Trying to escape the copy paste treadmill
I started using Bardeen because I got sick of opening the same six tabs every morning to grab data from Airtable, plug it into a Notion doc, slap the result into Slack, and then run a quick search on LinkedIn to prep for daily outreach. The worst part? None of it needed thinking. It was just clicking around like a warm-blooded macro.
Zapier had already saved me before — my first working Zap fired off every time I published a blog post on Webflow and auto-tweeted it with some hashtags. Love that little guy. But after a while, I started getting tangled in conditional filters, delays, and webhook chains so long it looked like spaghetti in a crime scene. Also, one weird API timeout and everything would break silently. I’d find out two weeks later that none of my blog promotions had been posted. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
So yeah, the hunt began. I wanted something that didn’t feel like building a Rube Goldberg machine to move a file into Google Drive.
What surprised me about Bardeen at first
The first thing I noticed when trying Bardeen was: wait, this thing lives in my browser? No dashboard. No multi-step builder UI. Just a Chrome extension and a sidebar that pops open like the devtools console. It was weirdly comforting and unsettling at the same time (like when Notion released buttons… and you didn’t know whether to cheer or cry).
Once I realized you could just open it while staring at an open LinkedIn tab and say something like “For each profile in this list, add name and role to Google Sheet” — and it actually *listened*? That was wild. Like, Zapier doesn’t even live in your browser. It’s always context-less — which works fine if you’re just connecting tools, but not if you’re scraping your screen or reacting to things you’re literally looking at.
Zapier needs triggers. Bardeen feels more like you’re just giving it instructions while multitasking. That alone made me shift to testing 80% of my day-to-day repetitive stuff in Bardeen for a while.
Extracting data without pulling your hair out
So here’s where Bardeen really started pulling ahead for daily annoying tasks. Say you’re staring at a table on a SaaS tool — like, Airtable’s shared view, or even something janky like Pipedrive’s kanban. If you’re logged in and can see it, Bardeen can usually extract from it.
You just right-click, select “extract data from this page,” and it tries to auto-detect patterns like rows and columns. It’s like a mini scraping robot that sits on top of your own screen — and doesn’t make you paste any XPaths (ugh). Sometimes it completely misunderstands table layouts — I tried extracting from a weird customer portal once, and it somehow grabbed only first names and prices, skipping all the email addresses — but when it works, it saves hours.
Zapier? You’re gonna need an extension like Mailparser or Apify. Then you point Zapier to that service. Then you hope the integration works. And yeah, it’s reliable when it’s set up. But that setup is tedious unless you’re using a fairly standardized input. I had to clean up error reports from a Zapier Parser email that missed badly formatted PDFs. Not fun.
So if you deal with browser-based, visual data that *you see but Zapier doesn’t,* Bardeen wins hard here.
The weird things Zapier still does better
Zapier still rules at structured multi-step logic across platforms. Let’s say you’re managing a hiring pipeline. You want:
– When a new person applies via Typeform
– Wait for a Greenhouse stage change
– Check LinkedIn company size of the applicant’s last employer
– Send Slack alert IF that company has more than 50 employees
No shot you’re doing all that in Bardeen. The logic tree gets too complex fast. I tried building similar logic and Bardeen just… gave up. It acted like it could handle it, but the flow crashed quietly or prompts got stuck at inconsistent steps. There’s also no way to say “wait 6 hours and then do x” unless you cheat with Google Calendar reminders.
Zapier, for all its old-school wizard interface weirdness, still manages these chained workflows better. Especially notable when you’re integrating things that *live outside the browser.* CRMs. Marketing platforms. Payment processors. That’s Zapier’s world. Still king.
