AWS Glue vs Zapier comparison

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AWS Glue

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Zapier and AWS Glue are competitive in the automation and data integration category. AWS Glue has the upper hand for enterprises due to its robust enterprise-level features.

Features: Zapier offers extensive integration capabilities, allowing users to connect various applications easily. Its plug-and-play ability is beneficial for small to medium enterprises, and it provides valuable automation of workflows. AWS Glue is praised for scalability, integrating seamlessly with AWS products, and offering strong ETL processes. It also provides automatic schema detection and robust data management.

Room for Improvement: Zapier could improve Google Sheets integrations, support comprehensive logic, and offer better support channels. Users also request a wider range of integrations and more customization options. AWS Glue requires a more user-friendly interface, diverse programming language support, and better multi-cloud environment support. Users also find the setup process cumbersome and suggest operational cost reductions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zapier is primarily used on public clouds, with high ratings for ease of deployment and customer service. AWS Glue is flexible across public, private, and hybrid clouds but has a learning curve and inconsistent technical support, which affects satisfaction levels. While Zapier users experience quick resolutions due to its simplicity, AWS Glue excels in technical integrations but could improve accessibility and support consistency.

Pricing and ROI: Zapier's tiered pricing includes a free plan for basic needs, scaling based on usage. Despite being pricey when scaling, it offers good value for small businesses. AWS Glue's pay-as-you-go model can be costly for small businesses but provides robust enterprise capabilities that justify the expense. Both solutions offer strong ROI, with Zapier appealing to cost-sensitive small businesses and AWS Glue to large enterprises seeking powerful features.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Glue vs. Zapier Report (Updated: April 2025).

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AWS Glue vs. Zapier

April 2025

Helped 851,604 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

AWS Glue

Ranking in Cloud Data Integration

1st

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zapier

Ranking in Cloud Data Integration

10th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Data Integration category, the mindshare of AWS Glue is 20.5%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zapier is 2.0%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal

Python AWS & AI Expert at a tech consulting company

Enables seamless integration and data preparation with robust transformation capabilities

AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models. It offers transformation options on canvas or through ETL pipelines, notebooks, and code. Additionally, it supports data preparation, cleaning, and filtering seamlessly. AWS Glue also enhances job scheduling and orchestration capabilities, integrating with AWS Glue Studio for comprehensive data workflow management.

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FrankHo

Analyst at MSXI

Though the tool offers a visually appealing UI, it needs to improve its documentation

With Zapier, improvements are required in the areas of concerns like bugs, ease of use, and documentation. The product has many bugs, so users have to wait for a period ranging from five minutes to an hour to see where the Zap went. In Zapier, Zaps aren't very understandable owing to the way they work. As a user, you would think that in Zapier, a Zap works in a particular way once you set it up, but it won't happen. At times, some Zaps can interfere with each other, because of which there might be infinite loops that may occur, owing to which multiple Zaps continue to run or break down in general, after which nothing would run in your environment. You would not be notified about the breakdown of Zaps. The bugs in the product may be considered to understand or get an explanation of how Zaps works between software systems, so for something between Gmail and HubSpot, Zapier would explain through better documentation what would work and what wouldn't work. Maybe if Zapier had better functionality with Python or any other coding language in general, it would make the product a lot better.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I like its integration and ability to handle all data-related tasks."

"The solution’s most valuable feature is the ETL job."

"Data catalog and triggers are the two best features for me. AWS Glue has its own data catalog, which makes it great and really easy to use. Triggers are also really good for scheduling the ETL process."

"AWS Glue is a good solution for developers, they have the ability to write code in different languages and other software."

"AWS Glue is fast and managed by AWS. Hence, you don't have to worry about capacity and the performance of Glue jobs. It has integrations with other data stores of AWS. The product offers metadata management, logging, and ETL processing capabilities. It comes with a powerful feature, Glue Studio, which helps to do queries interactively within the community. It is a managed service and very secure. Another popular and mature service is S3."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is that it provides a GUI format with a drag-and-drop feature."

"The solution's technical support is good. Whenever we raise a use case where we face an issue in our company, we get a response from the solution's technical team."

