Introduction
If you’ve spent any time researching workflow automation, you’ve hit the same fork in the road as everyone else: Zapier or Make? Both platforms promise the same big idea — connect your apps, eliminate manual busywork, and let your business run itself while you focus on what actually matters. But under that shared promise are two very different products, built on two very different philosophies, and — as thousands of frustrated users have discovered after their first surprise invoice — two very different pricing models.
Zapier is the household name. It practically invented the no-code automation category, boasts an enormous app directory, and remains the default answer when someone asks “how do I connect these two apps?” Make (formerly Integromat) took a different path, building a visual, node-based workflow canvas that appeals to people who want more control, more complex logic, and — increasingly — a much smaller bill at the end of the month. Both companies have leaned hard into AI over the past two years, adding agents, copilots, and natural-language workflow builders that would have sounded like science fiction when these tools first launched.
This guide breaks down everything you need to decide between them in 2026: pricing down to the dollar, feature depth, integration counts, security certifications, support quality, and the specific types of users and businesses each platform actually fits. Whether you’re a solo founder automating client onboarding or an enterprise IT team standardizing hundreds of workflows, you’ll find a clear, evidence-based recommendation by the end.
Features Comparison
| Feature | Zapier | Make |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow builder | Linear, step-by-step (“Zaps”) | Visual canvas with branching nodes (“Scenarios”) |
| Multi-step workflows | Yes (Professional plan and up) | Yes (available on Free plan) |
| Conditional logic | Paths (Professional+) | Native routers, filters (all plans) |
| Built-in apps/tools | Formatter, Webhooks, Tables, Forms, Interfaces | Built-in tools, HTTP/webhook modules, Data Stores |
| Custom code | JavaScript/Python code steps | Full JavaScript/Python via Make Code app |
| Error handling | Basic auto-replay, error notifications | Dedicated error handlers (Rollback, Break, Resume, Commit, Ignore) — don’t consume credits |
| Iteration/looping | Limited, via sub-Zaps | Native iterators and aggregators |
| API access | Yes (paid plans) | Yes, 300+ endpoints, rate limits scale by plan |
| Custom app building | Developer Platform (CLI-based) | Custom Apps with visual + code editor |
| Templates | 20,000+ pre-built Zap templates | Thousands of scenario templates |
| On-premise/local network access | Limited | On-prem agent (Enterprise) for tools like SAP |
Zapier’s biggest strength is approachability: you pick a trigger app, pick an action app, and it walks you through field mapping in a wizard-like flow. This works beautifully for simple, linear automations — “when a form is submitted, add a row to a spreadsheet and send a Slack message.” Where it gets clunky is branching logic, loops, and anything that isn’t a straight line; you end up chaining multiple Zaps or nesting Paths, which can get messy fast.
Make’s canvas, by contrast, is built for complexity from day one. You see your entire workflow laid out visually, with routers that split logic into multiple branches, built-in iterators for looping over datasets, and aggregators for combining data back together — all without leaving the canvas. According to Make’s official pricing and feature page, even the Free plan includes routers, filters, and Make’s full no-code builder, features that Zapier locks behind its Professional tier (Zapier’s pricing page). Power users and technical teams generally find Make faster to build in once they’re past the learning curve, while non-technical users often prefer Zapier’s guided simplicity for straightforward use cases.
Pricing Comparison
Pricing is where the two platforms diverge most dramatically — and it’s the single biggest factor in most people’s final decision. Zapier bills by task (one task = one successful action step, not counting the trigger), while Make bills by credit/operation (roughly one credit per module action). Because Make’s unit economics are far more generous, the “sticker price” gap widens enormously as usage scales.
Zapier Pricing (2026)
| Plan | Price | Task Limit | Key Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | 100 tasks/month | Two-step Zaps only, unlimited Zap workflows/Tables/Forms, Zapier Copilot |
| Professional | Starting at $19.99/month (annual billing) | 750 tasks (scales up to 2M+) | Multi-step Zaps, unlimited Premium apps, webhooks, Paths, AI fields, email + live chat support |
| Team | Starting at $69/month (annual billing) | 2,000 tasks (base, scalable) | 25 users, shared workflows/folders, shared app connections, SAML SSO, priority support |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Custom/annual task limits | Unlimited users, advanced admin controls, observability, Technical Account Manager, priority support with screen sharing |
Source: Zapier official pricing. Note that monthly (non-annual) billing runs higher — Professional is roughly $49/month and Team around $103.50/month when paid monthly rather than annually, per Zapier’s plan documentation.
