Zapier vs Workato

I have not actually worked with either of these, but I have seen some demos.  I hope others chime in as well.

My impression is that Workato is infinitely flexible, absolutely robust, industrial strength, bullet proof and well supported with a responsive help desk. The pricing is here https://www.workato.com/integrations/quickbase

Zapier is lower cost and not as full featured.  So it will depend on how complex your workflow is.

For example with Workato you could save a record in QuickBase  (Project Completed)  and an email Notification from QuickBase to Workato would fire off a Survey Monkey Questionnaire to the customer.  Then a week later the survey comes back with a poor rating.  Workato, which was patiently waiting, would detect that and trigger a "Slack message"  to the sales manager to follow up with the unhappy customer and the message would include the customer contact info, their sales, and the survey monkey complaint and rating.

Workato is worth the cost especially when considering complex workflows as noted above. Also, zapier doesn't have the same capability when dealing with creating child records of records that need to be created through the workflow, or other second level types of processes. Good Luck!

Just to throw a differing opinion in here... I've used both, but certainly more Zapier. I have an extremely complex QuickBase environment and over 75 active Zaps, about 65 interact with QuickBase in some way. Both systems have their pros/cons - just like anything. I've found Workato to be more robust and capable when it comes to large datasets as Zapier is very trigger-based. In the scenarios where I've needed to handle bulk processing of records, my team generally creates a custom app on the platform, or simply inserts a JavaScript or Python code step to do the data modelling. No doubt about it though, Workato is more flexible out of the box in that regard. Zapier though has a very large number of apps out of the box (around 800 now I believe) which helps get people off the ground quicker. There are some other pluses/minuses on both sides.

My initial impressions of Zapier were similar to what you are all indicating - that it was great for simple tasks, but not for more complex workflows. After seeing it work though in such advanced scenarios, I can say otherwise. Zapier is similar to QuickBase in the sense that they are really easy to get off the ground with and people sometimes pass them over for the more complex tasks. For some context, I have one Zap that talks to QuickBase that is 27 steps. The majority of my Zaps have multiple interactions with one or more applications, reading and writing data. Some are smaller, but accomplish cool tasks. As a sample, a handful of Zaps perform API_GenResultsTable to QuickBase on specific days/times, convert the JavaScript Array to an HTML table and then send out a custom e-mail - basically similar to QuickBase subscription but at a specific time of the day and with custom styling.

There is no doubt the value Workato brings - especially with the QuickBase partnership and some other advantages it has over Zapier but it is probably worth giving Zapier a fair shot.

I'm actually speaking about QuickBase integrations with Zapier at Empower 2017.

Hope this helps.