"AWS Glue's most valuable features are the data catalog, including crawlers and tables, and Glue Studio, which means you don't have to use custom code."

More AWS Glue pros

"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."

"Zapier’s most valuable feature is its ability to interconnect applications or devices."

"We find it effortless to set up. We really don't have to do anything other than finding the application in the Zapier catalog. And as long as the application has been re-integrated into Zapier, they're able to then just provide the connection details and hook it up."

"Zapier's interface, for me, is the solution's greatest value proposition. It is designed and developed for people who don't have a clue about what they're trying to do. It has a very user-friendly interface."

"Zapier luckily has a wide range of integrations, I would say."

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is very intuitive and has a very flat learning curve."

"There are a few valuable features, like the stability that it comes with and also the number of features that it offers. I've used other services like Pabbly, but they don't offer similar numbers of applications that Zapier has or allows to integrate with – it's maximum."

"The ability to connect web applications to trigger actions in another app after having enriched, formatted, delayed, grouped, and filtered is really valuable for many businesses."

More Zapier pros

Cons

"It is not clear how the partition discovery would have been affected by more data coming in."

"AWS Glue is more costly compared to other tools like Airflow."

"While working on AWS Glue, I could not find any training material for it."

"The solution’s stability could be improved."

"Beginners need additional support as it currently lacks some features required for complex transformations, often necessitating custom Python coding."

"It would be better if it were more user-friendly. The interesting thing we found is that it was a little strange at the beginning. The way Glue works is not very straightforward. After trying different things, for example, we used just the console to create jobs. Then we realized that things were not working as expected. After researching and learning more, we realized that even though the console creates the script for the ETL processes, you need to modify or write your own script in Spark to do everything you want it to do. For example, we are pulling data from our source database and our application database, which is in Aurora. From there, we are doing the ETL to transform the data and write the results into Redshift. But what was surprising is that it's almost like whatever you want to do, you can do it with Glue because you have the option to put together your own script. Even though there are many functionalities and many connections, you have the opportunity to write your own queries to do whatever transformations you need to do. It's a little deceiving that some options are supposed to work in a certain way when you set them up in the console, but then they are not exactly working the right way or not as expected. It would be better if they provided more examples and more documentation on options."

"In terms of improvement, the performance of AWS Glue could be faster."

"The solution should offer features for streaming data in addition to batching data."

More AWS Glue cons

"Being able to share Zaps and organize them with teammates would allow sharing and refining scenarios and even combining steps that require different people's credentials."

"After mapping them out, and they'd worked for a while, I've had Zapier fail."

"It could support various languages along with Python."

"Zapier needs more YouTube or video tutorials or more training for people. That would help a lot. In particular, Zapier should have documentation for every connector. Its documentation needs to be more detailed and visual."

"At the moment, they allow a limited number of apps. I look forward to getting more apps for each package."

"There is room for improvement in the support. They are not responsive, and they don't take much time to get resolved."

"With Zapier, improvements are required in the areas of concerns like bugs, ease of use, and documentation."

"Some recent changes to the solution have made it bulky and not as intuitive to use as it previously was."

More Zapier cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate pricing an eight out of ten."

"I would rate the solution a six or seven on a scale of one to ten, with ten being very expensive. Specifically, I rate its pricing a six out of ten."

"AWS Glue is a high-priced solution that bills the client $150,000 to $250,000 annually."

"If you are using the solution for an enterprise business, it will be expensive."

"AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go model, wherein the cost of the data you use will be counted as a monthly bill."

"AWS Glue is a paid service that doesn't come under the free trial of AWS."

"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten."

"The overall cost of AWS Glue could be better. It cost approximately $1,000 a month. There is paid support available from AWS Glue."

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

"Zapier is a paid service. Its license renews monthly, and Zapier will downgrade your subscription to the free version when your credit card doesn't have funds. That significantly impacts your service because everything halts completely. Zapier doesn't have any hidden costs."

"It's very affordable."

"The least expensive plan is $24 a month, and you can go all the way to $800 a month if you're a huge company using many tasks."