Make Pricing (2026)
| Plan | Price | Credits/Operations | Key Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | 1,000 credits/month | Full visual builder, 3,000+ apps, routers & filters, 2 active scenarios, 15-min minimum interval |
| Core | $12/month (monthly) / ~$9/month (annual) | 10,000 credits/month | Unlimited active scenarios, 1-minute scheduling, Make API access |
| Pro | $21/month (monthly) / ~$16/month (annual) | 10,000 credits/month | Priority execution, custom variables, full-text execution log search |
| Teams | $38/month (monthly) / ~$29/month (annual) | 10,000 credits/month | Team roles and permissions, shared scenario templates |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Custom credit volumes | SSO/SCIM, audit logs, 24/7 support, overage protection, dedicated AWS environment |
Source: Make official pricing page. Credit tiers scale upward (20K, 40K, 80K, and beyond) at proportional prices, and both platforms offer roughly 15–35% savings for annual commitments.
The real-world cost difference
The headline prices look close, but the billing units aren’t equivalent. Zapier charges one task per action step (excluding the trigger), so a five-step Zap running 150 times a month can burn through 600+ tasks — nearly the entire Professional allowance. Make charges by module execution but includes far larger baseline allowances, and error-handling and router modules don’t consume credits at all. Multiple independent comparisons, including Trackstack’s 2026 analysis and Make’s own comparison blog on Zapier, found that at moderate-to-high volumes (10,000+ monthly executions), Make typically costs 3–7x less than the equivalent Zapier plan. At low volumes (under a few thousand tasks/month), the gap is much smaller and Zapier’s simplicity may justify the premium.
Pros & Cons
Zapier
Pros:
- Largest integration library in the industry (8,000+ apps)
- Extremely beginner-friendly, guided setup wizard
- Massive template library (20,000+) for common use cases
- Strong AI features: Copilot, AI-powered Zap building, AI orchestration for agents
- Best-in-class reliability and uptime reputation
- Robust enterprise security (SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, GDPR, CCPA)
Cons:
- Expensive at scale — task-based billing punishes multi-step workflows
- Free plan is very limited (100 tasks, two-step Zaps only)
- Complex branching logic is harder to visualize and manage
- Not HIPAA compliant — cannot be used for protected health information
- Steep price jump between Professional and Team tiers
Make
Pros:
- Significantly cheaper per operation, especially at scale
- Visual canvas makes complex, branching workflows easier to design and debug
- Generous free plan (1,000 credits, full builder, multi-step scenarios)
- Native error handling, iterators, and custom code (JS/Python) built in
- SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, GDPR, and ISO 27001-certified Enterprise environment
- Router and error-handler modules don’t consume credits
Cons:
- Steeper learning curve for non-technical users
- Slightly smaller (though still extensive) app catalog than Zapier
- No confirmed HIPAA/BAA support
- Credit-consumption model (especially with polling triggers) can be confusing initially
- Enterprise pricing and SLAs are less transparent than Zapier’s published tiers
Ease of Use
Zapier is built for people who have never automated anything before. The onboarding flow asks you to pick a trigger, pick an action, and map fields in a simple linear form — there’s no canvas to get lost in, and most users can build a working two-step Zap within minutes of signing up. This simplicity is Zapier’s core value proposition, and it shows in customer sentiment: teams without a dedicated “automation person” consistently gravitate toward Zapier because anyone on staff can maintain a Zap.
Make’s learning curve is real but often overstated. The visual, drag-and-drop canvas requires you to understand concepts like modules, routers, and data mapping between bubbles — which takes longer to click for a first-time user. However, once that initial hump is cleared, most users report that Make is actually faster to build in for anything beyond a simple two-app connection, because you can see your entire logic tree at a glance instead of tabbing through nested menus. Debugging is also easier in Make: the visual execution history highlights exactly which module failed and why, whereas Zapier’s task history is more log-like and text-heavy.
Verdict on ease of use: Zapier wins for absolute beginners and single-step automations. Make wins for anyone building multi-branch, conditional, or data-transformation-heavy workflows once they invest a few hours in the platform.
Integrations
Both platforms integrate with essentially every mainstream SaaS tool you can name, but their scale and depth differ.
Zapier connects with over 8,000 apps, the largest catalog of any automation platform, spanning categories from CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive) to marketing (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign), e-commerce (Shopify, WooCommerce), productivity (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Notion, Airtable), and niche/long-tail SaaS tools that smaller platforms often haven’t gotten to yet. If an app has any kind of public API — or even just a Zapier-built integration — there’s a good chance it’s supported.
