Your Guide to ServiceTitan Integrations: Tray.ai vs. Zapier

If you’re in the trades industry, you are probably familiar with ServiceTitan, the CRM for home service businesses willing to centralize their business data. The platform’s versatility is an asset to its users as it helps align field and office teams, streamlines scheduling and dispatching, and improves decision-making with detailed reports and dashboards. By lowering the technical barrier to being more data-driven, ServiceTitan makes even the modest corner shops more competitive. Hence, the popularity.

But what if these companies want to extend ServiceTitan to pull in data from other sources? That’s quite a common scenario, as businesses operating in the trades industry often need to integrate ServiceTitan with some accounting software, a human resource management platform like Bamboo, or a call-tracking tool like CallRail.

Unfortunately, connectivity is not one of ServiceTitan's strengths. You’d be well-advised to use a third-party tool to connect ServiceTitan to other data sources so you can break down data silos, incorporate data from various data sources, and form a single source of truth for better decision-making.

What are your options for building ServiceTitan integrations? In this blog post, we take a look at two popular platforms, Tray.ai and Zapier, which people use for similar tasks. After evaluating these platforms regarding ease of use, scalability, and pricing, we’ll focus on how Peaka compares with these two popular solutions.

Key takeaways

• Despite being a highly capable product, Tray. ai loses in the usability and pricing departments, which are a priority for home service businesses using ServiceTitan.

• Zapier is an easy-to-use automation tool but struggles with ad hoc integration requests that can come up when users want to scale their ServiceTitan integrations.

• Peaka offers the Goldilocks solution for home service businesses looking to scale ServiceTitan integrations, as it combines usability and scalability at a reasonable price point. 

Tray.ai

Tray.ai is a cloud-based data integration and automation platform. It enables businesses to connect different applications, gather data from different sources, and sync it across different systems. The platform caters to the automation needs of various business teams as well. Companies can use Tray.ai to automate marketing campaigns, create customer support tickets, and process invoices, to name a few.

Ease of use

ServiceTitan users tend to be small businesses with limited technical resources. Due to the scarcity of engineering resources at hand, ease of use becomes one of the main criteria for these companies when choosing a data integration platform.

Tray.ai is a technical product that was developed with the data integration needs of enterprises in mind. Therefore, IT involvement is required to set it up and use it. With a sophisticated feature set that most SMBs do not need and technical complexity, it just is not a good fit for home service businesses.

Another factor that undermines the usability of Tray.ai is the small number of pre-built connectors. This results in a steeper learning curve, making it difficult for non-technical users to self-serve while accessing data.

Scalability

Building integrations is an IT-only job with Tray.ai, as the platform does not lend itself to use by non-technical users. Even with IT involvement, only one integration can be built at a time with this platform.

Factoring in the maintenance required by these integrations and other tasks that demand IT attention, scaling the number of integrations becomes a formidable challenge with Tray.ai.

Pricing

Tray.ai’s pricing depends on the number of workflows and integrations used. Starting at around $695 per month, the cost can quickly rise as more workflows and integrations are added, and it is easy for users to lose control of their expenses. This lack of transparent pricing undermines predictability for home service businesses, which would like to plan for the IT bill they will pay every month.

Zapier

Zapier is an automation platform for connecting SaaS apps and automating repetitive tasks across these tools without any need for coding or developer involvement. It’s particularly popular among startups as it simplifies tedious tasks and makes it possible to do more with less. Teams typically use Zapier to automate email notifications that are sent upon certain events, back up data into cloud storage at predetermined intervals, or update CRM contacts regularly.

Ease of use

Zapier has been the king of user-friendliness since its inception. The way Zapier simplified automation has propelled its widespread adoption and extraordinary growth. The easy setup and hundreds of pre-built integrations have made the platform very popular with startups and SMBs that typically have limited technical resources.

Scalability

Zapier offers simple, linear connectivity with your favorite apps, which is probably what you are looking for if you are running a startup or an SMB. It performs well when it is asked to retrieve data from a data source upon a predetermined trigger and push it to a new platform.

However, Zapier lacks the horizontal scalability needed to handle complex integration scenarios seen in enterprise use cases. Its simplicity comes at the expense of customizability, which prevents it from adjusting to changing integration requirements.

Pricing

Zapier’s pricing plans include a free tier and two more tiers with fixed monthly prices. These three cover almost every use case that startups and SMBs may have. An enterprise plan with custom pricing caters to the needs of larger organizations. All in all, Zapier offers more transparency in pricing, which makes it easier for customers to budget.

Peaka

Peaka is a zero-ETL data platform developed primarily to replace the modern data stack, which is too expensive to set up, too complicated to use, and too demanding to maintain for startups and SMBs. It relies on data virtualization to unify data without complex and time-consuming ETL processes.

Acting as a universal middleware, Peaka turns data into virtual tables and forms a semantic layer over relational and NoSQL databases, SaaS tools, and APIs. This semantic layer allows users to query disparate data sources as a single source right away.

Ease of use

In terms of user-friendliness, Peaka is placed somewhere between Tray.ai and Zapier. A technical person can set it up, and users can pick from a list of connectors to start accessing their data. Peaka allows anybody with some basic knowledge of SQL to query their data regardless of the source.

Scalability

Peaka functions as a serverless connector infrastructure that allows users to build integrations easily. It leverages data virtualization to create avatars of your scattered data and join them, enabling you to view your data as a unified data layer that you can query and expose to other systems. The process involves no ETLs, data warehouses, or maintenance, which makes it perfectly scalable.

Pricing

Peaka comes with a free tier that lets users get a taste of the Peaka experience and handle some meaningful data-related tasks. In the upper tier, pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model where users are charged based on the storage space and query time they use up.

Final thoughts

In terms of user-friendliness, Peaka is placed somewhere between Tray.ai and Zapier. A technical person can set it up, and users can pick from a list of connectors to connect to any data source and access data. Peaka allows anybody with some basic knowledge of SQL to query their data regardless of the source. Its embedded ChatGPT functionality, which allows the use of natural language for querying, lowers technical barriers further for people who are not proficient in SQL.

Tray.ai and Zapier both have interesting value propositions. While the former offers a highly capable product fit for technical teams, the latter’s value proposition is based on simplicity at the price of some functionality. Home service businesses do not have to settle for a compromise, though.

Peaka proves that companies do not need to sacrifice either one of usability or technical capability to have the other. By eliminating ETLs, data warehouses, and maintenance hassle, Peaka allows even a data team of one to integrate and manage data at a home service company without the hefty bills. It’s the ideal solution for home service businesses looking to connect ServiceTitan to other platforms and create a single source of truth.

Visit our documentation to see how you can connect ServiceTitan to Peaka.

Check out Peaka’s growing library of custom connectors and book a free demo to see Peaka in action!