Zapier vs Make: I Used Both for 6 Months and One of Them Is Ripping You Off

I Started on Zapier Like Everyone Else

When I first needed to connect my tools together, I googled "automation platform" and Zapier was the first result. Signed up, built my first Zap (new Typeform submission goes to Google Sheets and sends a Slack notification), and felt like a genius. Took about four minutes.

That was the honeymoon period. It lasted about two months.

Then my automations got more complex. I needed conditional logic. I needed to transform data before sending it somewhere. I needed error handling that didn't just silently fail and leave me wondering why leads were disappearing. And suddenly Zapier's simplicity started feeling less like a feature and more like a ceiling.

A friend told me to try Make. I resisted for weeks because I'd already built 15 Zaps and didn't want to rebuild them. But my Zapier bill had crept up to $73/month and climbing. So I gave Make a weekend.

That was six months ago. I've been on Make since.

The Interface: Different Philosophies

Zapier's editor is a vertical list. Trigger at the top, actions below, each step a form you fill out. It's clean. It's obvious. If your automation is "when X happens, do Y," Zapier is genuinely pleasant to use.

Make's editor is a visual canvas. You drag modules (their word for steps) onto a blank space and draw connections between them. First time I opened it, I thought it looked like a circuit diagram and almost closed the tab.

But here's the thing. Once your automations have any branching logic at all, the visual canvas makes way more sense. I have one automation that routes incoming leads to different CRMs based on their source, company size, and what form they filled out. In Make, I can see the entire flow at a glance. In Zapier, that same logic required three separate Zaps with Paths (a paid feature), and I could never visualize how they connected.

The learning curve for Make is real. Budget a few hours. Watch one YouTube tutorial. You'll be fine after that. Zapier is faster to start with, but Make is faster to work with once you know it.

Pricing: This Is Where It Gets Ugly

Let me just do the math for you at three different scales, because this is where most comparison articles get lazy.

Hobby Scale (5 automations, ~500 runs/month)

Zapier: Free plan gives you 100 tasks/month across 5 Zaps. You'll blow past 100 tasks in the first week if any of your automations fire more than once a day. So realistically you need the Starter plan: $19.99/month for 750 tasks.

Make: Free plan gives you 1,000 operations/month across 2 active scenarios. You'll need the Core plan to get more scenarios: $9/month for 10,000 operations.

Make is half the price and gives you 13x more operations. Not a typo.

Small Business Scale (15-20 automations, ~5,000 runs/month)

Zapier: You need the Professional plan because the Starter plan caps at 750 tasks. Professional is $49/month for 2,000 tasks. But 5,000 runs? That's the Team plan at $69/month for... still only 2,000 tasks with the option to buy more. Actually, at 5,000 tasks you're looking at around $100+/month depending on how Zapier's overage pricing hits you.

Make: The Core plan at $9/month gives you 10,000 operations. You won't even need to upgrade. But let's say you want more active scenarios and some advanced features. The Pro plan is $16/month for 10,000 operations with priority execution.

At small business scale, you could be paying 6-7x more on Zapier for the same work. Annually, that's the difference between $192 and $1,200+. For automations that do the same thing.

Agency/Power User Scale (50+ automations, ~50,000 runs/month)

Zapier: You're deep into enterprise territory. The Company plan starts around $500+/month, and they want you to talk to sales.

Make: The Teams plan at $29/month gives you 10,000 operations, but you'll need extra operations. At 50,000 operations, you're looking at roughly $100-150/month with add-on packs.

The gap widens as you scale. A company spending $6,000/year on Zapier could do the same work on Make for $1,200-1,800/year.

I wrote about this pricing dynamic in more detail in my n8n vs Zapier comparison, where the open-source option makes Zapier look even more expensive. Worth reading if cost is a primary concern.

Real Automations I Built on Both Platforms

I'm not going to give you a table with one-word winners. Let me actually walk you through what building these felt like.

Lead Routing Pipeline

The scenario: new lead comes in from a Typeform. Based on company size (pulled from Clearbit enrichment), route them to different Slack channels. If the company has over 50 employees, also create a deal in HubSpot and assign it to a specific rep. Send a personalized welcome email either way.

On Zapier: I needed three Zaps. The main one handles the Typeform trigger and Clearbit lookup. Then Paths splits based on company size, but Paths is only available on the Professional plan ($49/month minimum). Each path can trigger actions, but I couldn't easily share data between the paths without using a Formatter step to pass values around. The HubSpot integration was solid though, and the email step worked fine. Total setup: about 90 minutes, spread across three Zaps that I had to mentally keep track of.

