Make vs Zapier: An Honest Comparison for Business Owners

If you’ve been running automations on Zapier and started looking at alternatives, Make (formerly Integromat) was probably the first name that came up. It’s cheaper. It’s more flexible. The visual builder is beautiful. And the community swears by it.

But “which is better” is the wrong question. Both tools are excellent — at different things, for different users, at different scales. The right question is: which one fits what you’re actually doing? And the answer most people don’t want to hear is that, for a growing business, the choice between Make and Zapier often doesn’t matter — because you’ll outgrow both.

Let me explain.

Pricing: Make Wins, But It’s Complicated

Zapier charges by tasks (each action step that runs). Make charges by operations (similar concept) but gives you significantly more per dollar.

Here’s how the numbers shake out for a typical small business running 20 automations:

• Zapier Pro — $49.99/month for 2,000 tasks. A 5-step automation triggered 100 times/month uses 500 tasks. Twenty automations at that rate eat 10,000 tasks — you’re on the $199/month plan minimum.
• Make Pro — $16.67/month for 10,000 operations. The same 20 automations often fit within that tier because Make counts operations more efficiently and lets you design scenarios with fewer steps.

At moderate volume, Make is typically 60-75% cheaper than Zapier for equivalent automations. That gap narrows at enterprise scale, but for most SMBs, Make has a clear pricing advantage.

Ease of Use: Zapier Wins for Beginners

Zapier’s interface is deliberately simple. Each Zap is a linear sequence: trigger, then actions, top to bottom. You pick a trigger, connect your account, map some fields, done. A non-technical person can build a useful Zap in ten minutes.

Make’s interface is a visual canvas where you drag modules, connect them with lines, and build branching, looping workflows. It’s powerful, but the learning curve is steeper. Concepts like iterators, aggregators, routers, and error handlers make sense once you understand them — but “once you understand them” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most business owners I talk to tried Make, got confused by the interface, and went back to Zapier.

If you’ve got someone on your team with a technical mindset — not necessarily a developer, but someone comfortable with logic and data structures — Make’s canvas is a joy. If your automations are being built by a marketing coordinator or office manager who’s learning as they go, Zapier’s simplicity is worth the premium.

Flexibility: Make Wins Clearly

This is where Make pulls ahead in a meaningful way. Make lets you:

• Branch workflows — route data down different paths based on conditions, without creating separate automations
• Loop through arrays — process each line item in an order, each contact in a list, each file in a folder
• Handle errors explicitly — add error handlers that retry, ignore, or route failures to a different workflow path
• Transform data deeply — parse JSON, manipulate arrays, format dates, calculate values, all within the visual builder
• Use HTTP modules — call any API directly, even ones without a pre-built integration

Zapier can do some of this with Paths, Looping, and Code steps, but it’s clunky. Make was designed for complex workflows from the start.

Reliability: Both Have Issues

Neither platform is as reliable as custom code, and both fail in similar ways:

• API rate limits — when the services you’re connecting throttle requests, automations queue up or fail silently
• Webhook delays — both platforms occasionally experience delays in processing webhooks, which can cause timing-sensitive workflows to produce incorrect results
• Silent partial failures — an automation runs three out of five steps before failing, leaving data in an inconsistent state across your systems
• Platform outages — both Make and Zapier have occasional outages that halt all automations for hours

Make has a slight edge on reliability because its error handling is more sophisticated. You can design scenarios that catch failures and respond intelligently — retry three times, then send an alert, then log the failed data for manual review. Zapier’s error handling is essentially “stop and send an email notification.”

But both platforms share a fundamental limitation: your automations run on someone else’s infrastructure, and you have no control over uptime, performance, or queue priority. When Zapier or Make has a bad day, your business processes stall.

Integration Coverage: Zapier Wins on Breadth

Zapier has 7,000+ app integrations. Make has around 1,800. For mainstream tools — Slack, Google Workspace, Salesforce, HubSpot, Xero, Shopify — both platforms have solid coverage. Where the gap shows is with niche or industry-specific software.

If you use a specialised tool — a particular accounting package, a niche CRM, an industry-specific platform — Zapier is more likely to have a pre-built integration. Make may require you to use the HTTP module and build the API calls manually, which works but requires more technical knowledge.

That said, Make’s HTTP module is genuinely excellent. If a tool has an API, you can connect it through Make without waiting for a pre-built integration. Zapier has Webhooks and a Code step, but they’re not as seamless.

Where Each Tool Wins

Choose Zapier when:

• Your team is non-technical and needs the simplest possible interface
• You’re building simple, linear automations (trigger then action)
• You need a pre-built integration for a niche tool
• You want something working in under 15 minutes
• Volume is low (under 2,000 tasks/month)

Choose Make when:

• You need branching logic, loops, or error handling
• You’re cost-conscious and running moderate-to-high volume
• You have someone comfortable with slightly more technical tools
• You need to call APIs directly for unsupported tools
• You want to consolidate multiple simple automations into fewer, smarter workflows

When Neither Is Enough

Here’s the part that doesn’t get discussed in most Make vs Zapier comparisons: both tools share the same fundamental limitations.

Both are middleware — they sit between your real systems and shuttle data back and forth. Both add latency, cost, and failure points. Both require ongoing maintenance. And both charge you monthly for the privilege of running your own business logic on their infrastructure.

For a business running 5-10 simple automations, this is fine. The convenience outweighs the cost.

For a business running 30+ automations with complex logic, error handling requirements, and high data volume, the question isn’t Make vs Zapier. It’s: should your core business logic live in a third-party tool at all?

The automations that matter most — order processing, invoicing, job scheduling, customer communications — are too critical to run on a platform you don’t control. When those break, you lose revenue, miss deadlines, or damage customer relationships.

The path most growing businesses eventually take is a hybrid: keep the simple, non-critical automations in Make or Zapier (they’re great for that), and move the critical workflows to purpose-built integrations you own. You end up spending less overall, with dramatically better reliability where it counts.

The Make vs Zapier decision matters for now. But the more important question is: which of your automations have become important enough to own?