Zapier vs Relay App: Relay Is Gone, Now What?

Updated 2026-10-16 · 900 words

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Quick take: this comparison is now a migration question, not a live product decision. Relay.app shut down for good in 2026, free accounts lost access on August 15, paid accounts on September 14, so there's no current "Zapier vs Relay" trade-off in the sense this search usually implies. What's actually useful here is the follow-up question: if you were using or evaluating Relay, where should those workflows go now? For most teams, Zapier's much larger catalog and mature builder make it the realistic landing spot. If Relay's human-approval checkpoint on AI-drafted actions was the specific feature you relied on, Lindy is the closer structural match, and we cover that path separately.

What Relay.app actually was

Relay was a workflow automation platform built around one defining idea: not every action an AI step produces should fire unattended. You built flows much like you would in Zapier or Make, trigger, steps, logic, but at any point you could insert a checkpoint where a person reviewed a drafted email, Slack message, or CRM update, through Slack, email, or Relay's own dashboard, before it actually went out. That human-in-the-loop pattern was the product's whole identity rather than a bolted-on option, and it earned Relay a spot in plenty of "best AI agent" and "best automation tool" roundups for teams that didn't want to let an agent act fully on its own yet. It ran on tiered, usage-based pricing, free for light testing, paid tiers scaling with workflow steps and AI credits, and covered roughly 100 integrations, a meaningfully smaller catalog than Zapier's but enough for a common CRM, email, and messaging stack.

Why this matters: Relay shut down in 2026

Relay's own shutdown notice set an unambiguous timeline. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades stopped on July 16, 2026. Free accounts lost access on August 15, 2026. Paying customers kept access through September 14, 2026, after which the service and the account data behind it went away. If a "Zapier vs Relay" comparison you found elsewhere still treats Relay as live, it predates the wind-down and should be read as historical, not current.

This is also a useful reminder for anyone evaluating a narrower, single-purpose automation platform generally: vendor survival is itself a real evaluation criterion in this market, not just price and features. Before committing a workflow to a smaller platform, it's worth checking how long it's actually been generally available and whether it has a funded path to staying that way.

What Zapier is, for anyone comparing fresh

Zapier is the industry's original no-code automation hub: a trigger fires in one app, and visual "action" steps run after it, with no code involved anywhere in the builder. It connects well over 8,000 apps, the largest catalog in the category, bills per completed task, and its newer Zapier Agents product layers a goal-oriented AI assistant on top of that same catalog through Zapier MCP.

Comparison: what each one covered

Migrating off Relay: your two realistic paths

If what you mainly needed was broad app-to-app automation, move to Zapier. Its catalog covers far more than Relay's roughly 100 integrations ever did, and its builder is the more mature of the two for general trigger-action workflows. Rebuild your highest-volume Relay flow first, since that's where the gap in coverage or logic is most likely to surface early.

If what you actually valued was the mandatory approval checkpoint on an AI-drafted action, Zapier doesn't replicate that as a core feature the way Relay did. Lindy is the closer structural match: it's a role-based AI agent builder with an approve-before-send setting on individual actions, the same basic pattern Relay built its entire product around. Our Relay vs Lindy guide goes deeper on that specific migration if the approval gate, not general automation breadth, is what you're trying to replace.

When NOT to default to Zapier

Don't migrate to Zapier on autopilot if the actual feature you'll miss from Relay is the approval checkpoint on AI-reasoned output rather than general automation. Zapier's Paths and manual-review steps can approximate a gate, but they're conditional branching bolted onto a trigger-action model, not a purpose-built approval workflow. If that distinction mattered to how you used Relay, evaluate Lindy before assuming Zapier covers the gap.

Which should you pick?

Choose Zapier if your Relay workflows were mostly general app-to-app automation and you want the largest available catalog to rebuild on. Choose Lindy if the approval checkpoint on an AI-drafted action was the specific thing Relay did that you still need. Either way, there's no live Relay product left to weigh against anything, so this is a migration decision, not a feature comparison.

Check Zapier's current plans and catalog directly before rebuilding: Zapier publishes self-serve task-based pricing and its full app directory.

For the fuller view of what replaced Relay's specific approval-gate use case, our Relay vs Lindy guide covers that migration path in depth, and our best Zapier alternatives for agencies roundup is a useful next stop if you're rebuilding client-facing workflows that Relay used to handle.

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