When people hear 'automation' and 'no-code' in the same sentence they often ask how Gumloop different from Zapier. It becomes much more obvious when you start using the platform but in this post we'll break down the key differences.
tldr: Gumloop is a hyper-flexible, AI-native workflow builder that allows you to automate much more complex tasks than Zapier. Our 'ceiling' for what's possible is much higher and the large majority of automations built on Gumloop are not possible on Zapier. They have a wonderful product but it's better suited for automating simple work with less AI involved.
A More Flexible Automation Framework
Gumloop users describe it sometimes as 'Zapier on steroids' or 'Zapier meets Figma' because we have Zapier-like integrations but our automation building framework is an infinite canvas with no limitations.
Building on Gumloop is more similar to using a visual programming language than the "if this then that" framework Zapier provides. The rigidity of Zapier's framework makes it slightly easier to get started with but ends up inevitably restricting what's possible.
We're focused on letting anyone in a company have the same impact with AI that an engineer could by letting them build their own tools. Those tools can be as complex and custom as your imagination allows.
Features for Complex Creations
We've been building specifically to help our users create complicated flows. On Gumloop, it's easier to break up your automations into subflows, handle if-else conditions, errors and push the boundaries with advanced (more techincal) features.
Subflows
Subflows are how users can automate massive workloads without getting overwhelmed, keeping those large creations clean and modular.
In short, an entire flow can be used like a node. For example, if you're automating blog posting, you may have a subflow that handles creating an outline, one that handles scraping content, another that formats and another than adds embedded links. All of these subflows serve an individual purpose and when connected together in a larger flow can accomplish extremely complex work.
Here's our documentation on subflows and here's an example of a youtube video -> blog post flow that is composed of several subflows.
Conditional Flows
You can easily create conditional flows using our if-else functionality. When this is paired with AI categorization or data extraction you can have decision making baked into your creations with a few clicks.
Error Handling
How you handle errors is critical to building resilient automations, especially when AI is involved. Our framework is built to allow you to catch any error and handle it safely by routing it to separate branches of your flow or to entirely separate subflows.
Code Execution
Sometimes, users want to take automations further than the platform was designed for. In these cases we expose more technical features like the ability to execute arbitrary python and javascript in your flows in our 'run code' node.
You'll never need to write code, but you can if you want.
AI Native Integrations
We built Gumloop with LLMs integrated from day 1. Every aspect of the platform has been designed to gracefully handle the 'nondeterministic' aspect of AI. Legacy automation platforms were built with standard APIs as the only consideration, making them hard to refactor to support complex AI features.
Our AI node library is the best example of this. It's a toolkit of prebuilt nodes that make integrating LLMs into your workflows super simple. We handle the wrangling of the AI and provide the nodes to users so they can easily extract data, summarize, categorize, score etc. without needing to be an engineer.
We're also model agnostic so you can plug your favourite LLMs into your existing flows and explore which models perform best.
Combining these AI nodes with your data is a big part of what makes Gumloop so special.
Speed of Development ⚡️
We're a team of 2 and ship like the wind. If there's a feature you need that we don't support you can email us at founders@gumloop.com.
Speak to us directly and we'll build the features you need 🤝