When things break what breaks faster
Bardeen breaks quietly, but *visibly*. Say you build something that scrapes LinkedIn daily. One day you’ll open your browser and it’s like — “this element was not found.” You see the recipe run, and you see where it fails. That transparency actually helped me debug faster. I just go, “Oh, the HTML changed, duh” and update the selector. It may not work, but at least I *saw* it didn’t work 🙂
Zapier, on the other hand, is like a trapdoor with a rug over it. You think something’s firing, but maybe it’s stuck in a queue. Maybe it hit your task quota but didn’t tell you. I had a webhook Zap that silently failed because the return data was too big — didn’t even show an error until I clicked 4 screens deep into the task history.
I ran a test once where a Bardeen workflow silently skipped 3 rows out of 10, no error. But that’s because one of the LinkedIn profiles didn’t load fast enough. It turned out useful — now I build in 2-second delays anytime I notice that.
How each handles real world browser weirdness
This is really where Bardeen earns its messiah-of-repetitive-browser-tasks badge. If you’ve ever manually clicked through 20 Google search results or LinkedIn pages opening profile cards, you know how fragile that routine is.
Bardeen lets you loop through pages you’re already on. I had it load a Google search results page, click each link, grab a message, then go back. That felt illegal. But it worked… until Google blocked me temporarily one day. RIP.
You can build loops that mimic human actions like tab switching or clicking buttons with obscured class names. I literally had a Bardeen flow that logged into a SaaS site, navigated 3 layers in, exported a CSV, and uploaded it to Drive. It only broke when the site added a CAPTCHA. Not blaming Bardeen. That’s like blaming your umbrella because gravity exists.
Zapier would need APIs for all this. You can’t *click* inside a visual tool from Zapier unless you use something janky like browser automators or Selenium wrapped scripts pushed into Zapier via Code steps. That’s way too much for someone who’s just trying not to lose an hour copying names into a spreadsheet.
What it’s like to build and change automations
Zapier’s builder is linear, structured like a checklist. It guides you through Trigger → Action → Optional Paths. The downside is that editing anything mid-Zap can turn into purgatory. You change one field in Step 3 then everything downstream breaks unless you manually click through every little test preview. UI feels like dental insurance — necessary, but no joy.
Bardeen’s Playbooks feel a little wild-west. Sometimes I record actions in my browser. Sometimes I just choose from existing building blocks. It asks you questions in human language: “Where do you want to save this?” is a lot more comforting than “Choose destination schema from dropdown.”
But that flexibility has a downside: debugging is a scattered mess. There’s no single playbook history that lets you trace exactly which input caused which result. I often have to re-run flows with only 2 data points to be sure they’re working. It’s fiddly.
Cost silence task limits and the unspoken mood
Zapier reminds me of Dropbox in the early days. Super useful, everyone swears by it, but the free tier? You’ll hit that way too fast if your Zap runs daily. I had like 300 tasks/month before it downgraded silently. That’s barely 10 multi-step workflows a day.
Bardeen feels like it still lives in the free-at-all-costs age. Most of the core stuff works unpaid unless you’re really scaling. I got away with browser scraping, data extraction, and calendar-based reminders for weeks before I paid. And even then, it was more out of guilt than necessity 😛
Also, maybe I’m projecting here… but Zapier feels like an enterprise tool faking simplicity. Bardeen feels like an indie hacker tool trying to look grown up. That energy difference shapes how you use them. When something breaks in Bardeen, I feel like I can jump into Discord or ping the devs. When things break in Zapier, it’s like filing a help ticket into a TSA queue.
So which should you actually use and when
If your workflows happen inside Chrome tabs you actively use — LinkedIn, Google search, SaaS dashboards, Airtable views — Bardeen is your new best friend. It’s fastest for screen-level automations. If I see a list I want in a spreadsheet, I never think “Zapier.” I think “Can Bardeen grab this table before lunch?”
Zapier still crushes it if your trigger source is server-based or API-native. Think Stripe, Calendly, Google Sheets, Typeform. Stuff that doesn’t live visually in your browser. Those automations are usually fire-once-run-forever style. Bardeen doesn’t really handle that without some user interaction.
Honestly, I use both. Differently. I wish I didn’t have to. But I also wish Slack never added Stories — so here we are.