Zapier chose Parcel for collaboration
Sean Kennedy, senior marketing ops analyst at Zapier, on his email development workflow
This shows that Parcel was replacing a real build versus buy decision, not just adding a nicer editor. Zapier could have recreated the file history layer with GitLab, branches, and pull requests, but that would still leave reviewers commenting in Slack threads and operators manually matching feedback to code changes. For an email team that had grown from a few people to seven or eight, the bottleneck was coordination, not just storage of files.
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Before Parcel, the team stored templates in shared cloud folders and edited in VS Code. That worked when only two or three people were touching emails. Once more people were editing at the same time, they needed rollback, conflict management, and one place to keep the current template code.
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GitLab would have solved the engineer problem. It gives commits, diffs, and pull requests. It does not give a marketer friendly review layer. Parcel adds live collaborative editing, shared cursors, and public feedback links, while Litmus adds proofing, comments, approvals, and version history for reviewers.
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Taxi for Email points to a third path. It is useful when a central team wants to lock brand components and let non technical users assemble emails with drag and drop. But it is less suited to teams like Zapier that still want to write and manage code directly in MJML.
The market is moving toward email tools that bundle version control, coding, proofing, and approvals into one workflow. As email teams get larger and more specialized, plain Git repos become too technical for day to day collaboration, and pure no code builders become too rigid for teams that treat email like production software.