to the bottom of your to-do list, add a step that uses ChatGPT to compose a reply. The Zap can send you that reply in Teams to review.

Turn Microsoft Teams into a true work hub with Zapier

Teams can handle so much more than just internal messaging. By connecting the chat app to your entire tech stack, you can cross off business-critical tasks without shifting your attention between multiple windows throughout the day. 

These examples are just the start of what you can do with Teams and Zapier. What will you automate first?

This article was originally published in October 2020. It was most recently updated by Hannah Herman in January 2025.

With the pandemic behind us, many companies are inviting their employees back to the office. But for some employees, once you go remote, you never go back. If you're nodding your head, consider these 50+ companies that are fully remote—and plan on staying that way. Bookmark it for future reference—it'll come in handy in your next job hunt.

Before you apply: Learn how to find and get hired for a remote job.

Remote companies that let you work from anywhere—at a glance

Here's the full list of companies that let you work from anywhere. Keep reading for details on these teams, or scroll to the end for more companies that allow remote work, just with a little less flexibility.

1. Appcues

"We take pride in the skills we bring to the table and strive to deliver excellent experiences for our customers, but we also don't take ourselves too seriously."

Appcues helps companies build personalized product experiences and increase product adoption. They have over 100 employees in 11 countries (and counting!). Employee benefits include a home office budget, equity offerings, and a minimum of ten vacation days every year.

How does the Appcues team hire? Appcues doesn't share much about their recruitment process publicly. A non-negotiable trait is an alignment with their values.

See Appcues job openings.

2. Arkency

"We have a set of tools to make this kind of working possible. You won't miss anything important even if you're working in weird hours. In fact, some of us do."

Arkency is a consulting agency that builds business software, trains programmers, and produces books and webinars. They're always looking for talented coders who can thrive in a remote environment. Employee benefits aren't publicly available.

How does the Arkency team hire? The recruitment process isn't publicly available. But you have to align with three pillars of their culture—anarchy, async, and remote. Another huge advantage is running an active blog.

See Arkency job openings.

3. Automattic

"We're improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech industry."

Automattic is the company behind WordPress, Tumblr, Gravatar, Longreads, and more. They have around 2,000 employees from 90 countries. Employee benefits include a minimum of 25 days off per year, life insurance, and a professional developmental budget.

How does the Automattic team hire? After you submit an interest form or an application, an Automattic employee reviews it. If your qualifications meet the need, there's a Slack interview followed by a 30- to 60-minute Zoom interview. Engineers will also be given a code test. All positions include a paid trial project after this. After the trial project, there's an interview with an executive in the Automattic team. If all goes well, the HR team schedules a time to chat with you and extends an offer. This guide by Automattic goes into more detail about how they hire—along with tips to prepare.

See Automattic job openings.

4. Awesome Motive

"We're a global team with a single mission: help small businesses grow & compete with the big guys."

Awesome Motive is a software and media company helping websites improve their online businesses and workflow. The company has over 330 employees spread across 50 countries. Job benefits include flexible paid time off, life insurance, a perks program, and more.

How does the Awesome Motive team hire? Awesome Motive doesn't publicly share its hiring process. The best way to prepare is to understand the company's mission and values. Attention to detail and simplicity are essential traits for Awesome Motive.

See Awesome Motive job openings.

5. Buffer

"As a member of our team, you will be invited to work wherever you're happiest and most productive."

Buffer is a social media management software to help you store ideas, schedule social posts, and manage campaigns. They have teammates from over 15 countries and 11 time zones. Employee benefits include four-day workweeks, at least three weeks of PTO per year, and free books (along with a Kindle!).

How does the Buffer team hire? The hiring process varies from role to role, but each step is listed in the job description. Value alignment and resonating with Buffer's mission is crucial for the company. Buffer's big on transparency, and their Open blog shares a lot of details on how they work and what they look for in candidates.

See Buffer job openings.

6. Chili Piper

"First, our products reinvented how revenue teams grow and engage with customers. Now we're reinventing what it means to grow professionally for our Pipers."

Chili Piper is a platform for guiding customers through your pipeline with tools like scheduling, chat, and prospect routing. The team consists of more than 160 employees from 36 different countries. Employees get benefits like unlimited vacation time, a stipend to meet coworkers across the world, and help acquiring office equipment.

How does the Chili Piper team hire? If the hiring team approves your application, you’ll go through an initial culture interview. Then, you'll take an assessment to show how you think. From there, you'll have a few interviews with potential teammates and a final executive interview.

See Chili Piper job openings.

7. Constructor

"We are passionate about helping ecommerce and media site owners give their customers a better way to find products more quickly, more easily, and more intuitively."

Constructor is an AI product discovery platform for eCommerce retailers. Their employees are spread across 38 countries at the time of writing. Job benefits include health coverage, unlimited PTO with a minimum of three weeks off per year, and stock options for everyone.

How does the Constructor team hire? The recruitment process isn't publicly available. Constructor values taking initiative and finding the right answer empathetically.

See Constructor job openings.

8. Contra

"We believe in building your career around your lifestyle, not the other way around."

Contra is a freelance marketplace to help connect hiring managers with independent contractors. Employee benefits include medical benefits, no meetings on Wednesdays, and generous time off.

How does the Contra team hire? The interview process is laid out for every role in the job description. Typically, you can expect a 15-20-minute introductory call, followed by a test assignment if your position requires it. If all goes well, there's an hour-long interview with the hiring manager for the role you're applying to. Lastly, there's one last hour-long interview.

See Contra job openings. 

9. Doist

"Doist has been async- and remote-first since day one (back in 2010). We're living proof that this way of working is the future, not a fad."

Doist is the company behind productivity tools like Todoist and Twist. They've been pioneers of async and remote work since 2010. Job benefits include an educational budget, and 40 days of PTO per year.

How does the Doist team hire? If your application passes the internal review, you get your first interview. There's also a test assignment related to your role to assess your skills. There are two more interviews if your test project qualifies for it. The Doist team encourages you to read their blog to understand their values and products—the one about landing a remote job might be particularly useful.

See Doist job openings.

10. DuckDuckGo

"We're on a mission to show the world that protecting privacy can be simple."

DuckDuckGo is a privacy-first internet company. They have a private search engine, a tracker-blocking browser and extension, email protection, and app tracking protection for Android. Currently, DuckDuckGo employs more than 290 people across 15 countries. Job benefits include a $1,250/year professional development budget, location-independent salaries, and office setup reimbursement.

How does the DuckDuckGo team hire? If the application qualifies you as a good match, there's a brief call with the talent manager. There are two paid test projects, and there will be interviews in between these projects and a final chat after. DuckDuckGo has excellent documentation on how they hire and evaluate candidates.

See DuckDuckGo job openings.

11. Float

"We believe that smart time management empowers us to do the best work of our life, while still having a life."

Float is a resource management software for capacity planning. They're a company with more than 50 employees in 20 countries across the globe. Employee benefits include generous paid time off, a home office expense budget, and a health and wellness monthly allowance.

How does the Float team hire? If your application qualifies, there's an introductory call. Post that, there's a technical interview and a call with the hiring manager. In the next round, you speak with the founder. Lastly, the Float team has a brief call with your past employer—and you can do the same by speaking to a Float employee via Slack.

See Float job openings.

12. Ghost

"Everything we do is online. As long as you have wifi, you're all set."

Ghost is a blogging platform—a full-stack web application for running independent publications and newsletters. They're committed to staying small—never growing more than 50 people. Employee benefits include four-day work weeks, unlimited paid time off, and only one to two Zoom calls a week.

How does the Ghost team hire? If your application qualifies, there's an informal call with someone from the Ghost team. The next stage is an interview with the hiring manager, followed by a paid trial project. The last step is a final interview to discuss the trial project.

See Ghost job openings.

13. GitLab

"We strive to create a transparent environment where all team members around the world feel that their voices are heard and welcomed."

GitLab is an AI-powered code collaboration platform. They've been remote since day one. Employee benefits include flexible PTO up to 25 days at a time, a growth and development budget, and parental leaves.

How does the GitLab team hire? The hiring process varies from role to role, but GitLab has a comprehensive handbook, detailing everything you need to know about getting hired and working in the company.

See GitLab job openings.

14. Groove

"From the beaches to the mountains to the desert, our autonomous company culture allows for us to thrive."

Groove is a helpdesk software—a shared inbox for small businesses looking for an alternative to traditional email. The company has been remote for over a decade, with employees from over 30 countries. Employee benefits include paid time off and flexible hours.

How does the Groove team hire? The exact hiring process isn't publicly available, but Groove has a transparent and open blog read by more than 250,000 people on how they hire and run the company—this one about hiring remote employees from the CEO of Groove might be useful.

See Groove job openings (LinkedIn).

15. Kinsta

"Imagine a car enthusiast building their dream ride. That's us with hosting."

Kinsta is a cloud hosting company helping companies and dev teams ship and manage their web projects faster and more efficiently. Employee benefits include a remote working budget, paid time off, and a training budget.

How does the Kinsta team hire? After filling out the application, you may be asked to send a video or complete an assignment. If you get selected in this round, you have an HR interview. After this, there are a couple more interviews with your hiring manager and future teammates. A background check is mandatory if you accept the offer at Kinsta.

See Kinsta job openings.

16. Levity

"We founded this company on the belief that AI should not be the privilege of tech companies that hire and build data science teams."

Levity is an AI platform that builds tools to automate recurring tasks in any workflow. They're fully remote, and employee benefits include unlimited paid time off and effective training.

How does the Levity team hire? The hiring process isn't publicly available. Something that might help: Levity values simplicity in their products and in the way they work.

See Levity job openings.

17. Lightdash

"We're enabling everyone to answer their own data questions."

Lightdash is an open source business intelligence platform for analysts. They're currently a small team of 13—100% remote and plan to remain that way. Employee benefits include equity, a minimum of 28 vacation days, and a personal development budget.

How does the Lightdash team hire? Lightdash doesn't have a publicly available hiring process. Read their jobs page for more information.

See Lightdash job openings.

18. Literal Humans

"We help brands build a content marketing strategy that's future-proof and speaks to customers the way they do – like real people with real voices."

Literal Humans provides content and social media marketing services to companies of all kinds. The agency was started in 2020 with the aim to remain values-driven and results-focused. Job benefits include a four-day workweek, paid vacation (along with company vacation the last two weeks of December), learning resources, and a co-working pass.

How does the Literal Humans team hire? Fill out a short application. If your qualifications match the role requirements, you'll be moved to a 30-minute interview with leadership related to your role. Next, there'd be a paid assignment. If that checks out, you may also have a final interview round of 45 minutes.

See Literal Humans job openings.

19. Liveblocks

"We believe that the best companies invest early and intentionally in a strong, people-centric cultural foundation that is aligned to business goals."

Liveblocks is a real-time collaboration infrastructure for developers. They're a distributed company with employees across ten time zones. Job benefits include flexible paid time off, equity grants, and a physical wellness stipend.

How does the Liveblocks team hire? Liveblocks doesn't have a publicly available hiring process, but their jobs page stresses values like community success, pragmatism, and dedication to your craft.

See Liveblocks job openings.

20. Loomly

"We are in this for the long haul, and we are looking for individuals who share our ambition for creating a sustainable company."

Loomly is a social media planning and scheduling software with creative, collaborative, and analytical tools. They have a small but mighty team of more than 15 employees from six different countries. Employees get benefits like inclusive and flexible paid parental leave, 401K retirement, and healthcare benefits.

