Shouldn’t AI save the workday by paying us all less to do the work? I don’t know about you, but writing hints and improving them (and improving them again…) is giving me more work than in the pre-AI era.

So I try to build an agent whenever I can. But choosing the right platform to build them on matters just as much as deciding to use them in the first place.

OpenAI is rolling out codec-enabled versions of its AI agents, called Workspace Agents. They are very likeable. Zapier Agentswith some important differences. Here’s what we know so far about how they compare.

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Zapier Agents vs ChatGPT Workspace Agents at a Glance

Both make it easy for anyone to create an agent, but Zapier lets you build an end-to-end business system.

To create a ChatGPT workspace agent, you’ll start by visiting the ChatGPT sidebar. You click. Agentsthen makeand then type in the prompt describing the agent behavior you want. After ChatGPT thinks it over, you’ll get a plan for agent instructions that you can approve or tweak. And from there, you’ll combine your tools and let the agent loose.

You can also deploy workspace agents directly into Slack, where they can take requests from teammates, answer questions, and initiate workflows without ever leaving a conversation.

In Zapier, you can access agents from the dashboard, where you can view analytics, version history, and any agents you’ve grouped by “pods.” To start building, just click. + New agent. Zapier CopilotThe built-in AI assistant will ask you what you are looking for and then fulfill your wish.

Zapier Copilot can also connect your agent to other Zapier products, e.g Zips, Tablesand Forms. This means you can build end-to-end business systems—from the agent to the workflows, databases, and forms that power it—all under one roof.

And if you want to talk to your agent without leaving the tab you’re working in, the Zapier Chrome extension puts it in your browser.

Both Zapier and ChatGPT let you spin up agents with templates. OpenAI released a set of them for back office workflows. At Zapier, we’ve been developing battle-tested agent templates for over a year, including templates that our own colleagues have built and rely on to this day.

Two of our most popular agent templates are Support Email Agent, which drafts responses to your customers by looking at answers from your knowledge base, and Lead Enrichment Agent, which researches new leads for you, enriches them with key details like job title and company size, and automatically updates your CRM. For more templates, visit Zapier Agents Template Library.

Both let you standardize how agents work, but Zapier also offers a deterministic layer.

Like other AI coding tools, ChatGPT lets you add skills to your workspace agents: reusable, shareable workflows packaged as a Markdown file (or a folder of them) with instructions, examples, and sometimes code. The goal is to teach an agent your team’s playbook once—how you format a QBR deck or the steps your finance team follows for vendor onboarding—and then reuse that skill anywhere, without rewriting the prompt every time you create a new agent.

Finally, you’ll also be able to convert any existing GPTs you have into workspace agents.

If you want something more. DecisiveLean on principles rather than strong recommendations — you have a few options:

• Create a zip. Zaps are deterministic workflows that run the same way every time.

• Bind the Zapier agent to the Zap. It gives you the reliability of a defined workflow with additional AI decision making in the middle.

• Ask one Zapier agent to call another. Agents work best when given specific jobs. With agent-to-agent calling, you can pair experts together so that each handles the part they’ve been trained to do.

Zapier Agents connect to significantly more apps (about 9,000 more)

OpenAI says that beyond the usual suspects—Gmail, Google Drive and Calendar, Outlook, SharePoint, GitHub, HubSpot—more connectors for agent workplaces are on the way. But if you want to build a workflow on an app that doesn’t yet support it, you’re out of luck. Technically, you can wire something through the MCP. But that means setting up your own MCP server or finding a third party, then managing the connection yourself.

If you’re willing to stick with workspace agents, you can make it easy. Zapier MCPwhich gives ChatGPT access to Zapier’s 9,000+ app integrations through a single connection. Right now, though, you’re adding Zapier to fill that gap.

Zapier already comes with over 9,000 app integrations out of the box. An agent can read from your CRM, write to your project management tool, post to your team chat app, update a spreadsheet, send an email, file a ticket, and pull data from your billing system, whichever apps you prefer. And someone with no coding experience can create all this with just a few clicks.

This scalability means teams across your organization can build agents that plug into the tools they’re already using, without waiting for IT to add a new connector. Workspace Agent can only do parts that touch OpenAI supported tools.

Zapier agents come with more AI model flexibility.

ChatGPT Workspace Agents run on Codex, which currently uses GPT-5.5 as the default. Flagship model. And it’s well-suited to the agentic tasks that OpenAI designed it for. But if a different model would work better, cheaper, faster or more accurately for your use case, then you can’t use it. Not easily, anyway. You can wire up another model by calling it as an external tool through MCP or your API wrapper. But moving contexts across this range costs tokens. And once workspace agents start pricing based on credit, you’ll notice that cost on your bill.

Zapier agents let you access other models. Under the hood, the core agent runs on the same model. But you can bring Other AI tools In the mix, call ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another model at specific steps in your agent instructions. Agents are valued by “activities.And each tool call is counted as an activity. So if your agent calls Gemini to summarize something, that’s an activity, regardless of how long the thread is.

Credits, like ChatGPT will implement, will work differently. They are based on input and output tokens, which means that a long prompt or response can increase your bill, often in ways that are hard to predict before running your agent.

Zapier agents were built with governance in place from day one.

Both ChatGPT Workspace Agents and Zapier Agents offer audit and compliance features. Zapier sends real-time SIEM streaming for automation events (which lets your security team see agent activity in their monitoring tools as it happens) as well as cross-product audit trails. ChatGPT Enterprise already has a Compliance API that exposes agent configurations, updates, and run history. And an org-wide agent dashboard is coming soon.

Workspace agents have granular role-based access controls. There are separate toggles for who can browse, run, create, and publish agents. And administrators can create named roles with their own permissions to which ChatGPT features each role can access. Zapier uses a fixed four-tier system: Owner, Super Admin, Admin, and Member.

But where Zapier? Governance It is notable for its consistency. Every rule you set—what apps your team can connect to, what actions they’re allowed to take within those apps—applies everywhere: Zaps, agents, and MCP-connected assistants. You set the policy once, and it’s across the board.

This matters because once your agents work in other apps, your security is only as strong as the weakest link in your workflow. An administrator may carefully restrict the deletion of a Salesforce record within a workflow but forget—or be unable—to restrict it to an agent or assistant connected to the MCP. This is where a security gap opens up. When your teams are building on multiple tools and each has its own governance model (or none at all), gaps become apparent quickly.

Zapier lets you control where your data goes during evaluation. If you’re in a company with strict AI requirements, you can route agents through your AWS Bedrock account—called the Bring Your Own Model (BYOM)—so the AI ​​assessment stays within your approved infrastructure. Zapier still handles the automation logic, but model calls never leave your cloud contract. And if you’re security-conscious enough to keep your encryption keys with you, ChatGPT workspace agents aren’t currently available to you.

ChatGPT Workspace Agents vs. Zapier: Which Should You Choose?

If your fellow ChatGPT users are heavy, your tool footprint is small, you’re comfortable living on OpenAI models, and you’re running a research preview product, ChatGPT workspace agents are a solid choice.

But if you need agents that can reach the apps you use, run tasks on whatever model works best, and work within a governance framework that your security team has already approved, choose Zapier agents. You’ll join 200,000 builders who have created more than 450,000 agents, who have completed more than 33 million activities to date.

For a closer look at how agents work, check out Feature Guide. You’ll get a walkthrough of setup, real-world use cases, and how to get the most out of the agent once it’s up and running. If you’re keen to start building now, go straight to the Agents Dashboard.

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