"It's very straightforward licensing. There's only one cost you have to pay, and if you want a relevant pricing plan, I think you have two or three different models or packages which include the number of notifications or Zaps, as they call it, that you can program."

"There is a free plan that is, of course, limited. However, it allows you to understand and check true scenarios for a while."

"Think your Zaps through to make sure you don't use more Zaps than you need."

"Zapier's price is good."

"Per task, there is a monthly plan involving 15 euros...Also, in different forms, they just give you the ability to use different features. They charge 18.58 euros for the first standard plan, which includes 750 tasks. So, it is about 25 cents per task."

More Zapier pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Integration solutions are best for your needs.

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851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?

AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.

How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?

We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...

What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?

AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...

What do you like most about Zapier?

The product's most valuable feature is automation.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zapier?

The pricing is suitable. It's not cheap, but not expensive.

What needs improvement with Zapier?

The pricing could be a little cheaper.

AWS Database Migration Service vs AWS Glue

Comparisons

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Talend Open Studio vs AWS Glue

Compared 5% of the time

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Coefficient vs Zapier

Compared 22% of the time

Fivetran vs Zapier

Compared 14% of the time

SnapLogic vs Zapier

Compared 11% of the time

Coupler.io vs Zapier

Compared 9% of the time

MuleSoft Composer vs Zapier

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Download AWS Glue product report

AWS Glue

May 2025

Download Zapier product report

April 2025

Overview

AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.

AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.

AWS Glue Features

AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:

Automatic schema discovery: AWS Glue crawlers connect to the organization's source or target data source through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for users' data. This feature creates metadata in companies' AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Schemas for data stream management: The AWS Glue Schema Registry enables users to validate and control the evolution of streaming data through registered Apache Avro schemas for no additional charge.
Automatic scaling based on workload: This feature dynamically scales resources up and down based on workload. The feature controls job resources, removing them depending on how much the workload can be split up.
FindMatches: This feature is for machine learning-based data deduplication and cleansing, and works by finding records that are imperfect matches of each other to remove useless data copies.
Edit, debug, and test ETL code: This feature helps users who have chosen to interactively develop their ETL code by providing development endpoints for editing, debugging, and testing the code it generates for them.
AWS Glue DataBrew: An interactive, point-and-click visual interface for specialists to clean and normalize data without the need to write any code.
AWS Glue Interactive Sessions: This feature simplifies the development of data integration jobs by enabling data engineers to interactively prepare and explore data.
AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks: This AWS Glue feature provides serverless notebooks with minimal setup, allowing developers to start working in a timely manner.
Complex ETL pipeline building: This feature allows the product to be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or based on an event, allowing users to start multiple jobs in parallel or specify dependencies to build complex ETL pipelines.
AWS Glue Studio: This AWS Glue feature allows users to visually transform data through a drag-and-drop interface. The product automatically generates the code for ETL processes for users' data.

AWS Glue Benefits

AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:

Users of other AWS products can easily onboard with AWS Glue, as it is integrated across a wide range of the company's services.
The solution is serverless, which allows for a lower total cost of ownership.
AWS Glue offers more power for users, as it automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs.
The product allows customers to easily discover and search across all their AWS datasets through AWS Glue Data Catalog.
AWS Glue does not require additional payment for managing and enforcing schemas for data streams.
The solution facilitates the authority of scalable ETL jobs for beginners and non-coding experts through a drag-and-drop interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.

Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Zapier is a tool for primarily non-technical users to connect together web apps.

An integration between two apps is called a Zap. A Zap is made up of a Trigger and one or more Actions or Searches.

Whenever the trigger happens in one app, Zapier will automatically perform the actions or searches in another app in order.

Zaps are very lightweight and easy to set up. Zaps do not import or export old data (they only operate on new items created after the Zap is enabled). Zaps are also not kept in sync ("two way syncing") after the Zap is triggered.

Zaps are deceivingly simple if you're used to dealing with complex and difficult integrations. Their simplicity is what enables anyone to create them.

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday

BuzzFeed, Groupon, Spotify, Columbia University, FOX