How does the Loomly team hire? Loomly doesn't make their hiring process publicly available. According to their careers page, they value employees who take ownership of their work, stay agile, and communicate with intention.

See Loomly job openings.

21. Mailbird

"Our ultimate measure of success is the value we create for our users and team members alike."

Mailbird is an email marketing software for Windows. The company has been fully remote for the last 11 years and has employees from more than 20 nationalities working in over 15 countries. Employee benefits include 40 days of PTO and additional time off for life events like marriage and parenthood.

How does the Mailbird team hire? For some positions, there might be an aptitude test along with the application. If you qualify, there's a 30-minute interview with the recruiter. The next round is a technical assessment—either through multiple interviews or a written test (depending on your role). The final interviews are with the team members and the hiring manager. You can learn more about how Mailbird hires here.

See Mailbird job openings.

22. MailerLite

"Everything we do at MailerLite is designed to provide intuitive solutions for complicated tasks."

MailerLite is an email marketing software company with a remote-first culture. They have 150 people working across more than 40 countries. Employee benefits include an international healthcare payout, 31 vacation days per year, and a $1,000 joy budget to buy whatever sparks joy (after one year).

How does the MailerLite team hire? MailerLite won't ask for your CV. They have a Q&A application you have to fill out to get to the next stage. This consists of job-specific and cultural questions for the MailerLite team to understand you better. The next steps and interview rounds are role-specific.

See MailerLite job openings.  

23. MeetEdgar

"As a global, remote-first company, SureSwift hires people around the world."

MeetEdgar is a social media management tool to create, schedule, and share content. Employee benefits aren't publicly available.

How does the MeetEdgar team hire? The hiring process isn't shared online, but aligning with the company's mission is crucial. The company does background checks for all final candidates.

See MeetEdgar job openings.

24. Modash

"You'll work with people who have done everything from build solar cars to hanging out with Metallica and Bon Jovi."

Modash is an influencer marketing software to help businesses discover, analyze, and track creators and their posts. Their mission is to help every creator earn a living. Employee benefits include unlimited paid time off, personal development budget, and flexible hours.

How does the Modash team hire? The hiring process differs from role to role. In general, you should be fluent in English and willing to work in Europe, Africa, or Middle East time zones.

See Modash job openings.

(If you have the time, don't forget to check out Modash's furry friends on the Careers page. 🐶)

25. Namecheap

"There are unlimited ways you can explore with Namecheap—whether it's the world you're after, or new ground in your career."

Namecheap is a place to buy your domain (and everything else you need). They have over 2,000 employees spread across 22 countries. Some of their roles require you to be in-office or work remotely from a certain location, but most job openings support remote working. Job benefits include a flexible schedule with no time tracking, 25 days of PTO (along with five sick days per month), and a generous parental leave program.

How does the Namecheap team hire? The hiring process differs significantly for each role, but Namecheap places a strong emphasis on understanding and embodying its 21 cultural ideals.

See Namecheap job openings.

26. Omniscient Digital

"We're an organic growth agency that helps marketing leaders at B2B software companies turn content & SEO into growth channels."

Omniscient Digital is a marketing agency for B2B SaaS companies. They're a team of 100% remote content marketing experts who want to play long-term games with long-term people. Learn more about the team's principles here. Job benefits include an annual education stipend, profit sharing (after one year), unlimited time off, and a free books program.

How does the Omniscient Digital team hire? If your application looks interesting, you'll have a short screening call. Next, there'd be three to five interviews with your future colleagues. The third step is an assignment—which can be async or a live project, depending on the role. If all goes well, you'll have a final interview.

See Omniscient Digital job openings.

27. Pitch

"We're on a mission to enable every team's best thinking."

Pitch is a presentation software company enabling people to create beautiful and impactful decks. The company was started by eight co-founders who built and sold Wunderlist to Microsoft. Currently, Pitch has more than 30 employees distributed across the globe. Job benefits include flat hierarchies, an educational stipend, and health programs.

How does the Pitch team hire? If your application passes the first stage, you'll have an introductory call with a member of the Talent Acquisition team. The next stage will be one or two rounds of interviews with your future team members. If all goes well, you'll get a take-home practical assignment followed by a debrief and Q&A on the same. The last interview will be with a senior leader of your future team.

See Pitch job openings.

28. Plus

"We're a team of builders inspired by the ways technology can change how we work."

Plus is an AI-powered Google Slides and PowerPoint add-on to create custom, beautiful presentations in minutes. You can be located anywhere, but you need to work in North American time zones. Employee benefits include insurance and a monthly remote working budget.

How does the Plus team hire? It differs from role to role, but typically, there's an introductory call, followed by a domain-specific interview to assess your skills. Next, there's a project review to work on with the Plus team. In the end, there's a behavior interview. Learn more about how Plus recruits on their blog.

See Plus job openings.

29. Podia

"Help make it possible for everyone to earn a living from their passion."

Podia helps creators sell courses, memberships, coaching programs, and more. Their mission is to enable creators to earn a living from their passion. Employee benefits include unlimited therapy, three weeks of paid vacation, and a paid sabbatical (for a month after every three years).

How does the Podia team hire? After an initial application, candidates are moved to a test project—which is a paid assignment. Selected candidates go through three to four rounds of interviews with the hiring manager, leadership team, the CEO, and future teammates. Final candidates are asked for professional references from a past co-worker and a manager.

See Podia job openings (LinkedIn).

30. Remote

"If you're looking for a feel-good career that allows you to work and make an impact from anywhere in the world, you've come to the right place."

Remote is an HR software to hire, manage, and pay international employees globally. True to its name, Remote has hundreds of employees across more than 75 nationalities. Job benefits include a minimum of four weeks of personal time off and company stock options.

How does the Remote team hire? Each application has the entire process laid down in Remote's job description. In general, there's an interview with the recruiter, followed by an interview with your future manager. If all goes well, there are either more interviews and/or an assignment. The last step is a prior employment verification check. Remote has a public interview guide to help you prepare and stand out in interviews.

See Remote job openings. 

31. SafetyWing

"Join us in building a country on the internet."

SafetyWing provides insurance for digital nomads and remote teams. Their goal is to build a global safety net. SafetyWing has over 100 employees spread across more than 60 countries. Job benefits include a minimum of four weeks paid time off, global health insurance, and $1,000 to $2,500/year of personal developmental budget.

How does the SafetyWing team hire? The hiring process differs from role to role. SafetyWing emphasizes they look for someone who can think for themselves, is eager to try new things, has strong integrity, and aims to contribute to their mission.

See job openings at SafetyWing.

32. ScaleMath

"It is absolutely essential to us that everyone always feels safe to speak their mind."

ScaleMath is a content agency that works with brands to help them improve customer acquisition and experience. Job benefits include 20 paid holidays annually.

How does the ScaleMath team hire? ScaleMath's interviews involve conversations with your potential future colleagues. Final candidates need to complete at-home written exercises.

See ScaleMath job openings.

33. Shogun

"Shogun is a place where you are in the driver's seat of your career."

Shogun is a landing page builder for eCommerce founders, compatible with Shopify and BigCommerce. They've been remote from the beginning and currently have more than 40 employees across the globe. Job benefits include quarterly wellness reimbursement, a home office stipend, and company-sponsored healthcare.

How does the Shogun team hire? The hiring process varies by role, but Shogun offers interview guidelines to help you prepare better. The questions are largely attribute-based—think the "tell me about a time when [situation]" types.

See Shogun job openings.

34. SimpleTexting

"If you can show why you'll make a fantastic addition to our growing team, we'll hire you no matter where you are in the world and support you to become the best at what you do."

SimpleTexting is a text messaging service—enabling two-way SMS marketing for businesses to communicate with their customers. They're fully remote and operate as an international team. Job benefits include a generous PTO policy, birthdays off, and paid parental leave.

How does the SimpleTexting team hire? After the application, if you qualify, there's an introductory video call with the recruiter. You might also be asked to complete a short test if the role requires it. The next rounds consist of interviews with your future team members and hiring manager. SimpleTexting also asks for references and speaks to them to understand your employment history.

See SimpleTexting job openings.

35. Smile

"We're helping small businesses around the world grow sustainably so they can lead more passionate lives."

Smile is a loyalty app, helping businesses convert their first-time customers to forever buyers. Smile employees are all over the world. Employee benefits include a minimum of three weeks of PTO, remote work reimbursement, and stock options.

How does the Smile team hire? Smile doesn't have a publicly available recruitment process. They place a strong emphasis on aligning with their three values. You can also learn more on their Instagram employee page.

See Smile job openings.

36. Sporty Group

"Our mission is to be an everyday entertainment platform for everyone."

Sporty Group is a consumer internet and technology business. Their sites consistently stay on Alexa's list of top websites for the countries they operate in. Job benefits include 28 paid vacation days and quarterly bonuses. Many of their roles require you to work remotely from certain locations (like India Remote or Europe Remote), but they have tons of openings for globally remote roles too.

How does the Sporty Group team hire? The hiring process differs from role to role. In general, there are interviews and/or assignments to assess your technical abilities for the role followed by HR discussions.

See Sporty Group job openings.

37. Springworks

"We are bringing together technology, intelligence and human emotion. We are changing the way we work. We are Springworks."

Springworks is an HR tool to streamline recruitment, onboarding, and employee engagement. Currently, they have over 200 remote employees. Job benefits include work from home setup, health insurance, 30 annual vacation days, and a learning budget.

How does the Springworks team hire? You'll send a completed task and a video pitch in the first step of the recruitment process. After that, there's a call with the recruitment team. If all goes well, there are two interview rounds—first to assess your technical abilities for the role and the second to discuss departmental goals. The last step is an HR round to gauge culture fit and talk through salary expectations.

See Springworks job openings.

38. Storylane

"Join us in revolutionizing product demos, one interactive experience at a time."

Storylane is an interactive product demo software that lets users walk their customers through their product right on their web pages. The Storylane team includes about 40 people located throughout the world. According to Storylane, new employees enjoy benefits like equity and good compensation.

How does the Storylane team hire? Storylane doesn't share much about the hiring process on their website, but they value people who prioritize speed and efficiency and take action. Keep those values in mind as you tailor your application.

See Storylane job openings.

39. TestGorilla

"We envision a world where everyone has their dream job."

TestGorilla is an HR tech startup that replaces CVs with their assessment tests. Started in 2020, they're growing fast and already have over 150 employees in all corners of the globe. Employee benefits include a remote working budget, a learning stipend, and paid time off.

How does the TestGorilla team hire? The hiring process isn't publicly available, but TestGorilla values alignment with its mission and values. They also use their own platform to ensure their recruitment decisions are bias-free.

See TestGorilla job openings.

40. The Shelf

"Our varied experiences & paths towards this company is what gives us our edge…because no matter which client we partner up with, there's always someone who's an expert!"

The Shelf is an influencer marketing agency with its own proprietary software. They went fully remote due to the pandemic and aren't re-opening their offices. Job benefits include reasonable working hours and PTO.

How does The Shelf team hire?  Each job application for The Shelf includes questions related to your qualifications for the role. There's not much publicly available information on what happens after you submit that form, so ask the team what to expect moving forward if you get an interview.

See The Shelf job openings.

(The Shelf has an extensive page about its team and company history. Read it before sending your application to personalize as much as possible!)

