Our Zapier bill last quarter was three hundred eleven dollars. For a marketing agency with modest automation needs, that felt excessive.
We switched to Make.com. Our new bill is thirty dollars.
Here is exactly what happened when we migrated twelve workflows and whether we regret it.
Zapier is the industry standard. It connects five thousand apps. It just works. We never questioned the cost until we added a few new client workflows and the bill jumped forty percent.
Make.com is the challenger. Formerly Integromat, it offers visual workflow building with more control. At nine dollars per month for the Core plan, it is significantly cheaper.
We spent a weekend recreating our Zapier workflows in Make. The visual builder took getting used to. Instead of linear trigger-action chains, Make uses modules that branch and loop. It looks like a flowchart. It feels like programming without code.
The first workflow we rebuilt was our lead routing system. New form submission goes to CRM, assigns to sales rep, sends Slack notification, creates calendar reminder. In Zapier, this was a seven-step zap. In Make, it became a twelve-module scenario.
More steps, but more control. We added conditional logic that Zapier could not handle. Leads over five thousand dollars in potential value now trigger a different Slack channel and priority tagging.
The second workflow was content publishing. New blog post triggers social shares, email notification to subscribers, and RSS update. Make handled this easily. We even added error handling so failed social posts retry automatically.
The third workflow was our reporting dashboard. Pull data from Google Analytics, format it, email weekly summary. This is where Make shined. The data transformation tools are powerful. We consolidated metrics from three platforms into one clean report.
Migration took twelve hours total. Most of that was learning Make’s interface. Building workflows was actually faster once we understood the logic.
Now the downsides.
Make has fewer pre-built integrations. Zapier connects to everything. Make connects to most things, but occasionally we hit a missing app. We worked around this with webhooks, but it requires technical comfort.
The visual builder gets messy. Complex workflows look like spaghetti. We had to add notes and color-coding to keep track of what connects where.
Error messages are cryptic. When a workflow fails, debugging takes longer than in Zapier. The logs are detailed but not always clear.
Support is slower. Zapier has live chat. Make has email support with longer response times.
Here is the honest trade-off.
Make is more powerful and significantly cheaper. If you have complex workflows and technical aptitude, it is the better choice.
Zapier is simpler and more polished. If you want plug-and-play automation without learning curves, the extra cost is justified.
We are sticking with Make. The three hundred dollar monthly savings pays for itself. We just budgeted extra time for workflow maintenance.
Related: See our detailed Zapier vs Make vs n8n comparison for feature breakdown and use case recommendations.