Comparison
Eleven Cloud vs Zapier
Zapier is the most used automation tool in the world and it earns that. A new form response landing in a Slack channel takes about four minutes to set up and no engineer.
That is not usually the choice in front of you. The choice is whether a tool is what you are missing, or whether what you are missing is someone to decide what to build, build it, and stay until your team runs it.
The short answer
Buy Zapier when you already know what to automate and someone in-house will own it. Come to us when the expensive work needs a decision made, nobody in-house has the weeks, and you want the operation gone rather than connected.
One estimate, start to finish
Zapier
Request lands in Slack
Seconds
Zapier
Row added to the sheet
Seconds
A person
Priced by a salesperson
2 days
Zapier
Estimate sent and filed
Minutes
Three moves and one decision. Zapier does all three moves, and the two days stay where they were. If your expensive step were one of the moves, Zapier would remove it and there would be no project.
Side by side
| Eleven Cloud | Zapier | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | One operation, replaced and running | A platform your team builds on |
| Who does the building | We do, then we train whoever will run it | You, or someone you hire |
| Where it starts | A written assessment of every operation in the company | An empty workflow and a trigger |
| Best at | Work that needs a decision: quoting, support, screening | Moving data between apps on a clear rule |
| Messy input | Trained on your history, your replies, your rules | Handled as far as the rule you wrote goes |
| Price | A project fee, quoted after the assessment | Under $100 a month on their self-serve plans |
| Live in | Weeks, training included | Four minutes for a simple Zap |
| After we leave | Your person runs it from a written runbook | Whoever built it owns it |
Zapier moves the work. The expensive part is the deciding.
Look at what actually costs you money. It is rarely the copy from a form into the CRM. It is the two days a quote sits with a salesperson, because the price depends on the freight, on the spec, and on what that customer paid last time.
Zapier will move the quote request the second it arrives. Writing the quote is a different job. When a step needs a decision made from context, a rules engine hands it back to a person and waits.
So the line runs roughly here. Deterministic work: buy Zapier and pay nobody. Work your team does forty times a day out of memory and a spreadsheet: that is the expensive one, and it does not fit in a Zap.
What Zapier does better than we do
Breadth. More than 8,000 apps have a connector, so when both ends of your problem are on that list, nothing gets you to a working thing faster.
It is also the right answer when you have an operations person who likes this kind of work. Someone internal who owns automations gets more out of a Zapier seat than most companies get out of an agency retainer.
We say this on first calls. If the assessment comes back and your bottleneck is five disconnected tools and a person who can wire them together, we say so and there is no project.
The cost that does not appear on the invoice
Per-task pricing is fine until a system runs at real volume. The plan you bought and the plan you need come apart, and the first sign is usually a task limit hit mid-month.
Ownership is the larger one. Zaps get built by whoever had the idea. Two years on there are a few dozen of them, some are broken, nobody is certain which, and the person who built most of them has left. That is not a flaw in Zapier. It is what happens when building is easy and owning is nobody's job.
When we build, the handover is the work rather than the last email. Somebody in your company can explain what it does, change it, and switch it off.
You will probably run both
These are not exclusive. Several systems we have put live use Zapier or Make underneath for the plumbing, because writing custom code to talk to QuickBooks spends your money to arrive in the same place.
The plumbing is not the product. The product is the thing that decides, and the plumbing carries what it decided.
One distributor, both routes
A B2B distributor. Estimates get written by hand off price lists, freight tables, and a salesperson's memory of the account. Two days is normal. About a fifth go stale before they go out.
On Zapier: the request lands in a Slack channel and a row appears in a sheet. The salesperson still writes the estimate. Two days is still two days.
The way we ran it: the catalog, the freight rules, and three years of their own sent quotes became the inputs. The draft comes back in minutes and a person approves it. Two-day estimates now go out in 4 hours.
There is still a Zap in that build. It carries the approved estimate into their CRM.
So which one?
Choose Eleven Cloud if
- The expensive work needs a decision, not just a move
- Nobody in-house has the weeks to own a build
- You are somewhere around $3M to $10M and hiring has stopped helping
- You want the operation gone and your people put on other work
Choose Zapier if
- You already know what to automate
- The work is a clear rule with no it depends in it
- You have an operations person who enjoys building
- You want to start this afternoon for under $100 a month
Zapier, answered
Can you build on top of Zapier?
Yes, and we often do. If Zapier already connects two of your systems and the connection works, replacing it with custom code spends your money to get to the same place.
Is Zapier cheaper?
Every month, yes. Across the life of an operation it depends on whether somebody inside your company owns it. The unowned automations are the expensive ones.
What if the assessment says we only need Zapier?
Then that is what the assessment says, and you keep the written list either way. We would rather lose the project than sell a build that a subscription covers.
Other comparisons
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Find out what your most expensive operation is
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