Make integrates with 3,000+ apps directly through its own catalog, plus support for custom apps and generic HTTP/webhook modules that let you connect to virtually any service with a public API, even without an official integration. Make also supports enterprise-grade apps like Workday, Coupa, ServiceNow, Greenhouse, and Infor M3, and offers an on-premise agent for connecting to internal systems like SAP that live behind a firewall — a capability Zapier does not match as robustly, per Make’s pricing and security documentation.
Bottom line: if you rely on obscure, long-tail, or highly specialized apps, Zapier’s sheer breadth gives it an edge. If you need to connect internal, enterprise, or custom-built systems via API or on-prem access, Make’s flexibility often serves technical teams better.
AI Features
Both companies have raced to embed AI throughout their platforms rather than treating it as a bolt-on feature.
Zapier’s AI stack includes:
- Zapier Copilot — a conversational assistant that helps you build Zaps by describing what you want in plain English
- AI fields — dynamically generate content or extract data within a Zap step using an LLM
- AI orchestration/agents — build and deploy autonomous AI agents that can trigger and manage multi-step workflows, now unified under the same task-based pricing as regular Zaps (Zapier pricing page)
- Native integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), and other leading LLM providers
Make’s AI stack includes:
- Make AI Agents (beta) — build and manage autonomous agents using Make’s own AI provider or your own LLM key
- Make AI Toolkit — a set of built-in AI actions (summarization, classification, extraction) usable in any scenario
- AI Content Extractor — pulls structured text and metadata out of files automatically
- AI Web Search (beta) — brings live web data into automations with structured outputs
- Make MCP Server — lets external AI assistants (like Claude) connect directly into Make scenarios
- Access to 350+ AI apps within its ecosystem, per Make’s pricing page
One nuance worth noting: Make’s AI modules consume variable credits based on token usage (roughly 1 credit per ~3,500 tokens on a mid-tier model), while using your own API key drops that to a flat 1 credit per call, per independent analysis from Hack’celeration. Zapier, by contrast, has unified AI steps, code, and SDK usage under one consistent task-based rate, simplifying (but not necessarily cheapening) AI-heavy workflows.
Verdict: Zapier’s AI features are more polished for non-technical users who want natural-language workflow creation. Make’s AI toolkit gives more granular control and is often cheaper for high-volume AI processing, especially if you bring your own LLM key.
Security & Compliance
| Certification/Standard | Zapier | Make |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type II | Yes | Yes |
| SOC 3 | Yes | Yes |
| ISO 27001 | Not confirmed | Yes (Enterprise environment) |
| GDPR | Yes, full compliance | Yes |
| CCPA | Yes | Not explicitly stated |
| HIPAA / BAA support | No — explicitly not supported | Not confirmed / not offered |
| Data encryption at rest | AES-256 | AES-256 |
| Data encryption in transit | TLS 1.2+ | TLS 1.2 and 1.3 |
| SSO | SAML 2.0 + SCIM (Team/Enterprise) | OAuth2/SAML2, Google/Facebook/GitHub SSO |
| Data Privacy Framework | EU-US DPF, UK Extension, Swiss-US DPF certified | Not explicitly stated |
| Hosting | AWS, multi-region | AWS (US/North Virginia or EU/Dublin), Enterprise runs isolated |
Both platforms take security seriously, and both are explicit that neither is a good fit for regulated healthcare data. Zapier states directly in its own documentation that it “isn’t HIPAA compliant” and “can’t sign business associate agreements (BAAs)… for handling PHI,” per Zapier’s official HIPAA guidance. Make does not publicly advertise HIPAA compliance either, though it has completed SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, and ISO 27001 certification for its Enterprise tier, according to Make’s security and compliance page.
For most standard business use cases — marketing, sales ops, internal productivity — both platforms provide enterprise-grade protection. If your workflows will ever touch protected health information, you’ll need to route around both tools or work exclusively with de-identified data.
Customer Support
| Support Aspect | Zapier | Make |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan support | Help Center, community forum | Community forum, 90-day expert access |
| Paid plan support | Email + live chat (Professional 2k+ tasks and up) | Technical support from expert team (Core/Pro) |
| Team/Teams tier | Priority support | High-priority guidance from dedicated consultants |
| Enterprise | Technical Account Manager, priority support with screen sharing | 24/7 top-priority assistance from senior specialists |
| Live chat availability | Weekdays, targeted <5 min wait (varies by plan) | Not explicitly time-boxed; escalates with plan tier |
| Phone support | No public phone line | No public phone line |
Both companies rely primarily on email, live chat (gated by plan tier), and community forums rather than traditional phone support. Zapier’s support portal notes response times vary by plan, with faster live-chat access unlocked at the Professional (2,000+ tasks), Team, and Enterprise levels, per Zapier’s official support page. Make similarly tiers its support, moving from standard “technical support from our expert team” on Core and Pro plans up to “24/7 top-priority assistance from senior specialists” on Enterprise, according to Make’s pricing page. Neither platform offers a general-access phone line, which is standard for the SaaS automation category but worth knowing if phone support is a dealbreaker for your team.