41. tl;dv

"If you could catch up on entire meeting recordings in minutes, which meetings will you still attend live?!"

tl;dv is an AI-powered meeting transcription service—that also transcribes your meetings and shares valuable notes. Their vision is to end meeting fatigue. Employee benefits include stock ownership, fun team retreats, and professional growth.

How does the tl;dv team hire? The tl;dv team will get back to you after you send them an email including information about you, why you're interested in joining the team, and what role you want to apply for. They appreciate folks who show their personality (and weirdness) in their application.

See tl;dv job openings.

(If you have the time, tl;dv's Instagram is one of my favorite brand accounts.)

42. Toggl

"We're united by our shared commitment to autonomy and high-quality work."

Toggl is time tracking, project planning, and hiring software. They have employees from over 43 countries in 16 time zones. Employee benefits include paid sabbatical, flexible paid time off, and a home office setup budget.

How does the Toggl team hire? Toggl does a skill test of each candidate through their own software, Toggl Hire. If you qualify, the next stage is a cultural interview with the Talent Acquisition team. The next stage is a technical interview, depending on the role you're applying for. After that, you'll be "hired" for the next week for about three to five days to get a sense of actually working at Toggl (this week is paid for). If all goes well, you get an offer.

See Toggl job openings.

43. Tortuga

"We believe that sharing a mission is more important than sharing an office."

Tortuga is a travel company selling travel backpacks, laptop backpacks, and other travel accessories. The company has been working remotely for over a decade. Job benefits include medical insurance, unlimited vacation, and free travel gear.

How does the Tortuga team hire? Tortuga's recruitment stages differ from role to role. An interview of Tortuga's CEO lays down the general process: a phone screening of qualified applicants, followed by a role-based and a value-based interview.

See Tortuga job openings. 

44. Whereby

"Come and join our team on a mission to build a world in which anywhere works."

Whereby is a way to connect over video—whether that's via meetings or integrating videos into your website, app, or product. They're fully remote, although most of the team is based out of Europe. Job benefits include healthcare benefits, uncapped annual leaves, and a $3,000/year remote working budget.

How does the Whereby team hire? If your application qualifies, there's a brief and informal 30-minute introductory call. The next stages are three to four hour-long interviews with members of the Whereby team. Then there's a paid working task, often with an hour of discussing your project. There might be coffee meets in between with your future colleagues, and the last step is a 30-60-minute interview with an executive. Whereby has a detailed Notion directory of how they work and hire. The one sharing the interview process (with examples!) might be particularly helpful.

See Whereby job openings.

45. YNAB (You Need A Budget)

"We are intentional about creating an environment where everyone gets to do important work they love."

YNAB is a finance management app. They have their team spread all over the work—U.S. and U.K. employees register as employees, everyone else as independent contractors. Employee benefits include a four-day workweek, a minimum of three weeks vacation per year, and profit sharing.

How does the YNAB team hire? If your application qualifies, you go through a culture questionnaire (called CQ). The next stage is a couple of rounds of interviews with your future manager and questionnaires. YNAB shared more about how to get a job in their company in one of their podcasts.

See YNAB job openings.

46. Zapier

"We're humans who think computers should do more work."

Zapier helps you automate your business-critical workflows by connecting your favorite web apps. With Zapier-powered app integrations, you can move info between your apps automatically, so you can focus on your best work.

Zapier has always been remote (here's why) and currently has about 800 employees across 38 countries. Job benefits include flexible time off, one annual company retreat to an awesome place, and retirement plans with employer match. Learn more about the total rewards program at Zapier.

How does the Zapier team hire? You're asked to answer a few questions online to match your qualifications for the role. After the hiring team reviews your applications based on a job-specific rubric, they'll invite you to an interview with a recruiter. From there, you'll have interviews with the hiring team and a skills assessment. The best part? Zapier strives to never let more than seven days go by without letting you know the status of your application. Goodbye, job ghosting.

See Zapier job openings.

Note: Due to regulatory risks, U.S. trade embargoes, financial sanctions, and security reasons, Zapier doesn't make full-time hires from these countries.

47. Zyte

"We eat data for breakfast. You can eat your breakfast anywhere and work for Zyte."

Zyte is a web scraping service that also created Scrapy Cloud—a cloud-based web crawling platform that helps developers gather data from billions of web pages. They have over 250 employees working from more than 28 countries. Job benefits include a learning and development budget, paid time off, and covered wellness expenses.

How does the Zyte team hire? Zyte doesn't have a publicly available hiring process. Read the company's about and jobs pages to get familiar with its values to prepare for the hiring process.

See Zyte job openings.

Bonus: 44 more remote companies that hire from specific locations or time zones

The companies above are fully remote—they hire globally from around the world, with no restrictions. But many other companies living the fully remote lifestyle hire from specific locations or require you to work from a certain time zone. Here are 44 of them.

1. 10up: Certain positions require you to be from a specific location. Fully remote roles are also available.

2. 15Five: Fully remote, but only in the U.S.

3. Aha!: Each role hires candidates from certain locations—North America, South America, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and South Africa.

4. Articulate: Fully remote, but only in the U.S. 

5. Atticus: Any position can be remote, but only in the U.S.

6. BOLD: Fully remote for employees in the U.S.

7. Chameleon: Fully remote, but each role has a location restriction of either the U.S., Canada,  Brazil, or the Americas.

8. Deel: Has time-zone restrictions to either EMEA or LATAM. Few positions also require you to be in-office.

9. Descript: Plenty of remote positions available, but all employees must be local to the San Francisco area.

10. Dock: Fully remote, but some positions require you to work remotely from SF.

11. DoubleCloud: Fully remote, but location restrictions and a hybrid model.

12. Dribbble: Fully remote, but only hire from the U.S. and Canada.

13. ezCater: Remote-first with hybrid work options for people in the Boston and Denver areas.

14. Firstbase: Remote roles are restricted to the U.S., U.K., or E.U. Few locations also require you to come in-office.

15. Fleetio: Remote-friendly and has employees from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Might have a location preference for the U.S.

16. Gametime: Remote-first with offices in SF and Portland. Few locations require you to work remotely from specific locations.

17. GRIN: Fully remote, but some roles have location requirements.

18. Grow Therapy: Few roles require you to be in the NY office. Most roles hire remotely from the U.S. only.

19. Help Scout: Remote-first, but hires from only the United States, Canada, Australia, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, and Norway.

20. Hims: Fully remote, but only in the U.S.

21. Hoop: Fully remote, but only in the U.S.

22. Hubstaff: Fully remote, but certain roles require you to be from a specific location or work in a certain time zone.

23. Joy: Fully remote, but certain roles might require you to be in-office.

24. Kit: Fully remote, but only in the U.S. or U.K.

25. Knack: Fully remote, but almost all roles have a location restriction from where you can/can't work remotely.

26. Kona: Fully remote, but it's uncertain if they hire from across the globe.

27. Lumos: Fully remote, but you must live within four hours of Pacific Time.

28. Notably: Remote-first, but employees must either be based out of Europe or live in the Eastern time zone in the U.S.

29. Oliva: You need to be based in the E.U. or U.K. to apply here. Few roles also might require you to be in-office.

30. OnTheGoSystems: Fully remote, but you need to be available in Europe, Middle East, or Africa working hours.

31. Pixyle.ai: Remote working is available, but it's uncertain whether it's across the globe, or only in the E.U.,U.K., and the U.S.

32. Planhat: Remote-first, but some roles have location or time zone restrictions.

33. Real Chemistry: Members of regional teams work fully remote with quarterly meetups.

34. Shopify: Some roles may require you to work remotely only from the Americas or a specific country. Few positions are also in-office.

35. Sketch: Fully remote, but only for people in the U.S. or E.U.

36. Slite: Fully remote, but you need to be located in the -5h UTC or UTC +2 time zone.

37. SnapDocs: Fully remote, but only in the U.S.

38. Tettra: Fully remote, but only in the U.S.

39. Tidio: 100% remote work available, but only for people in the E.U. or U.S.

40. Toptal: Fully remote, but some roles require you to be based out of the U.S.

41. Upwork: Remote working available for 21 states in the U.S. Few roles require you to be in-office.

42. Uscreen: Remote-first, but you must live within four to eight hours of the Eastern time zone in the U.S., depending on the role. A few roles require you to be on-site.

43. VEED: Fully remote, but you must be in the U.K., the Netherlands, the U (sales team), or the Philippines (support team).

44. Vidyard: All remote roles require you to be either in the U.S. or Canada.

There are too many other companies to mention here that support remote work, so for further help finding a company that will let you work from home or anywhere else, see:

• This list of over 900 startups that hire remotely via Remotive

• This list of 1,000+ companies actively hiring remote jobs via Remote Work Academy

• 100+ remote work resources for finding a remote job via Tamilore Oladipo

Related reading:

• The ultimate guide to remote work

• The best resume builder

• How to use ChatGPT to write a cover letter (with prompts)

This article was originally published in May 2017 by Melanie Pinola and has also had contributions from Melissa King. The most recent update was in January 2025.

Reddit is everyone's favorite place to learn and chat about niche subjects—and Reddit karma demonstrates your ability to add value to those Reddit interactions. Redditors put a lot of weight behind users' ability to be genuine—especially if they represent a business—so while a high karma score doesn't automatically lead to trust, it'll help you become a legitimate member of the Reddit community.

To get more karma on Reddit, you have to play by Reddit's rules. Here's how.

What is Reddit karma?

Reddit karma is a user score that represents how much you've contributed to the Reddit community. Whenever you get an upvote on a comment or post, you earn karma. Meanwhile, getting a downvote decreases your karma.

How do you get Reddit karma?

Redditors give each other upvotes and downvotes using the arrows under a post or comment, as you can see in these screenshots from r/blackcats.

How is Reddit karma calculated?

Karma falls into two categories: post karma and comment karma. Reddit lists both of these numbers on your profile.

Here's what they look like on Chef J. Kenji López-Alt's profile.

What does Reddit karma do?

Mostly, Reddit karma is about building trust on Reddit. Whether you're an individual or a business, it shows just what kind of redditor you are.

It's also worth noting that some communities have karma minimums for posting, meaning that you'll need to earn karma to make content in some parts of Reddit.

How to get karma on Reddit

With that, here are nine ways to get karma on Reddit.

1. Identify subreddits to focus on

Reddit consists of communities called subreddits covering topics from frugality to television shows to Star Wars prequel memes. If you're an individual, follow whatever niche topics interest you. If you're a creator or a business, start your Reddit journey by following subreddits related to the following:

• Your industry. While the most popular subreddits tend to be consumer-focused, there are also plenty of industry-specific communities like r/marketing. You can also look for consumer-centric subreddits related to your industry, such as a home gardening subreddit if you're in the gardening industry.

• Your product. Keep an eye out for subreddits that relate to your product, too. If you sell embroidery floss at your craft store, for example, you could join r/Embroidery.

• Your location. If your business has a local element to it, there are plenty of regional subreddits out there, like Richmond, Virginia's r/rva.

As you follow and visit different subreddits across the site, your feed will recommend relevant communities, helping you find even more to join. You can also use a tool like Anvaka to discover potential subreddits.

Pay careful attention to each subreddit's rules as you post and comment in them—especially any rules related to promotion. You can see how a micro-bakery owner was able to raise awareness about their business on r/baking by sharing their feature on the news without any promotional information. The community usually doesn't allow self-promotion, but the moderators didn't mind this case because it "doesn't seem too self-promote-y."

