Both tools work. Both are good. They are priced and shaped differently, and the right one for a 5-person agency is rarely the right one for a 30-person operation. Here is the decision tree we use on real engagements.
Every week someone asks me which one they should use. The honest answer is that the question is wrong. The right question is "what are you automating, how often will it run, and how complex is the logic." Once you answer those three, the tool picks itself.
I have built more than 80 production automations across both platforms in the last 24 months, between my own businesses and AIROIOPS clients. Here is the decision tree, the pricing math, and the threshold where one starts winning over the other.
Zapier wins on speed-to-first-automation, UI polish, and breadth of app integrations. Make wins on price at scale, structural flexibility (filters, routers, iterators, error handling), and custom HTTP requests against APIs that Zapier does not natively support. If you are a 1-5 person business with under 500 monthly automation runs and you do not need complex branching, use Zapier. If you are 6+ people, expect more than 500 monthly runs, or you need conditional logic, use Make.
Zapier's pitch is "if you can describe the workflow in English, you can build it in 10 minutes." That pitch is largely true. The UI is the most polished in the category. The integration library is the deepest (7,000+ apps as of 2026). The AI Actions and Tables features close most of the gaps that used to send people to competitors.
Where it shines:
The ceiling shows up when you need conditional logic that branches more than two paths deep, when you need to loop through arrays, or when you are doing anything that touches more than 2,000-3,000 tasks per month. The pricing flattens you fast above that threshold.
Pricing as of 2026: Free up to 100 tasks per month with two-step automations only. Professional plan starts at $20 per month for 750 tasks and unlocks multi-step. Team plan jumps to $69 per month for 2,000 tasks. The 50,000-task tier is north of $300 per month. Every task counts (each step in a workflow is a task), so a 5-step workflow that runs 400 times eats 2,000 tasks in a single workflow.
Make (formerly Integromat) is shaped like a visual flowchart instead of a vertical step list. That sounds cosmetic. It is not. The flowchart shape makes branching, routing, and parallelism feel natural in a way that Zapier's interface fights against.
Where it shines:
The learning curve is real. The first three workflows you build in Make will take longer than the same workflows in Zapier, because you have to learn the flowchart paradigm, the operation model, and the data structure (Make passes structured JSON-like bundles between modules; Zapier hides that abstraction).
Pricing as of 2026: Free up to 1,000 operations per month. Core plan starts at $9 per month for 10,000 operations. Pro plan at $16 for 10,000 operations with more advanced features. Teams plan at $29 for 10,000 operations with shared workspaces. Higher tiers scale to 50,000, 100,000, and beyond at roughly 30-50 percent of equivalent Zapier pricing.
Here is the comparison most people never run.
| Monthly volume | Zapier cost | Make cost | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 100 tasks/ops | $0 (Free) | $0 (Free) | Tie, use Zapier for UI |
| 500 tasks/ops | $20 (Pro) | $9 (Core) | Make, but margin is small |
| 2,000 tasks/ops | $69 (Team) | $9 (Core, room to grow) | Make |
| 10,000 tasks/ops | $133+ (custom tier) | $16 (Pro) | Make, by 8x |
| 50,000 tasks/ops | $300+ | $70-90 | Make, by 3-4x |
| 100,000+ tasks/ops | Enterprise quote | $150-250 | Make |
The threshold flip lands roughly at 500 monthly runs. Below that, Zapier's UI advantage is worth the modest price premium. Above that, Make starts pulling away, and by the time you are doing 10,000+ runs, Make is 60-70 percent cheaper at equivalent functionality.
For a busy service business running a Speed-to-Lead agent, an auto-quoter, and a weekly dashboard refresh, you will blow past 500 monthly runs in the first 30 days. See the math in the busywork-hours post for a sense of the volume each automation drives.
If you can answer yes to any of these, default to Zapier:
If you can answer yes to any of these, default to Make:
For full transparency: AIROIOPS runs almost everything on Make. My residential service business runs on Make too. We migrated off Zapier in early 2026 because the volume hit a price wall and the Make routers let us collapse what used to be four separate Zaps into one cleaner scenario.
That said, we still recommend Zapier to roughly 20 percent of the clients we work with. Usually they are 1-3 person operations with a stable workflow set, no expectation of major volume growth, and a non-technical owner who will be the one maintaining the build. For that profile, Zapier's UI is worth the price premium and the migration is not worth the effort.
The other 80 percent get Make. Lower price ceiling, more headroom, more flexibility. The 30-60 minute extra learning curve pays itself back in the first month of saved subscription costs.
If you want a recommendation tuned to your specific stack and volume, that is part of every free AIROIOPS Operator's Vision. We map what you are running, where the leaks are, which platform fits each automation, and what the 12-month cost looks like. Free. 48-hour turnaround.
The free Operator's Vision finds the four biggest leaks in your specific operation, quantifies the ROI of closing each one, and gives you a sequenced roadmap to ship them yourself or hand off. Free. 48-hour turnaround.