Cisco vs Zapier

Cisco — Hardware · Public · $433.3B mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced  |  Zapier — Infrastructure · Private · $5B valuation · 3 of 3 figures sourced

Relationship

Cisco AI Defense and AI Guardrails by Zapier do comparable work on data security and guardrails and safety; both also serve buyers who need to detect and respond to security threats; smaller scale (private).

Assembled from the recorded fields for this pair, not hand-checked. The comparison below is read from each company’s own profile.

6 of 17 capabilitiesShared product typeSmaller scale

6 of 17 capabilities — Shares agent orchestration, customer support, data security and 3 more.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship application.

Ludbee product records

Smaller scale — Zapier: $5B valuation, against Cisco's $433.3B market cap.

Ludbee scale figures · valuation, market cap or revenue estimate

Aligned comparison

FieldCiscoZapier
Size$433.3B mkt cap$5B valuation different basis
Employees86,200730 Zapier has 118× fewer
Founded19842011 27 yrs later
StatusPublicPrivate
CategoryHardwareInfrastructure
Stack layerAI agent, Application, HardwareAPI service, Agent platform, Application, Developer tool, Platform
HeadquartersSan Jose, USASan Francisco, USA

Capability overlap

Shared · 6

Agent orchestrationCustomer supportData securityGuardrails and safetySummarizationWorkflow automation

Not verified for Zapier · 11

Accelerator siliconAI compute hardwareData analysisEvaluation and observabilityInterconnectModel inferenceModel trainingServer systemsSpeech to textThreat detection and responseVoice agent

Recorded for Cisco. Zapier’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Not verified for Cisco · 4

Code generationDocument extractionKnowledge retrievalText generation

Recorded for Zapier. Cisco’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Products, side by side

Algorithmic pairing — assembled from recorded fields, not hand-checked

Cisco

Application

AI Assistant for Webex Contact CenterApplication

AI assistant for contact-centre agents and supervisors that produces call and transfer summaries, live transcription, suggested chat replies, topic analytics, automatic CSAT scoring and agent burnout signals.

Cisco AI CanvasApplication

AgenticOps workspace where teams and AI agents collaborate to investigate, correlate and resolve issues across domains: natural-language querying, multi-step agent workflows, shared real-time visibility, and native Cisco plus third-party tool integration via Cloud Control Studio.

Cisco AI DefenseApplication

End-to-end AI security product that discovers an organisation's AI assets, red-teams models and applications for vulnerabilities, and enforces runtime guardrails against prompt injection and data leakage.

Cisco IQApplication

Agentic support intelligence delivered inside Cisco Support and Professional Services — 'the delivery vehicle for everything Cisco Support and Professional Services knows about your environment, made continuously available before you ask for it' — generally available as SaaS since April 2026 and included with existing support contracts.

Webex AI Workforce Engagement ManagementApplication

AI-native workforce engagement suite for contact centres that forecasts demand and optimises shifts, uses NLP and LLMs to evaluate 100 percent of human and AI agent interactions (AI Quality Management), and runs performance coaching and AI-led onboarding simulations.

Zapier

Application

Zapier CanvasApplication

Zapier Canvas is an AI-powered diagramming tool for mapping business processes and turning the diagram into working automation. Zapier says it uses AI to generate workflows, suggest next steps, and surface insights that help optimise automations and prevent breakages.

Zapier ChatbotsApplication

Zapier Chatbots is a no-code builder for custom-branded AI chatbots that can be embedded in a website to handle customer interactions. Zapier positions it as a way to scale support and generate leads, with the chatbot able to trigger Zapier workflows off the conversation.

Zapier CopilotApplication

An assistant that works across every Zapier product: asked in plain language to add a field to a table or a step to a Zap, it walks the user through the change or makes it for them.

No counterpart

Cisco sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Zapier yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

AI agent

Webex AI AgentAI agent

Autonomous customer-service AI agent that handles inquiries conversationally across voice, SMS, email, chat and messaging apps and escalates to a human agent with context when it cannot resolve.

Hardware

Cisco AI PODsHardware

Pre-validated modular AI infrastructure bundles that combine Cisco UCS servers, NVIDIA GPUs, Nexus 9000 400G/800G switching and management software into single orderable stacks for AI inferencing, training and fine-tuning.

Cisco AI PODs for CollaborationHardware

Turnkey on-premises AI appliance that runs real-time speech transcription for Cisco collaboration deployments locally, for customers with data-sovereignty requirements that rule out cloud AI services.

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AIHardware

Cloud-managed full-stack AI cluster sold as hardware plus software plus service, packaging Cisco 6000 and N9300 series switches on an 800GbE back-end fabric, UCS servers with NVIDIA H200 GPUs and BlueField DPUs, optional VAST storage and NVIDIA AI Enterprise under the Hyperfabric cloud controller.

Cisco Silicon OneHardware

Unified programmable networking-silicon architecture for AI, hyperscale, data-centre, service-provider and enterprise routing/switching, spanning five series (G/P/E/K/A) of chip families.

Zapier sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Cisco yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

API service

Zapier MCPAPI service

Zapier MCP is Zapier's implementation of the Model Context Protocol, giving AI clients such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor the ability to take real actions in the user's connected apps. Zapier states it exposes 9,000+ apps and 40,000+ actions while handling app connections, credentials and rate limits on the caller's behalf.

Agent platform

Zapier AgentsAgent platform

AI agents that act across the applications Zapier already connects, built and debugged from a prompt with Zapier Copilot.

Developer tool

AI Guardrails by ZapierDeveloper tool

AI Guardrails by Zapier adds inline AI safety and compliance checks to Zapier workflows. Added as a step to any Zap, Agent or Zapier MCP workflow, it scans content for personally identifiable information, toxic language, prompt injection attempts and negative sentiment, then routes, blocks or escalates based on what it finds.

AI by ZapierDeveloper tool

AI by Zapier is Zapier's built-in tool for adding AI steps to a workflow, powered by the user's choice of model from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Users write text prompts to perform tasks such as extracting lead data from unstructured text or answering routing questions inside a Zap.

Zapier SDKDeveloper tool

Zapier SDK gives coding agents and developers authenticated, governed programmatic access to Zapier's app catalogue from code, on behalf of their users. Zapier handles OAuth flows, token management and retries; the SDK ships with a CLI for exploring apps and running actions from the terminal.

Platform

Zap workflowsPlatform

The workflow layer Zapier's AI products run on: multi-step Zaps that connect over 9,000 apps and can call AI steps, agents and MCP tools inside a run, built without a developer.