2. But don't be afraid to participate in larger subreddits

Besides the niche-centric subreddits, there are also much larger communities on Reddit that cover broad topics like humor or wholesomeness. Large and popular subreddits like r/funny or r/todayilearned can also be good sources of karma because they expose your content to so many people. Pay attention to what redditors typically post and comment in these communities, and follow their lead.

You can use Zapier to find relevant posts in larger subreddits to comment on. Here are some pre-built workflows to help you keep up on Reddit content.

3. Have genuine interactions

Once you find subreddits to post on, post and comment with genuine interaction as your top priority. If you're representing a business, it can be tempting to show off your product in every piece of your Reddit content, but redditors are very wary of promotional content. Instead, think of Reddit as a place to build trust and connections—you'll drive many more people your brand's way.

For example, J. Kenji López-Alt spreads awareness of his career as a chef by sharing his opinions and expertise in cooking-related subreddits. You can hardly tell he's a creator in the first place without looking at his username. Here he is, offering advice related to one of his own recipes without being directly asked.

4. Post at the right time for your subreddits

Like any other form of social media, Reddit has optimal times for posting. But instead of being platform-wide, these best times vary by subreddit. Check the ideal posting time for your subreddits using Later for Reddit's Top Post Analysis tool.

Enter the subreddit's name, and this tool will break down the posting days and times of its top posts. 

5. Comment on new and rising posts

One of the biggest obstacles to getting karma is visibility. You could have the best comment or post, but if it gets buried under other content, no one will even see it. That's why, if you're karma-hunting, it's best to stick with posts that are brand new or rising. If you know how to smell a winner early, you can get maximum visibility with minimum competition.

Zapier can let you know right away if there's a new hot post in the top 10 of a subreddit. That'll let you jump on it more quickly to earn karma.

6. Always respond to keep the conversation going

If someone comments on your post, give them a reply, even if just to say thanks. This makes the commenter more appreciative, increasing the likelihood of upvotes in the future. Plus, it shows others that you're willing to respond, increasing your comments overall.

As you grow your presence on Reddit, you'll also get comments mentioning your username from people who want to show you a post or recommend you for something. These comments are especially important to respond to because they involve someone who wants to hear from you. You can automatically keep track of them with these Zaps.

7. Post good content

At the end of the day, the best way to get upvotes is to post good content. Social media skills can go a long way on Reddit: if you post the kind of content your audience wants, you'll have no problem earning karma.

Some basics in social media posting:

• Improve the quality of your titles. Reddit users respond well to upfront, easy-to-understand titles with a personal angle. For example, if you're sharing the results of your content marketing report on r/marketing, you could use the title "Here's what my team discovered about small business content marketing workflows."

• Use high-quality visuals. Upgrading the quality of your photos, videos, and GIFs makes your post more appealing. Reddit doesn't have an ideal image size or ratio because it presents each image in its original ratio. As you upload, keep in mind that your image should be under 20MB in size if it's a static image and under 100MB if it's a GIF.

• Aim for emotional connections. Particularly when having conversations in the comments, don't be afraid to show your human side.

8. Repurpose helpful and meaningful content

Reddit does work as a repurposing channel for social media, but like with any other aspect of Reddit posting, you need to play by the community's rules.

Social media marketer Jaskaran Singh gained more than 500 upvotes across multiple subreddits on an r/socialmedia post he repurposed from a blog post about the Instagram algorithm. He chalks his success up to the fact that he curated information from his post in a Reddit-friendly format.

"The key to successfully repurposing your content on Reddit is understanding how the community discusses those topics. I tracked that and I deleted the elements that would not interest them. [I tried] to keep the post to the point," Jaskaran says. If you plan on repurposing a blog post, he also suggests using a Reddit post title that hints at a backstory instead of using the original article's title as-is.

9. Tread carefully with promoted posts

Reddit offers the option to pay for promoted posts that appear on users' home feeds. Since these posts can also earn karma, they may seem like an easy way to earn those reputation points. But the opposite is often true: redditors judge these paid posts much more harshly than regular posts because of their promotional nature. For example, they rallied against a Pete Davidson ad from Taco Bell in 2022 because it was all over the platform.

Pay careful attention to the principles of Reddit marketing if you decide to make a promoted post. Keeping things personal and down-to-earth is key here. One of my favorite promoted posts got thousands of karma points because the author was transparent, communicative, and understood the tone and voice of a typical Reddit post.

Community first, promotion second

Reddit is a community-first platform, so create content with the goal of building your community over selling your product. Stay transparent and down-to-earth, and you'll build trust with your fellow redditors. You'll do best as an individual who happens to have a business rather than a business with an individual behind it.

Related reading:

• How to keep up with Reddit with automation

• Find Out When Your Website is Linked to on Reddit

• The Journalist's Guide to Keeping Track of Local Subreddits 

This article was originally published by Matt Ellis in May 2019. The most recent update was in January 2025.

When you're running a high-volume YouTube channel, time is of the essence. You need to get content live fast, but you also need to manage your files properly so you're not left with a huge mess on your hands later. But when you have limited time or a small team, you might think you need to sacrifice organization for speed.

With automation, you don't! If you connect Google Drive to YouTube with Zaps—Zapier's automated workflows—a video uploaded to Google Drive can be live on your YouTube page in seconds, complete with title, description, and the right settings. Here's how.

How to upload new videos in Google Drive to YouTube

Zapier lets you create automated workflows called Zaps, which send your information from one app to another. You can create your own Zap from scratch without any coding knowledge, but we also offer quick templates to get you started. 

If you'd like to start with a template, click on it below, and you'll be taken to the Zap editor. You'll need to create a Zapier account if you don't already have one. Then, follow the directions below to set up your Zap.

Don't use Google Drive? No problem! You can follow these same basic steps to upload YouTube videos from the other apps you use. Here are some templates to get you started:

Before you begin

There are two things you need to know before setting up your Zap. First, the title of your video in Google Drive will become the title of the YouTube video when it's uploaded with this Zap, so make sure any videos you want to upload to YouTube are appropriately titled when you add them to your drive.

Second, each video needs a description before it's uploaded. Fortunately, files in Google Drive also support descriptions (up to 25,000 characters), which the Zap will turn into the YouTube description automatically. 

To add a description to your Google Drive file, right-click the video file in Google Drive and go to File Information > Details. Scroll down and add the text in the Description field.

Set up your Google Drive trigger

First, set up your trigger step—the event that starts your Zap. Search for and select Google Drive for your trigger app and New File in Folder for your trigger event. If you're using the Zap template, these will be selected for you. Next, sign in with your Google Drive account, if you haven't already, then click Continue.

It's now time to select the Google Drive folder where you store your YouTube videos. In the Drive field, select the drive where you'll store your video files. In the Folder field, select the appropriate folder. 

Now, it's time to test your trigger step. If you haven't already, make sure you have at least one video in the folder you selected to properly test your step. Zapier will use this info to set up the rest of your Zap.

Click Test trigger. Then select a record from the list, and click Continue with selected record. 

Once the test runs successfully, you're ready to set up the action step.

Set up your YouTube action

Next, we'll customize the action step. An action is an event a Zap performs after it's triggered. Select YouTube for your action app and Upload Video as your action event, which will be selected for you if you're using the Zap template. Then, connect your YouTube account, if you haven't already, and click Continue.

Now it's time to customize your action step. If you're using the Zap template, the Title, Description, and Video fields will already be filled in with data mapped from your previous Google Drive step. You can customize the content of these fields by clicking on the + sign in each field and selecting different data from the modal. You can also type in static text that will show up the same way every time the Zap runs.

By default, Zapier will upload the video in Private mode. If you want, you can select Public in the Privacy Status field to make the video live as soon as it's uploaded.

Optionally, you can also set the date and time for uploading the video. This feature is only available for YouTube Partner accounts, and it will only work if you set the Privacy Status to Private. 

You can also select a Category for the video and add Tags so YouTube can start processing your video instantly (only add these if you plan to use the same tags for all your videos). 

You can also choose if the video is Made for Kids. Lastly, choose if you want to notify your subscribers about the new video from the Notify Subscribers menu. Once you're happy with the setup, click Continue.

Next, test your action step by clicking Test step. Note that unlike with your action step, which showed test data from your own Google Drive, this test will run using a sample video from Zapier's YouTube account. This is done in accordance with YouTube's upload rules and to deter spammers. 

Once the test runs successfully, you're ready to use your Zap. Once the Zap is live, it will run using your own data and accounts rather than the Zapier YouTube account.

Once the Zap is live, it will successfully upload a new video to YouTube each time you add a new file to your Google Drive folder. Here's what ours looks like:

Now, going forward, any video that you upload to the Google Drive folder will automatically show up in your YouTube account. 

This article was originally published in October 2023 and was most recently updated in January 2025.

If you've experimented at all with AI, you'll know it's a handy assistant when it comes to certain tasks, like writing code or qualifying leads. But when you pair AI with automation—that's when you'll start seeing the full benefits across your entire operations.

Picture this: You attend a call with a potential prospect who shows interest in your product. After you hang up, AI sifts through the conversation, pulling out key details like pain points and specific needs. The information is then automatically logged in your CRM, and a personalized outreach email is drafted based on the lead's preferences and behavior. Finally, your sales team in Slack receives a notification, so the right team member can trigger the outreach. 

These aren't the efforts of a hyper-organized, overly caffeinated employee, but AI and automation combined.   

Connecting your AI tools to the rest of your tech stack (be that with chatbots, AI-powered agents, or workflows) is a game-changer. It doesn't just knock out the tasks that eat into your day (and soul). It's the smartest way to scale your impact and bring your business true value. Here's how.

Table of contents

• It keeps you (and your apps) from working in a silo

• It helps bring your automation ideas to life

• It helps you scale your business and impact—faster

• It helps you focus on the work that matters 

It keeps you (and your apps) from working in a silo

Every app you use at work serves its purpose. (They wouldn't be part of your core tech stack if they didn't.) 

But the problem is that every tool is its own task for us to manage. Especially when the apps in your stack don't automatically "talk" (or integrate) with one another. All the data stored in one app, for example, doesn't make it into another without a manual transfer.

That may not be a big deal at first. But as your tech stack grows, keeping track of the tools your team is using—and syncing the data between them (without error)—is no easy feat. Downloading a .CSV file and then uploading it to another platform can quickly become how you spend most of your day. 

The same goes for the processes that involve your AI tools. 

As an example, I've been using AI tools like ChatGPT to create blog article outlines, write product descriptions, and come up with blog ideas. 

But I don't actually spend time within ChatGPT's interface conversing with the bot. I let Zapier (and my other apps) do the talking for me.  

By connecting my favorite apps to ChatGPT, I can create simple workflows that let those apps talk with one another and carry out actions. Zapier can collect a blog topic from a brief in Asana, for example, then prompt ChatGPT to create an article outline, and finally paste those results into a Google Doc—no human intervention necessary. 

When your AI tools and the rest of your tech stack work together, you can build better processes that automatically move information from one app to another—eliminating the time you spend hopping between tools. 

It helps bring your automation ideas to life

By bringing AI to the workflows you use every day (involving apps like Slack, Notion, or HubSpot), you can build smarter workflows that solve your unique business problems. That's a given. 

But what if you struggle to bring your automation ideas to life or you're not sure which business processes you should be automating in the first place?

The magic of AI is that it can suggest the right workflows for the job—then have it build those solutions for you. (Tools like Zapier Canvas and Copilot have got this locked down.) That means even if you have virtually zero automation experience, you can use AI to help you finesse and visualize your business-critical processes, and get recommendations and assistance through every step of the way.  