On Make: One scenario. The Typeform module connects to the Clearbit module, which feeds into a Router (free, built-in). Each route has a filter condition. The HubSpot branch creates the deal and assigns it. The email branch sends the welcome. Everything is visible on one canvas. Total setup: about 40 minutes.

This is where Make's visual approach pays off. Complex conditional logic is just... easier to build and easier to debug when you can see it.

Content Publishing Workflow

The scenario: when I mark a blog post as "Ready" in Notion, automatically tweet about it, post to LinkedIn, create a short summary for my newsletter, and log everything to a Google Sheet.

On Zapier: The Notion trigger worked well. Posting to X (Twitter) worked. LinkedIn posting... kind of worked. Zapier's LinkedIn integration is limited to company pages on certain plans, and personal posts required workarounds. The Google Sheets logging was fine. But all four actions ran sequentially, so if the LinkedIn step failed, the Google Sheets step never fired. Error handling meant adding a separate "catch" Zap. Total: two Zaps, about an hour of setup, and a lingering anxiety that failures were happening silently.

On Make: Same flow, one scenario. The key difference: I set the social media modules to run in parallel, so a LinkedIn failure doesn't block the tweet or the sheet update. Make has built-in error handling where you can add a fallback route for any module. If LinkedIn fails, it logs the error and keeps going. I set this up in about 30 minutes.

Simple Stuff (Where Zapier Is Actually Better)

For dead-simple automations, like "new email attachment saves to Google Drive" or "new calendar event sends a Slack reminder," Zapier is genuinely easier. You can build these in 2-3 minutes without thinking. Make would take 5-10 minutes for the same thing because you're dragging modules around and configuring connections.

If all your automations are linear A-to-B-to-C chains, Zapier's simplicity is a real advantage. I have maybe 3-4 automations like this, and honestly, I'd use Zapier for them if I weren't already paying for Make.

The Integration Gap (And Why It Matters Less Than You Think)

Zapier advertises 7,000+ integrations. Make has around 1,800. On paper, Zapier wins by a landslide.

In practice, I've hit exactly one situation where Zapier had an integration Make didn't: a niche project management tool called Teamwork. For everything mainstream (Google Workspace, Slack, HubSpot, Notion, Stripe, Shopify, Airtable, etc.), both platforms have solid integrations.

And Make has an HTTP module that lets you connect to literally any API. It takes 10-15 minutes instead of 2 minutes, but you're never truly stuck. Zapier has Webhooks for the same purpose, but Make's HTTP module is more flexible because you can chain it with data transformation steps easily.

The integration count is Zapier's best marketing asset. It's not nothing. But for 95% of users it's not the deciding factor.

What Zapier Does Better (Being Honest)

I'm clearly a Make person, but I want to be fair about where Zapier genuinely wins.

Onboarding. If you've never built an automation before, Zapier will have you productive in 10 minutes. Make takes an afternoon to click.

Templates. Zapier's pre-built Zap templates are excellent. Search for what you want to do, click "Use this Zap," fill in your accounts, done. Make has templates too, but fewer and less polished.

AI features. Zapier recently added natural language automation building. You describe what you want in plain English and it builds the Zap. It's genuinely impressive for simple workflows. Make hasn't shipped anything comparable yet.

Documentation and community. Zapier has been around longer and has more tutorials, blog posts, and community answers. When you Google a problem, Zapier solutions show up first.

My Recommendation

If you're running fewer than 5 simple automations and don't want to learn anything new, use Zapier. Seriously. The free tier or Starter plan will cover you, and the simplicity is worth paying for.

For everyone else, Make is the better platform and it's not particularly close.

The pricing alone should be enough to switch. But the visual builder, the built-in error handling, the Router for conditional logic, the parallel processing... these aren't nice-to-haves. They're the things that determine whether your automations actually work reliably or silently break at 2 AM.

I migrated 15 Zaps to Make over one weekend. It took maybe 6 hours total. My monthly bill dropped from $73 to $16. The automations are more reliable because I can see when something fails and handle it gracefully. And I can build things now that I simply couldn't build on Zapier without expensive workarounds.

The only people I'd steer toward Zapier are complete beginners who need to automate one or two things and don't want to invest any time learning. That's a valid use case. But if automation is part of how you run your business, you'll outgrow Zapier fast, and switching later is harder than switching now.

Make isn't perfect. The interface can feel cluttered with complex scenarios. The mobile experience is basically nonexistent. And occasionally the execution speed is slower than Zapier for simple workflows.

But those are minor annoyances compared to paying 5-7x more for less capability.

Save your money. Use Make.