The short answer
If you want to connect two apps this afternoon without writing code, use Zapier. It's mature, it reaches more than 9,000 apps, and Sanoma doesn't try to compete with that.
Sanoma is for a narrower job: the workflows that touch money, customers or access, where someone should approve a change and every call should be on record. They live in code, a policy decides who has to approve each change, and every call to a vendor is recorded.
Sanoma is also early. Below, each thing we describe is marked available (it works in the source-available repo today), in development or planned.
What Zapier is good at
- Breadth. Whatever tool your team uses, it's almost certainly there.
- No code. Anyone on the team can build a Zap in minutes, and most never need help.
- Approvals where you want them. A Human in the Loop step pauses a Zap until someone approves.
- It's working on the weak spots. Version rollback on paid plans, automatic retries for failed steps, and, in early access, an agent that diagnoses a failed run and proposes a fix, asking first for the riskier ones.
Where teams run into trouble
These come from public posts on Zapier's community forum, Reddit, Hacker News and review sites, read in October 2026. They are individual reports, not a measure of how often anything happens.
A Zap stops, and nobody finds out. The most common complaint is a Zap that stops running with no error and no alert, noticed weeks later. "I've been burned twice, both times a customer told me before Zapier did," one builder wrote. Agencies running Zaps for clients ask the same question: how do you notice a run that never happened?
Success doesn't mean the right result. A run can finish every step and still leave the wrong data behind. One post describes "the green checkmark on a Zap that ran perfectly and did exactly the wrong thing."
Changes elsewhere break Zaps. When a connected app changes its API, existing Zaps can need repair. One user found that a Notion API rollout removed filter fields from existing Zaps, and Zapier told Slack users that steps not migrated before Slack retired its legacy Workflow Builder would stop working.
When the builder leaves. An admin at a company with leavers couldn't list a departed person's Zaps and connections except app by app.
A different approach
Zapier is built around "when this happens, do that." Sanoma is built around "this is how our tools should be set up, and these are the rules for changing it."
- Changes are code in your repo. Workflows and policies are TypeScript files, so a change gets a diff, a review and a history. Available.
- Runs survive crashes and long waits. Each vendor call is a durable step. A run that waits days for an approval or a launch date carries on after a restart and doesn't repeat what it already did. Available.
- A policy check before every vendor call. Zapier lets you add an approval step where you choose. Sanoma has one policy, written in Cedar with rules like "publishing a post needs the marketing lead," that runs before every call to a vendor, so a workflow can't leave it out. Available.
- A record of every run. Who started it, each call with the policy's decision and the vendor's reply, and each approval. Available.
- Checking the tool matches the file. Reading each setting back and flagging any difference, including changes someone made by hand in the vendor's own dashboard. This is the piece aimed at "it ran but did the wrong thing." Available for GitHub and Stripe; more vendors planned.
To be clear about the silent-stop problem: Sanoma doesn't have event triggers yet, so it can't claim to catch a trigger that never fires. What it is designed to catch is a setting that isn't what your files say.
When to stay with Zapier, or use both
- There's no engineer on the team. Stay with Zapier. In Sanoma's app anyone can start a run and approve what waits on them, but writing or changing a workflow still takes someone comfortable with TypeScript and git. An agent that makes those changes for you is planned.
- The job is glue. Notifications, lead routing, a form into a spreadsheet: these are low-stakes and need many apps. Zapier is the better tool.
- Use both. Keep Zapier for notifications and glue. Move the few changes that touch money, payroll or access, the ones you'd want someone to approve, into Sanoma once it supports the tools they live in.
Sources
Zapier's facts are linked in the table below. The user reports come from public posts we read in October 2026; every quote links to the original.