Airtable Automations vs Zapier - Which Works Best for Publishing

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Connecting Airtable and Zapier is usually easy until it isnt

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve set up a super clean Airtable → Zapier sync, congratulated myself, and then two days later wondered why none of my scheduled blog posts went live. 😐 Classic setup: I have a base in Airtable with a list of blog posts – title, body, featured image URL, publish date, and maybe a Boolean flag like “Ready to Publish.” I set up a basic Zap: when a new record matches certain conditions, create a WordPress post.

The first few runs usually work fine. But then something really weird starts happening – maybe the Zap triggers too early when “Ready to Publish” is still unchecked, or, even worse, it doesn’t trigger at all.

The problem? Airtable’s trigger conditions are finicky. It doesn’t watch for cell-by-cell changes; it watches for new records or “when a record enters a view.” This means your entire Zap depends on a view filter updating exactly when you think it should. I’ve tried to work around it by setting up a “To Be Published” view with filter conditions like “Status is Ready” and “Publish On or Before Today,” but sometimes Airtable automations update in a batch, which seems to confuse the Zap trigger 😕

What I didn’t realize until way too late is that Zapier sometimes just sees that a record entered a view, grabs it, and triggers… even if other automations haven’t finished updating all fields yet (especially calculated fields like formulas and rollups). I had this whole elaborate formula calculating the publish date based on a parent record, and it consistently lagged behind by a couple seconds, which meant Zapier often fired with the wrong date.

Eventually, I gave up and just added a manual “Publish Now” checkbox, which worked way better. Not elegant, but at least it was safer. I’d rather click a box myself than accidentally publish half-written drafts 🙃

Airtable Automations nailed it until they didn’t

Airtable Automations look deceptively slick. You set a trigger – usually when a record enters a view – and then tell Airtable to run an action. This can be sending an email, updating another record, or even triggering a webhook. For content publishing workflows, the appeal is obvious. Why add a middle layer like Zapier if Airtable can do it directly?

For a while, I used an automation that triggered when a new blog post record entered a view filtered by “Ready to Publish is true” and “Publish Date is within today.” Then the automation would send a webhook to Integromat (now Make) or even shoot data directly to WordPress using a custom Webhook. That worked… until it didn’t.

Here’s what I learned the hard way: Airtable Automations don’t retry reliably. If a webhook fails due to a temporary timeout – which happens way more often than you’d think – it just… logs an error. That’s it. No retry, no alert, no fallback. I had a whole campaign queued to launch, including tweets, newsletter copy, and blog posts, and my webhook strung through Airtable failed silently because my endpoint was slow for 10 seconds during a Lambda cold start 🙁

Also, you only get a limited number of automation runs per month on the free plan, and even with the paid tiers it’s not unlimited. I hit that wall once during a batch update where 40 records hit the published view at once. Airtable tried to fire 40 automations simultaneously. It got grumpy. Half of them failed.

There’s also just not much debugging support. You get a little play button to test and see logs, but the logs feel like peering through a dirty glass window – basic steps only, no payload preview, no downstream effects.

Eventually, I rewired my workflow to pass data from Airtable ➝ Webhook ➝ Make ➝ WordPress, with a fallback SMS notification to me if anything fails. It’s more duct-taped, but at least I know when things go sideways 😅

Zapier makes publishing easier but not smarter

Zapier is appealing because it feels like a grownup compared to Airtable’s low-key Automations. When I set it up to publish blog posts, I can chain multiple actions together – create a WP post, upload images, then share the URL in Slack. And when it breaks, I get slightly better logs. Slightly.

But the problem with Zapier is there’s no memory. Literally. If your “Create Post” action works but your next action (e.g., “Send tweet with post URL”) fails, Zapier doesn’t re-use the values unless they were explicitly mapped. I had a Zap that ran perfectly until I added a few filter steps to only tweet certain content. That broke the path that stored the post URL, so the tweet step sent out blank text. Oops.

Another realism: Zapier can’t fetch Airtable attachments consistently. I had a column for featured image upload. Airtable stores these as URLs to their CDN – short-lived URLs. Zapier would pull the URL, but if I was on a free Zapier plan and the task queued for more than a few minutes, Airtable’s URL expired and WordPress posted a broken image. That issue alone made me ragequit Zapier for about two months.

