Census vs Zapier

Stop hacking data integrations.

Companies choose Census as the most complete platform for data activation and quality. Census wins in scalability, observability, and performance to help every team build better data, together.

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High-growth enterprises choose Census:

What do you get from Census
that you can't get from Zapier?

One single source of truth

A true 360° view of customer data that keeps all your metrics consistent across apps. Deliver the freshest and most trustworthy data to any internal team or external partner.

Highest quality integrations

Sync with confidence with the fastest and most reliable connectors that scale to billions of rows — up to 200x faster than other activation platforms.

Centralized security and governance

Ensure data quality and rapid delivery with an entire suite of code and no-code tools that enable data transformation and governance.

Why customers choose Census over Zapier

Census

Zapier

Pricing

Transparent Pricing

Flexible for multiple use cases, easier to forecast pricing, and scalable for growing organizations.

Pay-per-task: quickly becomes unmanageable for high-growth with larger volumes of data.

Low Maintenance Costs

Census has 99.7% uptime and we alert you of any data errors. Centralized data integration is easy to maintain, manage, and troubleshoot.

With multiple APIs, webhooks, maintenance, and fixing time, the total operational cost of managing a point-to-point infrastructure is unsustainable.

Data Activation

Visual Segment Builder

Marketing teams can easily build audiences on top of the data warehouse and sync them to all their ads and marketing tools – No CSV uploads or SQL required.

No functionality

Data Modeling

No-Code Data Transformation

Computed Columns enable self-serve transformations like rollups, equations, lookups, GPT, and text transforms.

No functionality

Data Engineering

Sync Management API

Programmatically create, trigger, edit, and delete syncs, models, and connections.

No functionality

Native dbt, Looker, and Sigma integrations

Connect to any existing dbt project, Looker Look, or Sigma Workbook. You can configure Census to automatically run syncs whenever your dbt Cloud models have been rebuilt. Census will alert you if dbt changes will adversely affect Census syncs.

No functionality

Observability

Workflow Visibility

Full transparency and visibility into what data is delivered, where, and when. Data is never secretly overwritten or rejected.

Dozens of Zaps dependent on one another with no workflow visibility. When one connection breaks, error handling and debugging are difficult.

Live API Inspector

Real-time visibility into API requests and responses to help you debug and fix errors as they happen.

No functionality

Sync Dry Runs

Census supports running test syncs to preview how data downstream will change, without actually changing your destination data.

No functionality

Custom Alerting

Configurable alerts for failed syncs, invalid source records, or records rejected by the destination.

No functionality

Sync Logs in the warehouse

Census stores detailed logs of every data point and every audience synced in your data warehouse so you can query them with SQL or BI tools. No extra tools needed.

None

Security

Data stays in the warehouse by default

Your data is 100% safe in the best storage option: the data warehouse. We don't store any of your data and we minimize the number of credentials needed.

Multiple APIs and login credentials mean more opportunity for security breaches.

Role-Based Access Controls

4 different levels of permissions, with a unique Operator role that only creates and manages segments and syncs on approved data models.

Impossible to maintain compliance and consistent access control lists when your data is spread across multiple different apps.

EU Data Hosting

You can choose to use our EU server to keep all your data within the EU throughout the duration of a Census sync.

None

Single Sign-On (SSO)

Census supports enterprise-grade SAML 2.0 SSO, which makes signing in with your existing identity provider easy.

Only for highest tier Company plans

Support

White Glove Onboarding

Our Customer Data Architects aren't your average support team. All of them used to be Heads of Data at companies like Verizon and the AMA.

Basic support

Dedicated CSM

A dedicated CSM to help you set up and troubleshoot any issues. We're with you every step of the way.

Not available

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Start a trial of Census

“Before, with Zapier, it took us a lot of time to make changes. Every time we updated something, we’d have to go into Zapier, change how it operated, and connect it to all the right pieces. Census does it all in one tool. We've saved tens of thousands of dollars.”