This makes automation so much more actionable, because you can describe a workflow or problem in the simplest of terms, and chat with AI to come up with—then build—the solution, including the right apps for the job. 

That makes automation actionable to everyone, regardless of their technical background. By letting AI do the heavy lifting, you'll be moving your business forward in ways that were never possible before. 

It helps you scale your business and impact—faster

Automation doesn't just streamline your AI processes. It also speeds them up. 

We all know that, as your business grows, the volume of data you handle will increase. Trying to make sense of growing information—and then learning from it—could take your team weeks, months, maybe forever. 

Using AI and automation together means creating mission-critical systems that collect data automatically, identify certain patterns, and then offer up insights in an expedited way. And, on the flipside, because you can train AI on your own knowledge sources, it can follow tailored instructions to summarize, categorize, and relay information at scale—all without compromising your team's personal productivity.

And this doesn't just apply to your business's overall strategy. AI can help you improve your customer, marketing, and sales experiences, while automation can help you scale them. 

By leveraging tools like Zapier Chatbots or Zapier Agents, you can create bots and agents that access your live knowledge sources and work across 7,000+ apps. That way, they can answer support questions and resolve tickets (even when your team is away). 

For example, you can train these digital agents to write personalized sales emails and send them out at scale. Instead of firing off hurried emails whenever a new lead lands in your pipeline, your AI-powered teammates can take care of it so you're automatically reaching out to 100 times more folks as soon as they show interest. 

In business, where speed to lead can make all the difference between a purchase and a missed opportunity, that's a game-changer. 

From handling more customer queries to creating marketing campaigns that reach a larger audience, you can give your business scale-up superpowers—even if you have limited resources.

It helps you focus on the work that matters 

Let's be clear: AI and automation shouldn't replace every single aspect of your job.  

What it should do is change how you work. 

As a writer, combining AI and automation has helped me knock a lot of admin off my plate, freeing me up to focus on more creative, strategic work like writing long-form articles and defining content strategy. 

Not only am I doing more of what I enjoy, but it also has the happy side-effect of increasing my productivity, as I'm not fighting email fatigue or getting side-tracked. 

By entrusting AI and automation to deal with time-consuming, monotonous tasks (like combing through data or sorting through your email inbox), you'll be able to pursue higher-value tasks that require higher-level thinking—and the more complex problems that arise in your business.

Ultimately, by using AI and automation in tandem, you can address business problems, ultimately driving greater efficiency and creating room for innovative solutions.

Power your business with AI and automation 

Eager to start using AI and automation together to streamline and supercharge your work processes? Discover some of the best ways you can leverage AI and automation with our AI tools:

• Visualize, plan, and automate business-critical processes with Zapier Canvas.

• Teach AI agents to work across your favorite apps with Zapier Agents.

• Create custom AI chatbots to engage customers and take action with Zapier Chatbots.

• Discover which AI tools to use and when with Zapier.

This article was originally published in September 2023. It was most recently updated in January 2025.

Twitter is dead. Sure, Elon Musk has rebranded the app it used to be as X, but the vibe has totally changed. Instead of being weird in a good way, X now feels weird in kind of a bad way. While there were always different communities using Twitter, the boundaries between them have been torn down. Unless you're into politics, tech startups, culture wars, and bad memes, X probably isn't the community you're looking for anymore. 

Which is where Bluesky comes in.

Bluesky is the closest thing to old Twitter going. It's not a one-to-one replica, but it's attempting to recreate the same eclectic feeling. To many people, it seems like it's succeeding.

So, let's dig in and look at what Bluesky is, how it's different from X, and whether it has a future.

Table of contents:

• What is Bluesky social?

• What makes Bluesky different?

• Bluesky vs. Twitter

• How to sign up for Bluesky

• Is Bluesky the future of social media?

• Automate Bluesky

• Bluesky FAQ

What is Bluesky social?

Bluesky is an open and decentralized social network. It's essentially modeled on Twitter, which means:

• Everyone gets a profile and a username/handle. 

• You can follow other users, and other users can follow you.

• Anyone can create a post. It can be text, an image, a meme, a video, a GIF, a link to something, or any other normal kind of social media post. Posts have a maximum of 300 characters.

• You can reply to most posts, repost them, or repost them with a comment. 

• You can send direct messages to other users.

• There are hashtags and likes and all those other social network bits. 

In short, Bluesky is really, really similar to Twitter and every other Twitter alternative, including Mastodon, Threads, and X. For all that, though, there are still some things it does differently.

What makes Bluesky different?

Bluesky is attempting to build "an open foundation for the social internet." In practice, this means that the tech underlying Bluesky is open for anyone to build on top of, and users get a lot more control over what they see in their feeds. Let's take these one by one. 

Bluesky's tech is open 

Bluesky has developed the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Proto). It's a federated protocol, so other developers can operate alternative servers that can interoperate with Bluesky. (This is similar to how Mastodon/Threads use ActivityPub, but they aren't interoperable.)

The first place you'll encounter this is when you sign up to Bluesky. Account handles include both a username and a domain name. For example, my Bluesky account is @harryguinness.bsky.social. The vast majority of people are also on bsky.social, but you'll occasionally see users with a different host. If you have the technical chops, you can also set one up yourself. 

This also extends to things like client apps. While there's an official Bluesky app, there are also third-party apps that offer a different experience. 

The one caveat to all this is that Bluesky is very much in its infancy. While other developers can build on top of Bluesky, there aren't yet loads of alternative hosts and apps that offer their own take on a Twitter-like social network. 

Bluesky gives users control over their experience

The other area where Bluesky sets itself apart is with how much control you get over the content you see.

Like other social networks, Bluesky is based around feeds. The difference is that you can subscribe to different kinds of feeds on Bluesky, or even create your own. If you don't like what the amorphous algorithm is serving, you don't have to accept it.

By default, Bluesky gives you two feeds: an algorithmic Discover feed and a chronological Following feed. But it also suggests new feeds for you to check out. To give you an idea of the kinds of feeds available, here are some that I've liked:

• Popular With Friends: A feed of content that the people you follow have liked or engaged with. 

• Science: A curated feed of science content. Approved scientists and science communicators can share posts with a test tube emoji, and they appear in this feed. (Some other feeds work the same way.)

• Mutuals: Posts from people who follow you back. 

• Pinned: A feed of posts I've replied to with the thumbtack emoji.

You can find more than 45,000 feeds to subscribe to on Goodfeeds or, if you've got the programming knowledge, build your own. 

On top of all this, Bluesky has strong block and mute tools. You can subscribe to public block and mute lists, mute or block individual users, and mute or block specific phrases or words.

And Bluesky also allows for third-party moderation services that automatically label or hide content. For example, there's a service that labels users who share a lot of AI-generated content as well as Bluesky's official moderation service. (It's worth noting that while this is a great idea, it doesn't seem to be as widely implemented or easy to use as it needs to be to make it effective.)

Combined, all these features mean that Bluesky gives you a lot of control over what you're going to see in the app. Not everything works quite as well as I'd like, nor is Bluesky anywhere near as popular as Twitter was at its height. But if it continues to take off, these features allow for an exciting and vibrant public square.

Bluesky vs. Twitter

On the surface, Bluesky is very similar to Twitter (now called X). They're both (mostly) public social networks that are based around one-to-many communication. But there are a handful of key distinctions that make them very different social networks. 

• Bluesky strives to be open and distributed; X is controlled by a single company. 

• Bluesky doesn't allow ads (though it has a premium subscription in the works).

• Bluesky allows you to use third-party apps and services.

• Bluesky gives you a lot more control over what content you see.

• Bluesky has a significantly smaller number of users; a lot of the people you can follow on X just aren't there yet. 

• Bluesky has an open API, so it's significantly easier to automate with Zapier and other tools. 

If all this sounds good, then Bluesky is probably worth checking out. 

How to sign up for Bluesky

Bluesky is really easy to sign up for:

1. Head to the Bluesky web app or download the iOS or Android app (or grab a third-party app). 

2. Sign up for an account.

3. Follow the onboarding to get started. 

Unfortunately, there's no reliable way to automatically import the people you follow on X or even find your phone contacts. Unless you do things manually, starting on Bluesky means starting from scratch. 

Is Bluesky the future of social media?

Bluesky is having a major moment. It's reminding a lot of people of what Twitter used to be like in the early days. Of course, Bluesky has a long way to go. It has a fraction of X's users, and the platform, while making big promises, is still under development. There are also multiple other social networks, including X, Mastodon, and Threads, that are all vying to be Twitter's successor in cultural relevance. 

Automate Bluesky

One of the reasons you might choose Bluesky over X is that its open API means you can connect it to Zapier to automate your workflows. Automatically create new posts on Bluesky based on activity in your other apps, or send Bluesky posts to the other apps you use most. Get started with one of these pre-made templates.

Bluesky FAQ

Bluesky is still a baby app, so you might still have some questions. Here are some answers.

Who owns Bluesky?

Not Elon Musk. Bluesky is owned by CEO Jay Graber (the biggest shareholder) and other employees, though it was originally founded by former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey.

How many users does Bluesky have?

The Bluesky user count currently stands at more than 20 million. Seems like a lot, but X has more than 300 million, so Bluesky is still playing a lot of catch up.

Is Bluesky free?

Yep. And currently, there aren't even ads to support it. There is a premium subscription in the works, though.

Related reading:

• The best social media management tools

• A Notion social media planner to plan and track your content

• How to monetize LinkedIn with brand partnerships

Twitter is dead. Sure, Elon Musk has rebranded the app it used to be as X, but the vibe has totally changed. Instead of being weird in a good way, X now feels weird in kind of a bad way. While there were always different communities using Twitter, the boundaries between them have been torn down. Unless you're into politics, tech startups, culture wars, and bad memes, X probably isn't the community you're looking for anymore. 

Which is where Bluesky comes in.

Bluesky is the closest thing to old Twitter going. It's not a one-to-one replica, but it's attempting to recreate the same eclectic feeling. To many people, it seems like it's succeeding.

So, let's dig in and look at what Bluesky is, how it's different from X, and whether it has a future.

Table of contents:

• What is Bluesky social?

• What makes Bluesky different?

• Bluesky vs. Twitter

• How to sign up for Bluesky

• Is Bluesky the future of social media?

• Automate Bluesky

• Bluesky FAQ

What is Bluesky social?

Bluesky is an open and decentralized social network. It's essentially modeled on Twitter, which means:

• Everyone gets a profile and a username/handle. 

• You can follow other users, and other users can follow you.

• Anyone can create a post. It can be text, an image, a meme, a video, a GIF, a link to something, or any other normal kind of social media post. Posts have a maximum of 300 characters.

• You can reply to most posts, repost them, or repost them with a comment. 

• You can send direct messages to other users.

• There are hashtags and likes and all those other social network bits. 

In short, Bluesky is really, really similar to Twitter and every other Twitter alternative, including Mastodon, Threads, and X. For all that, though, there are still some things it does differently.

What makes Bluesky different?

Bluesky is attempting to build "an open foundation for the social internet." In practice, this means that the tech underlying Bluesky is open for anyone to build on top of, and users get a lot more control over what they see in their feeds. Let's take these one by one. 

Bluesky's tech is open 

Bluesky has developed the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Proto). It's a federated protocol, so other developers can operate alternative servers that can interoperate with Bluesky. (This is similar to how Mastodon/Threads use ActivityPub, but they aren't interoperable.)