Best For
Choose Zapier if you are:
- A solo founder, freelancer, or small business automating simple, linear tasks
- A non-technical team without a dedicated ops/automation specialist
- Reliant on a very specific or niche app that may only have a Zapier integration
- Building AI agent workflows and want a polished, natural-language builder (Copilot)
- Willing to pay a premium for simplicity, reliability, and the largest app ecosystem
Choose Make if you are:
- A technical or ops-savvy team comfortable with a visual canvas
- Running high-volume automations where cost-per-task matters (agencies, growing startups)
- Building complex workflows with branching logic, loops, or custom code
- Needing to connect to enterprise or internal systems via API/on-prem access
- Looking for the best free tier to prototype real, multi-step automations before paying
Final Verdict
There’s no universal winner here — the right choice depends entirely on your technical comfort level and automation volume. Zapier remains the better starting point for non-technical users and teams who value simplicity over cost efficiency, thanks to its massive app catalog, polished AI copilot, and beginner-friendly linear builder. You’ll pay more per task, but you’ll spend less time learning the tool.
Make is the stronger choice for cost-conscious, technically capable teams running anything beyond the simplest automations. Its visual canvas handles complex logic more gracefully, its credit-based pricing is dramatically cheaper at scale, and its free plan is generous enough to build and test real multi-step workflows before paying a cent. For agencies, startups scaling automation across many workflows, or anyone who has been shocked by a Zapier invoice, Make is very likely to save real money without sacrificing capability.
If you’re just automating a handful of simple, low-volume tasks, either platform’s free tier will do — start with whichever interface feels more intuitive to you. If you’re planning to scale automation as a core part of your operations, invest the extra hour or two learning Make’s canvas; the savings compound fast.
FAQs
1. Is Make actually cheaper than Zapier?
Yes, in almost every scenario involving meaningful automation volume. Make’s Core plan starts around $9–12/month for 10,000 credits, while Zapier’s comparable Professional tier costs roughly $20–30/month for only 750 tasks. Because a single Zapier “task” often maps to multiple Make “credits” of equivalent work, the effective savings with Make typically range from 3x to 7x at scale, according to multiple 2026 pricing analyses including Trackstack and Zapier’s own comparison post.
2. Which platform is easier to learn for beginners?
Zapier. Its linear, wizard-style builder walks new users through connecting a trigger to an action step by step, with no visual canvas to navigate. Make’s node-based canvas is more powerful once mastered but requires a steeper initial learning investment.
3. Can I use either Zapier or Make for HIPAA-regulated healthcare data?
No. Zapier explicitly states it is not HIPAA compliant and will not sign business associate agreements (BAAs) for protected health information, per Zapier’s official guidance. Make does not publicly offer HIPAA compliance or BAAs either. Neither platform should be used to store, send, or automate PHI.
4. Do both platforms offer a free plan?
Yes. Zapier’s free plan includes 100 tasks/month limited to two-step Zaps. Make’s free plan includes 1,000 credits/month but supports full multi-step scenarios with routers and filters — generally considered the more capable free tier for testing complex workflows, per Make’s pricing page.
5. Which platform has more integrations?
Zapier, with over 8,000 supported apps compared to Make’s 3,000+. However, Make compensates with flexible HTTP/webhook modules and custom app-building tools that let you connect to virtually any service with a public API, even without an official pre-built integration.
6. Are Zapier and Make suitable for enterprise use?
Both offer dedicated Enterprise tiers with SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, and custom support SLAs. Zapier’s Enterprise plan adds a Technical Account Manager and advanced admin controls, while Make’s Enterprise tier runs on an isolated, ISO 27001-certified AWS environment with 24/7 support. Both are used by large organizations, though the right pick depends on your existing integrations and technical resourcing.
7. Can I switch from Zapier to Make (or vice versa) without losing my workflows?
There’s no automatic one-click migration between the two platforms since they use different underlying architectures (linear Zaps vs. visual scenarios). You’ll need to manually rebuild workflows, though both platforms offer templates and community guides to speed up the process. Many teams run both tools simultaneously during a transition period, using each for the automations where it performs best.
Pricing and feature details in this article reflect publicly available information from Zapier’s official pricing page and Make’s official pricing page as of mid-2026. Both companies update pricing and plan structures periodically — always confirm current rates directly on their websites before making a purchasing decision.