So my workaround is: instead of using the Airtable URL, I created a Make webhook that pulls the Airtable file, uploads it to Cloudinary (or wherever), and returns that new URL. Zapier now pulls that stable URL from a second lookup and uses that to upload the image to WordPress. That feels more stable – but again, I wouldn’t have even known about the expiring URL stuff unless everything had failed quietly the first ten times 🎯

Failed triggers showed me more than successful ones

The most revealing part of comparing Airtable Automations vs. Zapier for publishing is how each handles failure – especially silent failure. When something doesn’t trigger, you learn quick who gives you a receipt and who leaves you wondering.

Airtable Automations log basically just says “Complete” or “Failed.” Clicking into it shows a clean breakdown of each step, but it doesn’t always help you understand what went wrong. For example, if my webhook failed because the endpoint returned a 502, Airtable just logs that HTTP error and doesn’t retry. You stare at it like, “Cool… now what?”

Zapier, for its part, can be overly optimistic. It often says an action ran successfully even when the underlying service – like WordPress or Twitter – never actually processed it. Their error messages feel vague: things like “Timeout” or “Endpoint not responding” without payload details. When my tweet didn’t send, I thought Zapier had rate-limited me, but it turned out Twitter was just having an off day 🙄

I started adding catch steps – like “If error occurs, email me with record ID” – but even then, Zapier makes you think the whole Zap will retry. Nope. It’ll just stop at that step. The idea of building a backup “dead letter queue” using a Google Sheet just to catch failed items became… ridiculous.

I now have a separate Airtable base purely for logging Zap outcomes. I send the record ID, timestamp, and a basic status so I can at least backtrack what happened. Clunky, but necessary.

Publishing speed depends on the middle layer

One big thing I didn’t realize until way too deep into deployment: speed matters. Not human speed – machine speed. I thought a 10-second delay didn’t matter, until I realized Zapier sometimes queues tasks for later depending on your plan. If you’re on the free or low-tier Zapier plan, there’s a chance your trigger runs 5 or even 15 minutes late. That’s deadly if your “Publish blog post at 11am” becomes “11:13am” and suddenly your Tweet thread goes out before the link is live.

Airtable Automations have a slight edge here – they fire almost instantly when a record matches a view. But they’re bad with batching. If you bulk-edit 30 records, only about half will go through immediately. Sometimes one fails silently and never retries.

I tried Make (formerly Integromat) as the middle layer between Airtable and WordPress. It gives you a beautiful visual flow, and more importantly, allows me to schedule things precisely — “run at this exact time, one per minute” — which is impossible in either Airtable or Zapier.

I also started adding a 5-second delay node between steps where data needs to be written and then used (like: update Airtable, wait, then trigger webhook), just to make sure calculated fields had time to resolve. That delay alone solved at least 20% of the bugs I was having.

Version control is basically a memory game

You ever go into an old Zap or Automation and think, “Wait, why did I do it this way?” That’s the versioning problem. Airtable doesn’t offer true version control — if you change the logic of a view or automation, that’s it. No changelog. Zapier does let you restore versions, technically, but only from the past few edits and only if you remember to save them as drafts. So you end up commenting your own logic in the field names: “Don’t delete this formula – used for Zap trigger.” Hopefully future-you listens.

In one case, I had three different Zaps referencing three different Airtable views which all looked identical but had 1-character differences in filter logic. Which one triggered what? Who knows. It became clear I needed to write actual documentation… about my automations 😬

Eventually I gave up and just started storing automation metadata inside Airtable records — a notes column per base that explained which automation used what fields or filters. Like this:

Not elegant, but better than trying to reverse-engineer things based on cryptic Zapier step names.

The tiny setting that saved me

One day I accidentally fixed everything.

In Airtable’s automation trigger settings, there’s a small option that controls when a record enters a view. If you edit a record so it enters, it triggers. But if a record was already in the view before the automation was added, it won’t do anything. Obvious, right? Except I had added the automation after the posts were already in the view. So none of them fired.

The solution? I made a new column — just an empty checkbox. I edited one post at a time, checking and unchecking the box. That refresh caused the record to cycle out of and back into the view, which re-triggered the automation as if it were new.

It wasn’t a real solution, but it was enough to get the posts live by noon. Sometimes you just have to hack your way past the finish line 😛

Airtable Automations vs Zapier – Which Works Best for Publishing