Are you struggling with Zapier’s escalating costs and limited customisation?
We sat down with Aircury’s Senior Product Owner & Data Protection Officer, Chris Smith, to explore how Aircury’s Connector offers a tailored, efficient, and cost-saving alternative to Zapier. In this blog article, we discuss the common automation needs and challenges organisations face, and how Aircury’s Connector tool compares.
Understanding typical automation needs
Based on your experience, what are the most common automation needs and challenges organisations currently face when looking for automation tools and integrations?
A lot of our customers are looking to sync the user base that exists in their application (be it a custom-built application or an off-the-shelf product) with their CRM (typically Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive, Hubspot etc.) or cloud-based MIS (typically Arbor, SIMs, etc.). The reasons for syncing this data with their CRM or MIS vary depending on the customer. Sometimes it is for ‘core’ CRM or MIS reasons (tracking interactions with their users or customers or tracking performance data), but more frequently, we are starting to see more of our customers use their CRM and MIS platforms for reporting and analysis purposes, scheduling workflows that rely on user data. This highlights the need for robust CRM integration and workflow automation.
The specific insights uncovered often include:
- Identifying data issues and enhancing customer support.
- Analysing attendance statistics, with the ability to group them by demographics.
- Pinpointing gaps in data fields to prioritise user feature development.
These insights then enable the scheduling of various workflows, such as:
- Carefully managing historical student data sets during MIS migrations.
- Creating customer support workflows to standardise data across different MIS platforms.
- Pre-calculating website metrics to eliminate long wait times for macro reports.
- Scheduling data extraction to avoid overlapping with end-user operational hours.
We have also seen customers using Zapier to connect with Power BI and Tableau for their reporting, analytics and visualisation needs. Aircury Connector’s visualisation feature provides a cost-effective solution as an alternative to Tableau and Power BI subscriptions, with significant savings and enhanced data analysis, reporting, and visualisation, all while offering the benefits of customisation, bespoke tailoring, complex integrations and workflows, and dedicated end-to-end support that makes a real difference.
Tasks and Workflows
Can you describe the typical tasks and workflows that organisations automate using Zapier?
One common task is to sync their users from their own platform to another system (often a CRM or MIS). In some cases, they then sync the data back to their own platform, which is a key area for app integration and automated workflows.
Let’s look at some specific scenarios where automated workflows make a difference:
1. Sync custom application users to CRM, MIS, or other applications, including roles (e.g., teacher, mentor, learner, etc.).
2. They then use this data for customer relationship management, learners, subscriptions or sales.
3. Manage custom application features and resources via CRM, MIS, or others, controlling user access.
4. Automate user creation across all ecosystem applications at signup to remove barriers.
5. Sync users to marketing tools (like Mailchimp) for professional email campaigns and tracking.
Zapier Limitations
In your opinion, what are some of the main challenges or limitations with Zapier, particularly regarding cost, customisation, or scalability during an organisation’s growth?
1. Cost: As the number of ‘transactions’ increases, so does the cost. It’s quite common for users to experience significant cost increases as their organisation grows.
2. Flexibility and complexity: Zapier is a good start, but as organisations scale, they often need more niche or sector-specific integrations. Instead of adapting the integration, organisations end up adapting to Zapier’s limitations, highlighting the need for a Zapier alternative with greater customisation.
3. Robustness: If an integration fails, it’s tough to pinpoint the issue and re-run that specific transaction. Many users struggle with this in Zapier due to a lack of detailed logging or clear error reporting.
Desired Functionality in an Integration Tool
Is there such a thing as the perfect automation tool? What key functionalities or features do you believe better support users with bespoke or complex automation needs?
In the education and non-profit sectors, the types of common data sets requiring frequent syncing and integration include:
1. The customer’s user base
2. Organisation or school data that the customer works with
3. Government data
4. Data captured in another third-party solution (for example, survey data from SurveyMonkey or Typeform)
Often we need to transform or ‘shape’ data sets so that they can be synced with the target application (either another system such as a CRM, MIS or the user’s own application). Sometimes this requires complex logic, or the merging of multiple data sources before it is synced to the ‘target’ system.
Users should easily maintain and monitor it with proactive warnings and alerts. Specialist expertise should be available to help if support and guidance is needed. You shouldn’t need an in-house specialist just to maintain and support simple integrations! The ideal automation platform would offer higher ROI and efficient integrations.
An ideal solution would seamlessly handle these diverse data sources, offering advanced capabilities to transform and merge data before syncing.
The “Aircury Connector” Advantage
The custom Aircury Connector tool offers tailored integrations, end-to-end support, and enhanced AI intelligence. How do you envision these features addressing the problems of Zapier users and improving their organisation’s overall operational efficiency?
The Aircury Connector has proven to be a popular, cost-effective solution when compared to tools such as Zapier, allowing our customers to spend more time and money on their core business and organisational needs. We can configure it to operate on the customer’s own infrastructure, meaning the day-to-day cost of the integration is not based on transactions, but on hosting it (and our license fee). This leads to significant savings, as typically 1,000 transactions per day versus 10,000 transactions per day will have an increased infrastructure cost (because it will take more time to sync more records), but that’s it.
For the education sector, we have integrated with many standard education datasets such as Get Information For Schools. For complex integrations, we can provide end-to-end support, from defining the required business logic all the way through to implementing and testing the integration. This reduces the need for in-house expertise, which could create a bottleneck issue. This makes Aircury Connector a strong Zapier vs. Aircury Connector contender.
Aircury’s Connector offers significant advantages, especially with Large Language Models (LLMs) hosted securely on your organisation’s server. Our AI capabilities are designed to empower you with a robust document information extractor, effortlessly moving data into your databases or spreadsheets. We are also committed to continuous innovation, with exciting advancements in smarter data mapping and predictive analysis on the horizon, promising even greater potential for your workflows.
Impact and Future Vision
Considering the potential for significant time and cost savings, how would an ethical and agile custom solution impact an organisation’s ability to achieve its mission and benefit higher-impact work?
If businesses and organisations can define, implement, monitor, and support integrations efficiently and cost-effectively, then they can focus on their core function without the need to allocate resources (time, people and cost) to functions that are not aligned with their core goals, leading to improved growth and sustainability.
If we implement reliable, cost-effective, flexible automations, then the benefits for the customer are enormous -- reduced administrative burden, less repetitive tasks, more time and resources available to grow their business or organisation and not get bogged down in complicated spreadsheet imports, for example.
A lot of our customers work in the non-profit and education sectors, so we’re always looking for ways to free up their time and find cost efficiencies to ethically support their operations for better streamlining and overall efficiency.
To put this into perspective, Aircury’s Connector is currently:
🚀 Processing data for 4,043 schools and nearly 8 million students.
🚀 Handling more than 25 million actions daily on data records.
🚀 Supporting over 35 integrations.
🚀 Running around 200k configurations weekly.
These figures demonstrate the tangible impact and efficiency gains our custom solutions provide, allowing organisations to reallocate valuable resources towards their key focus areas.
Explore Aircury Connector
For organisations currently using Zapier and facing challenges with escalating costs, limited customisation, or scalability, the customisable Aircury Connector offers a robust, ethical, and agile alternative.
By providing tailored integrations and end-to-end support, Aircury Connector empowers businesses and organisations to streamline operations, reduce administrative burden, and reallocate resources towards their core mission and higher-impact work.
If you’d like to explore what Aircury’s Connector can do for your business, school or organisation, book a chat with our friendly team who are here to answer any questions you might have.