The first place you'll encounter this is when you sign up to Bluesky. Account handles include both a username and a domain name. For example, my Bluesky account is @harryguinness.bsky.social. The vast majority of people are also on bsky.social, but you'll occasionally see users with a different host. If you have the technical chops, you can also set one up yourself. 

This also extends to things like client apps. While there's an official Bluesky app, there are also third-party apps that offer a different experience. 

The one caveat to all this is that Bluesky is very much in its infancy. While other developers can build on top of Bluesky, there aren't yet loads of alternative hosts and apps that offer their own take on a Twitter-like social network. 

Bluesky gives users control over their experience

The other area where Bluesky sets itself apart is with how much control you get over the content you see.

Like other social networks, Bluesky is based around feeds. The difference is that you can subscribe to different kinds of feeds on Bluesky, or even create your own. If you don't like what the amorphous algorithm is serving, you don't have to accept it.

By default, Bluesky gives you two feeds: an algorithmic Discover feed and a chronological Following feed. But it also suggests new feeds for you to check out. To give you an idea of the kinds of feeds available, here are some that I've liked:

• Popular With Friends: A feed of content that the people you follow have liked or engaged with. 

• Science: A curated feed of science content. Approved scientists and science communicators can share posts with a test tube emoji, and they appear in this feed. (Some other feeds work the same way.)

• Mutuals: Posts from people who follow you back. 

• Pinned: A feed of posts I've replied to with the thumbtack emoji.

You can find more than 45,000 feeds to subscribe to on Goodfeeds or, if you've got the programming knowledge, build your own. 

On top of all this, Bluesky has strong block and mute tools. You can subscribe to public block and mute lists, mute or block individual users, and mute or block specific phrases or words.

And Bluesky also allows for third-party moderation services that automatically label or hide content. For example, there's a service that labels users who share a lot of AI-generated content as well as Bluesky's official moderation service. (It's worth noting that while this is a great idea, it doesn't seem to be as widely implemented or easy to use as it needs to be to make it effective.)

Combined, all these features mean that Bluesky gives you a lot of control over what you're going to see in the app. Not everything works quite as well as I'd like, nor is Bluesky anywhere near as popular as Twitter was at its height. But if it continues to take off, these features allow for an exciting and vibrant public square.

Bluesky vs. Twitter

On the surface, Bluesky is very similar to Twitter (now called X). They're both (mostly) public social networks that are based around one-to-many communication. But there are a handful of key distinctions that make them very different social networks. 

• Bluesky strives to be open and distributed; X is controlled by a single company. 

• Bluesky doesn't allow ads (though it has a premium subscription in the works).

• Bluesky allows you to use third-party apps and services.

• Bluesky gives you a lot more control over what content you see.

• Bluesky has a significantly smaller number of users; a lot of the people you can follow on X just aren't there yet. 

• Bluesky has an open API, so it's significantly easier to automate with Zapier and other tools. 

If all this sounds good, then Bluesky is probably worth checking out. 

How to sign up for Bluesky

Bluesky is really easy to sign up for:

1. Head to the Bluesky web app or download the iOS or Android app (or grab a third-party app). 

2. Sign up for an account.

3. Follow the onboarding to get started. 

Unfortunately, there's no reliable way to automatically import the people you follow on X or even find your phone contacts. Unless you do things manually, starting on Bluesky means starting from scratch. 

Is Bluesky the future of social media?

Bluesky is having a major moment. It's reminding a lot of people of what Twitter used to be like in the early days. Of course, Bluesky has a long way to go. It has a fraction of X's users, and the platform, while making big promises, is still under development. There are also multiple other social networks, including X, Mastodon, and Threads, that are all vying to be Twitter's successor in cultural relevance. 

Automate Bluesky

One of the reasons you might choose Bluesky over X is that its open API means you can connect it to Zapier to automate your workflows. Automatically create new posts on Bluesky based on activity in your other apps, or send Bluesky posts to the other apps you use most. Get started with one of these pre-made templates.

Bluesky FAQ

Bluesky is still a baby app, so you might still have some questions. Here are some answers.

Who owns Bluesky?

Not Elon Musk. Bluesky is owned by CEO Jay Graber (the biggest shareholder) and other employees, though it was originally founded by former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey.

How many users does Bluesky have?

The Bluesky user count currently stands at more than 20 million. Seems like a lot, but X has more than 300 million, so Bluesky is still playing a lot of catch up.

Is Bluesky free?

Yep. And currently, there aren't even ads to support it. There is a premium subscription in the works, though.

Related reading:

• The best social media management tools

• A Notion social media planner to plan and track your content

• How to monetize LinkedIn with brand partnerships

Remember when Apple launched the App Store and the early novelty of app discovery? Oh, how naive we were. Now we're juggling too many apps that don't talk to each other and slow us down. 

Zapier is an AI automation platform that lets you connect your favorite apps and automate work without any code. We have thousands of app integrations, but what if your app isn't available?

Don't worry, you still have some alternative ways to integrate your favorite app with Zapier. We rounded up some of our favorite solutions, in order from least to most technical.

See what you're working with

Before you investigate other ways to connect your app to Zapier, make sure you've searched our App Directory first to see if your app has an existing integration. Or, who knows, you might even find a better alternative that you might not have considered. (I highly recommend checking out our handy guide to all the things you can do with our App Directory.)

If your search comes up empty, now you can explore alternative options: 

1. Does your app use RSS feeds? You can connect to Zapier through our built-in tool. 

2. Does your app have an email integration? You can use existing email integrations in our App Directory.

3. Missing an action from existing app integrations? Create your own with AI-powered Custom Actions and API Requests.

4. Does Apple's Shortcuts app support your app? You can use a webhook to connect a Shortcut with Zapier.

5. Can your app use webhooks? You can connect to Zapier with our built-in webhooks tool. 

6. None of the above apply? Build your own integration with the Zapier Platform. 

Share data with RSS

RSS feeds are the unsung heroes of the internet. They may sound like a relic today, but they still secretly power everything from your favorite podcasts and YouTube channels to blogs and websites. 

You can also use RSS feeds as a real-time bridge for your apps. First, check to see if an RSS feed is available for your app. You may be pleasantly surprised.

If a feed exists, create a Zap—what we call our automated workflows—and use our built-in RSS by Zapier tool. It lets you send RSS feed content to your favorite tools. You can even create your own custom RSS feed with your favorite sources. 

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Monitor notifications and statuses

Some notifications or statuses are a top priority for your team, so why not filter out what you don't care about? For example, you can create a custom feed with only high priority alerts, such as outages from your favorite apps. 

Curate your own news feed

There are so many places to check for content—and not enough time to keep up. You can create your own newsletter by sending your favorite media—such as that Patreon podcast you pay for—to a custom RSS feed. 

You don't have to receive your newsletter by email either. You can add your custom feed URL to an RSS reader or thousands of other apps. 

Build a bridge with email

Your email inbox is likely clogged with notifications from businesses and apps you use regularly. But there's a bright side: emails are an easy way to connect those apps with Zapier in an unexpected way. 

Extract information from emails

There's essential information buried in your inbox, such as invoices, appointment confirmations, and bank statements. You can use Zapier to send those messages to the right place. 

For example, you can save email attachments to your favorite cloud storage app.

Or if you only need specific information from emails, our built-in Email Parser tool is another backdoor you can use. Email parsers can recognize patterns within your messages and extract the critical stuff based on your instructions. 

Get started with these automated workflows:

Send emails to your apps

Before smartphones, the main way to send information to apps remotely was to send an email to an app's address. While it's not as exciting or flashy as an app integration, many apps still have built-in email integrations.

For example, you can email documents to app-specific email addresses on Kindle devices and note-taking apps like Goodnotes. Many blogging platforms also have an email-to-draft function. If your app has a built-in email integration like this, you can use Zapier's email integrations or our Email by Zapier tool to send automatic emails to your apps.

Get a jumpstart with the Zaps below:

Add missing actions with Custom Actions and API Requests

What if there is a Zapier integration for your app, but it doesn't support the action you need? With AI-powered Custom Actions, you can create new actions within existing app integrations that support it. 

Just describe what you'd like your action to do, and Zapier's AI-powered Copilot will find the right API endpoints, generate the code, and build the action for you. You can chat with the AI builder to refine it even further. 

Once you've published your custom action, you can reuse it across Zaps and share it with your whole team, saving everyone time. 

You don't need webhook or API knowledge to use Custom Actions, but if you prefer getting hands-on with the API endpoints, there's another option: API Request actions. 

Available on supported app integrations, API Request actions allow you to make those API calls in Zaps. The best part: API Request actions use your existing app connections in Zapier, so you don't have to wrestle with authentication. 

If you can read API docs, you can use API Request actions. In your Zap, just fill out the required fields specified by the API endpoint and test it to make sure it works.   

Use webhooks to connect any app to Zapier

Your app doesn't use RSS, lacks an email integration, and won't work with Custom Actions or API Request actions. Now what? Another option is webhooks. 

In short, webhooks are one way that apps can send automated messages or info—known as a payload—to other apps. Check your app's settings and help docs and see if it provides or accepts webhooks. If it does, you can connect it to Zapier through our built-in webhooks tool—available on paid plans.

You don't need to know how to code to use webhooks, but it helps to understand how HTTP requests are structured to automate them successfully.

But what can you do with webhooks?

Connect apps that accept webhooks

Your app's help documentation mentions webhooks, but you're unsure what to do next. If your app provides a URL, you can use it in your webhook trigger or action.

For example, some customer relationship managers (CRM) and marketing automation tools have workflow features that generate webhook URLs. You can create a Zap that routes leads directly into your pre-existing automation.

These Zaps will also get you started:

If your app doesn't provide a URL for you to use, don't worry. Zapier can create one for you with Webhooks' Catch Hook trigger. 

These beginner-friendly resources can get you started with webhooks and Zapier:

• Zapier for Alfred: Run Zaps from your Mac keyboard

• How to send an email from a webhook

• 7 ways to use webhooks to automate anything

Connect apps that accept scripts

Let's say you have a favorite app that lets you use scripting for automation—but you don't know how to code. Webhooks to the rescue again!

For example, one of my favorite distraction-blocking apps lets you use Bash scripts to automate certain actions. Do I know how to use shell scripts? Not really. Could I switch to another app? Sure, but I'd rather not.

Instead, I can generate a URL with Webhooks' Catch Hook trigger. Then, within my app's interface, I can use that webhook URL in a command like this:

WEBHOOK_URL="https://your-zapier-webhook.com/12345"

curl -X POST $WEBHOOK_URL -F "keyName=$VARIABLE_VALUE" -F "anotherKey=$ANOTHER_VARIABLE_VALUE"

If you're new to shell scripts and your app can use them, you can try out these examples in RequestBin, which will show you how to structure your shell script to send data. Then, set up the rest of your webhook Zap. 

Try these automated workflows:

Connect your Apple-exclusive apps through Shortcuts

There are some great apps that only exist within the Apple ecosystem. If it offers automation, it will likely use Automator or Apple's Shortcuts app. 

If you need more automation options than Automator or Shortcuts, you can still use those apps to connect to Zapier. 

Here's how it works: 

1. Use Webhooks' Catch Hook for your trigger—the event that starts a Zap—to generate a webhook URL you can use in a Shortcut or in a script within Automator. 

