Make vs Zapier
 Make |  Zapier | |
|---|---|---|
| Sentiment | ||
| Score | 44/100 | 37/100 |
| Rank in category | #3 | #5 |
| Rated comments | 31 | 21 |
| Best for | Non-technical teams and beginners building multi-step automations; Freelancers who hand finished workflows to non-technical clients; Users who have outgrown Zapier's pricing or simple linear flows | Non-technical users connecting popular SaaS apps quickly; Small businesses automating simple handoffs such as forms, payments and spreadsheets; Teams that would rather pay than maintain integrations and auth themselves |
| Skip it if | High-volume or very complex scenarios where per-module credits add up; Teams that need to self-host; Developers who want heavy custom code or agent-style AI workflows | High-volume workflows where per-step task pricing adds up; Workflows with complex branching, judgment calls or heavy API traffic |
| Starting price | $9/mo | $19.99/mo |
| Pricing (vendor-stated) | Free plan with 1,000 credits/month. Paid plans shown at 10,000 credits/month: Core $9/mo, Pro $16/mo, Teams $29/mo; Enterprise is custom. Credits replaced operations as the billing unit; most module actions use 1 credit and unused credits expire at the end of the term. The page says annual prepay is cheaper (badged "Save 15%"). | Free plan with 100 tasks/month. Professional from $19.99/mo billed annually ($29.99 month-to-month) for 750 tasks; Team from $69/mo billed annually ($103.50 monthly) for 2,000 tasks; Enterprise is sales-led. Prices rise with the task tier chosen. 14-day Professional trial, no card required. |
Independent users see Make as the middle ground: easier than n8n for non-coders and cheaper and better at branching logic than Zapier, which is why freelancers hand it to non-technical clients. The main complaint is cost as scenarios grow, sharpened by the switch to per-module credits that some users say raised their bills overnight; with no self-hosting option, many who got more technical moved to n8n. The corpus leans heavily on r/n8n, so it over-represents people who left, and about a sixth of the 100 comments were promotional, including a run of near-identical 'I've seen zapier and integromat, X came up too' comments seeding unrelated products.
Users like
- Easier for non-coders to start with than n8n, and simple enough that non-technical clients can edit their own workflows[1][2][3][4][5]
- Seen as better than Zapier for branching, multi-step logic, easier to build and debug in, and cheaper at volume[1][2][3][4]
- The free tier and sign-in-only setup make it easy to try before committing[1][2]
- Small-business users report it running real day-to-day jobs: inbox summaries saving an owner about 3 hours a day, Trello sales automations, review collection into Airtable, and an AI receptionist built with Retell[1][2][3][4]
Users complain about
- Costs climb quickly once scenarios get complex or high-volume, because every module consumes an operation or credit[1][2][3][4][5]
- The move to a credit model raised bills for existing users; one says costs jumped about 30% overnight when previously free modules started using credits[1][2]
- Cloud-only, with no self-hosting, so users are tied to its pricing[1][2]
- Users who need more technical depth or AI agent workflows find it limiting and move to n8n[1][2][3][4][5]
Independent users treat Zapier as the fastest way for non-technical people to connect common apps, and small-business owners describe it quietly running bookkeeping, onboarding and booking handoffs; one agency also values that it carries OAuth upkeep that self-built integrations must handle. The recurring trade-off is cost and ceiling: per-task billing counts every step, and users say it struggles with volume, rate limits, judgment-heavy handoffs and debugging broken chains, pushing them to Make or n8n. A quarter of the 100 comments were promotional, including several accounts all steering people to a cheaper alternative called WRK and templated tool listicles plugging unrelated products.
Users like
- Easiest of the main automation tools for simple app-to-app flows; users rank it first on ease of use[1][2][3]
- Small-business owners report concrete workflows running reliably: splitting online sales into tax spreadsheets, copying clients into Square and QuickBooks, intake forms into Notion projects, and new bookings into a cleaner's Jobber schedule[1][2][3][4][5][6]
- Takes on integration upkeep such as Google OAuth token refresh, which users see as easier to live with than maintaining custom scripts[1][2]
- Its AI features help non-coders: one owner described a flow and Zapier built it, another uses a Zapier agent to draft blog posts into Google Drive[1][2]
Users complain about
- Per-task pricing counts every step, so multi-step workflows get expensive; users call it overpriced next to Make, Pabbly or n8n[1][2][3]
- Struggles at volume and with judgment-heavy handoffs: one user says it falls over around 200 invoices a month, and rate limits push teams to self-hosted tools[1][2][3]
- When a multi-tool chain breaks, tracing where data got lost takes hours, and failures can go unnoticed for weeks[1][2][3]
- Least capable of the major options once workflows need custom logic; users who switched to n8n say they did not go back[1][2]