2. Set up your Shortcut or Automator workflow to send information from your app to your Zapier-generated webhook.

3. Test your Shortcut or Automator workflow. 

4. Test your webhook trigger. You should see the results from your previous test. 

5. Set up the rest of your Zap and make sure it's ready to use.

Build your own Zapier integration

If none of the above options suit your needs or you want a more robust solution, you could also create the robot yourself. The Zapier Platform lets you build a Zapier integration—with or without code. 

There are a few benefits to building a custom integration on the Zapier Platform: 

1. You can keep app account information secure: For example, API keys associated with your login or your username and password. You can also share your app integration with your team, so they can automate using their own credentials.. 

2. You can use webhooks that don't send messages. Some webhooks send an empty payload, but Webhooks by Zapier need usable data to pass on to the next Zap step. The Zapier Platform gives you more flexibility with "no-payload" webhooks. 

3. You need to make advanced adjustments to your app's output every time. Formatter and Code by Zapier can help you transform app data into the format you need, but if your app's API returns a messy output, you can use the command line within the Zapier Platform to fix it. 

You can create an integration for an app you don't own—it will just be private for you and your team to use. Or, if you're an app developer, you can create a public integration for your app and let your users automate away. 

Non-coders will need to understand APIs and how to read API documentation, but our beginner's guide to APIs will help get you up to speed.

Automate without (app) limits

You don't have to miss out on the magic of automation. Explore these creative workarounds to connect your apps to Zapier and expand your automation powers. And don't forget—you can request to add your app to Zapier. It doesn't hurt to ask!

This article was originally published November 2014, written by Matt Guay. It was most recently updated in January 2025 by Krystina Martinez.

Drink more water. Hit 10,000 daily steps. End the week on inbox zero. Why is it so hard to hit these seemingly simple goals? Most often, it's our habits (or lack thereof) that let us down. 

A habit is something we do without much thought or effort. We can get up and brush our teeth without thinking about it—perhaps even switch off our brains when driving a manual car, even when changing gears required intense concentration while learning to drive. 

I'd argue that achieving your goals isn't about willpower or determination. It's the habits we do every day that accelerate progress. And that's why habit stacking can be such a powerful tool.

Table of contents:

• What is habit stacking?

• How to habit stack

• Habit stacking examples

• Does habit stacking work?

What is habit stacking? 

Habit stacking turns goals into habits by combining them with things you already do. For example, if your goal is to drink more water, you'd stack the new habit (drinking a glass of water) on top of something you already do every day (brushing your teeth). Every time you brush your teeth, you'd drink a glass of water. At first, you'll have to remind yourself, but eventually, the goal becomes a habit.

Habit stacking works because it appeals to the four laws of behavior change outlined in James Clear's book Atomic Habits:

1. Make it obvious

2. Make it attractive

3. Make it easy

4. Make it satisfying

Using the same example: the trigger to drink more water becomes obvious when your brain associates it with brushing your teeth. It's attractive because you know the goal, and easy because you're already at the sink. The satisfaction comes from achieving your goal before you've even gotten dressed for the day.

Habits are notoriously hard to build. Smart people estimate that it can take the better part of a year to form a new one. And it makes sense: the idea of doing something without thinking about it requires intense repetition. But the more you do two tasks together, the more you'll associate the two. The two habits become linked in your brain so that the new habit becomes second nature—something you do without having to think about it. 

How to habit stack

Ready to make headway on your goals by making the task second nature? Here's a practical guide to start habit stacking, based on my research and my personal experiences with habit stacking.

Observe your daily habits

Before you dive into creating new habits, look at those already cemented in your daily routine. These are things you do every day with little thought or consideration. For example: 

• Brushing your teeth

• Getting into/out of bed

• Making your morning coffee

• Dropping your kids at the bus

• Checking Instagram on your lunch break

• Walking your dog

• Eating dinner 

You could also think about the things that happen to you, rather than habits you have yourself. For example, do you get lots of text messages during the day? Are you up early enough to see the sunrise? These events make for great stacking triggers and can actually build a stronger routine that encourages you to do the task multiple times a day.

Use the habit stacking formula

The habit stacking formula is a fancy way of describing how you'll implement the new habit. As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, the formula goes: 

After/before [current habit], I will [new habit]. 

For example: if your goal is to feel less stressed in the mornings and have a more productive evening, your formula could be: "After I brush my teeth in the evening, I'll lay out my clothes for the following day."

Start small—but be specific

Habits are easy to create when they're easy (one of the laws of behavior change). The more resistance that's in your way, the less enthusiastic you'll be to do it. Remember: repetition is what forms a solid habit. 

Be specific about when and where your new habit stack will happen. If your goal is to keep your inbox tidy, for example, your habit could be: "After I send my last email of the day, I'll spend 10 minutes organizing my emails into folders." Now you know exactly when you'll do it and how long it'll take—two common points of friction with new behaviors.

Use smart connections

The two habits you're tying together shouldn't just be things you do every day. 

Be smart about how you connect the two—particularly if the new habit isn't naturally fun (e.g., drinking more water). You could tie it to something you do enjoy doing to get the reward aspect of the habit formation loop. 

Similarly, if you have a fun new habit that you want to implement, tie it with an existing, boring one. In my case: I find washing the dishes mind numbingly boring, so I added my new fun habit (listening to an audiobook) to make it more enjoyable. Just like that, I look forward to finishing lunch.

Use a habit tracking app

Habits become second nature when they're repeated. Motivate yourself to not break the streak with a habit tracking app like Streaks or HabitNow. Either option is available on mobile so you can keep up with your habits on the go.

Pen and paper or a sticker chart can also do the trick, particularly if you're appealing to law #1 (make it obvious). Place the tracker where you'd do the new habit so you can't forget.

Give yourself a reward

Long-term habit formation includes four stages:

1. Cue (the trigger)

2. Craving (the motivator)

3. Response (the actual behavior)

4. Reward

The last one is important because rewards release dopamine, known as the "feel good" hormone. Our brain drives us to get more of the hormone, therefore solidifying the habit formation loop and encouraging us to cement the new task in our routine. 

Habit stacking examples

Here's some inspiration on what habit stacking could look like for both professional and personal goals:

• After I've made my morning coffee, I'll spend 15 minutes on Duolingo practicing Spanish.

• After I finish eating dinner, I'll put my plate into the dishwasher.

• After I've opened my laptop, I'll spend 15 minutes tidying my inbox.

• Before I drink my morning coffee, I'll drink a glass of water.

• After I send a client a new piece, I'll prepare the invoice.

• After I close my laptop for the day, I'll do a 10-minute declutter of my workspace.

• After I leave my car, I'll throw away any trash left in there.

• Before I get into bed, I'll lay out my clothes for the following morning.

• Before I fall asleep, I'll put my phone on Do Not Disturb.

Does habit stacking work?

I've been using the habit stacking technique to ultimately feel more productive, without having to think about it. It's helped me cement new habits, like drinking more water and keeping my workspace tidy, without feeling like either goal is too hard.

The best part about habit stacking: it's super easy to start. Use this simple formula to try it for yourself:

After ________ , I'll _________ .

That's it.

Related reading:

• How to build habits that will last all year

• Microproductivity: How to get mundane tasks done, finally

• How to ruthlessly prioritize tasks to get more done

• Automation is a habit—here's how to build it

Over the past year or two, ChatGPT has become one of my most used tools. If I need a quick answer to a complex question, help with a puzzle, a synonym for a word I've used too much, a few lines of better code than I can write myself, an Instagram post translated, or a long document summarized, it's the first app I reach for. At $20/month for ChatGPT Plus, this all feels like a bit of a bargain. It's replaced a handful of apps I used to use, made basic coding tasks a lot easier (because I'm terrible at it), and generally sped up some workflow stuff. 

Is it possible that ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI's new $200/month ChatGPT subscription, is 10 times better? 

Spoiler: no. But that doesn't mean ChatGPT Pro isn't a fit for some people. It might not be you or me, but it can still be worth it. Let me explain. 

Table of contents:

• What is ChatGPT Pro?

• ChatGPT Plus vs. Pro at a glance

• How to sign up for ChatGPT Pro

• Is ChatGPT Pro worth it for you?

• Automate ChatGPT

What is ChatGPT Pro?

ChatGPT Pro is the $200/month ChatGPT plan aimed at power users who frequently run up against the limits of ChatGPT Plus. (And yes, that's a two with two zeros.) 

If you're not sure if you need this plan, you probably don't. Unless you're trying to solve incredibly complicated math and coding problems or regularly hitting rate limits, it's probably not a fit for you. But here's what you'll get with ChatGPT Pro that might tip the scales.

No limits with GPT-4o, o1, and o1-mini

While the limits are subject to change and can depend on demand, ChatGPT Plus limits you based on the AI model you're using.

• GPT-4o: 80 messages every three hours

• o1: 50 messages every week

• o1-mini: 50 messages every day

There are also unspecified limits with advanced voice mode and live video.

With ChatGPT Pro, you have unlimited access to GPT-4o, o1, o1-mini, and advanced voice mode. (Presumably there is some limit, but it's unreachable with any kind of reasonable use.)

Check out the video below to see advanced voice mode in action.

Access to o1 pro mode

OpenAI o1 takes time to reason through multi-step problems. The more time it's given to work through problems, the more compute it uses and the better its results. The tradeoff is that compute costs money, so getting o1 to run for extended periods of time makes it more expensive. o1-mini uses less compute than o1, which is why it's less powerful and has a higher rate limit. 

ChatGPT Pro introduces o1 pro mode, which gives o1 more time to solve harder problems. At the moment, ChatGPT Pro users are limited to 50 messages per week. 

A larger context window with all models

The context window is the number of tokens an AI model can process at once—basically, how much information it can remember at a time. It includes the input, output, resources, and any system instructions. The larger the context window, the longer the documents you can upload and the larger the problems you can solve can be. It's particularly relevant if you're working on complex coding projects or using ChatGPT to analyze large text documents.

With ChatGPT Plus, you're limited to a context window of 32K tokens across every model. With ChatGPT Pro, that's expanded to 128K tokens. 

The ability to create longer videos with Sora

Sora is OpenAI's text-to-video model. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can create a limited number of watermarked videos up to 720p and five seconds in length. ChatGPT Pro users, on the other hand, can generate an unlimited number of unwatermarked videos, and they can be up to 1080p and 20 seconds in length. 

While Sora is nowhere near as popular as ChatGPT, this is perhaps the biggest difference between ChatGPT Plus and Pro. If you're experimenting with Sora, ChatGPT Pro provides a lot more options.

Future promises

While these might seem like relatively small benefits now, OpenAI plans to release more powerful models like o3 in 2025. It seems obvious that any new models, especially the more powerful ones, will be available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers before anyone else. 

Personally, I think OpenAI has released ChatGPT Pro now in preparation for these more powerful models that have the compute demands to justify the higher price tag.

ChatGPT Plus vs. Pro at a glance

How to sign up for ChatGPT Pro

Assuming you're already a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, here's how to upgrade to ChatGPT Pro.

1. Go to chat.com. 

2. At the very bottom of the side panel, click View plans. 

3. Click Get Pro.

4. Complete the subscription process.

Is ChatGPT Pro worth it for you?

ChatGPT Pro probably isn't worth it for most people, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it for anyone. 

If you rely on ChatGPT professionally and regularly run into rate limits, ChatGPT Pro may be a solid investment. Similarly, if you're pushing the edge of what ChatGPT can do, either by exceeding context windows or needing o1 for a lot of your work, then ChatGPT Pro might be the solution you need. But $200/month ($2,400/year!) is a lot—so be sure you need it before you dive in.

For most of us, ChatGPT Plus is the best balance. It's a big step up from the free version of ChatGPT but still a relatively affordable $20/month. 

Automate ChatGPT

If you're using ChatGPT so much that you might be willing to pay thousands of dollars a year for it, you should also be automating it. Zapier's ChatGPT integration lets you write and execute code, analyze data on CSVs, and even get questions answered based on your documents—straight from the apps you use most.

Learn more about how to automate ChatGPT with Zapier, or try one of these templates.

Related reading:

• How does ChatGPT work?

• The best ChatGPT alternatives

• How to create a custom GPT

Silos are great for grain (and sport climbing)—but they spell doom for businesses. If your GTM organization is just three separate sales, marketing, and support teams wrapped in a trench coat, the inefficiency and communications breakdown will become unsustainable fast. 

That's why RevOps teams are so crucial, coordinating revenue-related activities across departments to keep a business running smoothly. And it's why RevOps folks value tools that work well across departments.

HubSpot is one of those tools: it's a multifaceted suite of CRM, marketing, customer service, and operations tools. But many RevOps teams barely scratch the surface of what the platform can do. 

We asked nine RevOps experts how they use HubSpot to unlock the tool's full potential and turn their organization into a well-oiled, silo-free machine. Here's what they said.

Table of contents

• Get in-depth insights with custom reporting

• Build quality backlinks with attribution reporting

• Make smarter decisions with custom behavioral events

• Clean up your data with data quality automation

• Prioritize high-quality leads with lead scoring

• Transform sales with HubSpot playbooks

• Track unique data with custom properties

• Maximize efficiency with HubSpot workflows

• Enhance automation with workflow extensions

Get in-depth insights with custom reporting

The reporting feature in HubSpot may seem basic at first glance—until you leverage its custom reporting capabilities. Take it from Alex Vasylenko, founder of development and design agency The Frontend Company: "Most teams are used to simple pipeline or sales reports, but the real magic happens in combining data from multiple HubSpot objects, like deals, tickets, and custom properties, to build out bespoke reports that answer a specific operational question."

Alex provides a helpful example: "You can create a report to track leads from initial contact to closed deal, broken down by the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns or sales sequences."

For your RevOps team to get the most out of this reporting feature, Alex recommends starting by "identifying key performance indicators and aligning them with HubSpot's custom properties." After that, he says, "The next step is to explore segmentation options: filtering reports on deal stages, team performance, or regional trends. A powerful insight could be drawn by the RevOps teams in finding out when and how follow-ups are associated with clogs in the funnel. Accordingly, teams can move toward proactive processes instead of simply reacting to problems, therefore driving more revenue growth and operational efficiency."

Build quality backlinks with attribution reporting

Attribution reporting helps you understand exactly how your marketing efforts work on leads. By seeing things like ad clicks, form submissions, registrations, and page views, you can get a clearer picture of what is and isn't working. 

Most RevOps teams use HubSpot's attribution reporting feature for standard lead tracking, but Authority Builders, a link-building outreach company, uses it in an unconventional way. Matt Harrison, the Vice President of Global Operations, says their team also adapted it to "measure the quality of link-building placements against client conversions."

Matt elaborates: "We built custom attribution models that track how different types of backlinks influence the sales cycle. When a prospect interacts with our guest posts on high-authority sites, the system attributes their journey through our pipeline. This insight revealed that leads from educational guest posts convert faster than those from purely promotional content. Our sales team now prioritizes leads based on their interaction with specific types of placed content."

His tip? "Create custom attribution models that track your unique business metrics—forget generic templates and build reports that measure what actually drives your revenue growth."

Make smarter decisions with custom behavioral events 

If you know specific behaviors are a good signifier that a lead is moving closer to converting, you can use HubSpot's custom events feature to dig even deeper than standard attribution reporting.

"The feature that often flies under the radar but can be transformative for RevOps teams is custom behavioral events," says Aljay Ambos, the lead SEO and marketing consultant with Twixify, an AI-driven SaaS platform. "It's not as flashy as some other features, but it's a big help for tracking user behavior in a way that drives smarter decisions. Instead of relying on standard metrics like page views or email opens, you can define and track specific actions that matter most to your business."

Aljay explains how they've used the tool effectively: "For example, in one campaign, we tracked when prospects interacted with a product comparison tool on our website. This gave us a clear signal that they were seriously evaluating our offering, and we could prioritize them for follow-up or even send a personalized email addressing their interests."

Better yet, according to Aljay, setting it up is fairly simple. "Identify the behaviors that signal a user is moving closer to conversion. This can include users spending time on your pricing page, clicking on a demo request button, or engaging with an interactive tool. Use HubSpot's tracking code to capture those actions and feed them into your workflows. Once set up, you can trigger notifications to your sales team or automate personalized outreach, so your leads feel seen and understood."

Clean up your data with data quality automation

Data is king for RevOps—but your data is only as good as it is consistent and organized. HubSpot has a powerful data quality automation feature that can help you clean up your customer records. 

JJ Maxwell, CEO of investment platform Double Finance, explains, "This tool allows RevOps teams to proactively identify and fix data inconsistencies within HubSpot, ensuring data integrity across all connected systems. It goes beyond simple field validation and uses automation to detect issues like inconsistent formatting, duplicate records, and missing required information. For RevOps, this translates to cleaner data for reporting, more effective segmentation for marketing campaigns, and improved lead routing for sales."

Digging into exactly how this feature can take your RevOps efforts to the next level, JJ says, "Data quality automation lets you create custom rules to identify data issues specific to your business. For example, you can set up a rule to flag contacts with missing phone numbers or those with incorrect email formats. Once an issue is detected, you can automatically correct it using predefined actions or trigger workflows to notify the appropriate team members for manual review. This proactive approach to data quality management saves countless hours that would otherwise be spent manually cleaning data."

JJ also offers advice on how to best use the tool. "To get started, RevOps teams should first audit their existing data to identify the most common data quality issues. Then, using the data quality automation tool, create rules that address these specific issues. Begin with a small set of rules and gradually expand as needed. Regularly monitor the tool's dashboard to track progress and identify any new data quality trends. By implementing data quality automation, RevOps teams can ensure data accuracy, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately drive better business outcomes.

Prioritize high-quality leads with lead scoring 

No matter how big your sales team is, you still have a finite amount of time to nurture leads—which means it's crucial to focus on leads that are most likely to convert. That's why, if your CMS offers built-in lead scoring (as HubSpot does), you should take advantage of it.

"One HubSpot feature every RevOps team should be using is lead scoring," shares Ally Moisse, a PR specialist at lead generation agency Pearl Lemon. "It allows you to assign scores based on specific behaviors, attributes, or engagement levels. For example, if a lead downloads a whitepaper, visits your pricing page, or attends a webinar, their score increases. Conversely, inactivity over time or irrelevant actions can lower their score. By customizing these metrics, RevOps teams can identify the hottest leads for the sales team to focus on while nurturing colder prospects with targeted campaigns."

To adopt this feature effectively, Ally recommends starting by "collaborating with sales and marketing teams to define scoring criteria that align with your business goals. Use historical data to identify patterns that indicate a lead is likely to convert. Once set up, integrate these scores into your pipeline stages to ensure sales reps are working with the most actionable opportunities."

Transform sales with HubSpot playbooks

Playbooks is another HubSpot feature that can level up your RevOps efforts by systematizing sales. Michael Maximoff, the co-founder and managing partner of B2B appointment setting agency Belkins, shares, "Playbooks provide structured guidance for sales reps during calls or interactions, and they remove any ambiguity and 'magic' from the sales process. It's like the invention of gunpowder for the sales world—it completely transforms how customer conversations are handled. While other platforms may offer similar tools, HubSpot's playbooks are unique because they integrate directly with CRM data. RevOps teams get precise, real-time, context-rich insights for every interaction."

Michael elaborates, "This feature is essential because it helps avoid common mistakes that can ruin potential sales. For example, a sales rep might fail to address a lead's critical pain point, which could result in losing the deal to a competitor. Playbooks are valuable because they help standardize and digitize the sales process. This makes it easier to evaluate performance without bias and apply statistical methods to improve results."

Track unique data with custom properties

Sometimes, you need to track unconventional kinds of information that aren't accounted for in traditional CRM setups. HubSpot offers a custom properties option to let you tailor your CRM to meet your business's needs. "It's super flexible and allows you to track data points unique to your business, like churn risk, contract renewal dates, or lead scoring criteria," says Vishal Shah, a Senior Technical Consultant at eCommerce and web development company WPWeb Infotech.

"For example, you can create a property like 'Contract Expiry Date' and set up workflows to alert your team 30 days before a renewal," Vishal explains. "This ensures you stay proactive with upselling or retention efforts. You can also analyze custom properties in HubSpot reporting to identify trends, like how 'High Churn Risk' deals perform compared to others. It's a simple yet powerful way to align your sales, marketing, and customer success teams with data that reflects your actual revenue drivers."

Maximize efficiency with HubSpot workflows

According to Justin Schulze, the owner of digital marketing agency Schulze Creative, "If you're not using workflows on HubSpot, you're missing out on a huge productivity hack."

So what are workflows? Justin explains, "Workflows automate repetitive tasks, but the real magic lies in conditional logic, which lets you create 'if/then' scenarios for smarter processes. You can automatically route leads to the right salesperson based on location or deal size, remind account managers to follow up on expiring contracts, or even trigger alerts for upsell opportunities when customers hit key milestones. By handling repetitive tasks for you, workflows free up your time to focus on strategies that grow revenue."

Enhance automation with workflow extensions

HubSpot also offers an advanced workflow builder for developers called Workflow Extensions, which lets you connect HubSpot to third-party tools. "This feature allows you to seamlessly connect HubSpot workflows to external apps or systems, making automation much more effective and tailored to your business processes," says Carl Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of SaaS company Apicbase. "For example, we use it to trigger actions in tools like Slack, Trello, or even custom-built platforms whenever certain criteria are met in HubSpot."

Carl continues, "A great use case is automating deal handoffs between sales and customer success. When a deal moves to 'Closed-Won,' our workflow automatically creates a task in Trello for onboarding, sends a Slack notification to the onboarding team, and syncs relevant customer details to our project management software. It eliminates manual steps, reduces errors, and speeds up the process."

When building your automated sales ecosystem, Carl suggests starting small. "Pick a repetitive process, like lead follow-ups or task creation, and set up a workflow to integrate HubSpot with the tools your team already uses," suggests Jacobs. "Also, don't forget to track the impact. HubSpot allows you to measure workflow performance, so you can tweak and improve over time. This feature ensures your operations run like a well-oiled machine, keeping teams aligned and saving valuable time."

To make things even easier, you can use Zapier's HubSpot integration to automate across apps without writing any code. Because Zapier integrates with thousands of apps, you can build fully automated systems that use HubSpot as the source of truth. Learn more about automating HubSpot, or get started with one of these templates.

Dig into HubSpot's features yourself

The best way to keep your organization running smoothly is to collect and use the right kinds of data. Then, you'll need to send that information to the right places so the right people—across teams—can access it. And HubSpot offers seemingly endless reporting, scoring, and automation features to let you do just that. Which HubSpot feature will your team experiment with first? 

Related reading:

• How RevOps professionals use AI and automation 

• RevOps best practices: How Zapier created a centralized revenue operations team 

• The  best HubSpot certifications, according to experts 

• The best HubSpot alternatives