Is Make or Zapier cheaper?

Make starts at $9/mo (Core, 10,000 operations, annual billing) (free plan available). Zapier starts at $19.99/mo (Professional, 750 tasks, annual billing) (free plan available).

Make vs Zapier

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Make compared with Zapier

Zapier sells breadth and ease; Make sells depth per dollar. Zapier's catalog (~8,000 apps vs ~2,000) and guided editor get a non-technical team live fastest, but every action is a metered task. Make's visual canvas handles branching, iteration, and error handling more naturally and its per-operation pricing starts at $9, typically landing far cheaper at the same workload. Pick Zapier when your niche tools demand it or your builders are non-technical; pick Make when workflow complexity per dollar is the contest.

Zapier compared with Make

Choose Make if

Visually-minded builders and cost-conscious teams who need real workflow logic, branching, iteration, error handling, without writing code, especially agencies and SMBs whose per-month automation budget is closer to $20 than $200.

Choose Zapier if

Teams that want automations working in minutes without technical staff, businesses whose niche tools only Zapier connects, and operators assembling a light no-code stack (forms, database, automation, AI agents) from one vendor with one bill.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Make	Zapier
Category	GTM Engineering	GTM Engineering
Starting price	$9/mo (Core, 10,000 operations, annual billing) (free plan available)	$19.99/mo (Professional, 750 tasks, annual billing) (free plan available)
Pricing model	Freemium with operations-based metering: every module execution consumes one operation from a monthly allowance. Tiers scale the allowance, minimum scheduling interval, and team features; operations can be topped up, and unused allowance policies vary by tier. Prices quoted for annual billing; monthly billing runs higher.	Freemium with task-based metering: every action a Zap performs consumes one task from a monthly allowance. Free includes 100 tasks; paid plans scale allowance and features, with pay-per-task overage beyond plan limits. Tables, Interfaces, and Chatbots have free inclusions with their own paid tiers; Enterprise is custom.
Free plan	1,000 operations/month, two active scenarios, 15-minute minimum interval	100 tasks/month, unlimited Zaps, two-step Zaps plus AI power-ups
Free trial	Free plan serves as the trial; paid features preview via plan upgrades	14-day Professional trial
Best for	Visually-minded builders and cost-conscious teams who need real workflow logic, branching, iteration, error handling, without writing code, especially agencies and SMBs whose per-month automation budget is closer to $20 than $200.	Teams that want automations working in minutes without technical staff, businesses whose niche tools only Zapier connects, and operators assembling a light no-code stack (forms, database, automation, AI agents) from one vendor with one bill.
Setup time	Under an hour to a first live scenario for anyone who has used any automation tool; the template library shortcuts common patterns. Complex scenarios with error handling are a day of iterative building, made faster by per-module test runs.	Minutes. Account to first live Zap is routinely under fifteen minutes, and each additional single-purpose Zap takes about as long. The platform products (Tables, Interfaces) add hours, not days.
Learning curve	Moderate: the canvas and mapping panel are intuitive within hours, while iterators, aggregators, and error-handler semantics reward a deliberate afternoon with the docs. Sits clearly between Zapier's near-zero curve and n8n's technical one.	The gentlest in the category: the editor teaches the trigger-action model as you use it. Advanced features (Paths, Looping, webhooks, code steps) introduce a second, steeper curve most users never need to climb.
Platforms	Web app, REST API, Developer platform (custom apps)	Web app, Mobile app (monitoring), Chrome extension, REST API, CLI (developer platform)
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA
Founded	2016	2011
Headquarters	Prague, Czech Republic	Fully remote (incorporated in San Francisco; founded in Columbia, Missouri)
Ownership	Subsidiary of Celonis (acquired 2020)	Venture-backed but famously capital-efficient; founder-led and long profitable

Strengths and limitations

Make

Strengths

The best power-per-dollar in mainstream automation: full logic primitives on a $9 tier, and a genuinely usable free plan.
The visual canvas makes complex flows legible; routers, iterators, aggregators, and error handlers are native drag-and-drop, not workarounds.
Operations pricing is transparent while you build: the editor shows what each run costs, making optimization a visible activity.
Deep per-app modules: integrations typically expose many actions and searches, not token connectors.

Limitations

Per-operation metering still bills every step, so Make loses the long-pipeline economics contest to n8n's per-execution model at scale.
The ~2,000-app catalog covers the mainstream but concedes the long tail; niche-tool buyers routinely end up on Zapier anyway.
The canvas intimidates true beginners relative to Zapier's guided linear editor, and error-handler semantics take study to use well.
No self-hosted option; EU region processing exists but the platform is cloud-only.

Zapier

Strengths

The ~8,000-app catalog is the category's deepest moat; for long-tail SaaS tools, Zapier is routinely the only automation platform that connects them.
Fastest time-to-first-automation in the category: guided setup, field mapping, and per-step testing let non-technical users ship the same day.
Fifteen years of operational reliability and a famously capital-efficient, profitable company behind it; the platform risk is as low as SaaS gets.
The surrounding stack (Tables, Interfaces, Chatbots, Agents, Canvas) covers real small-business needs without adding vendors.

Limitations

Task-based pricing punishes exactly what power users build: every step bills, so complex workflows at scale can cost multiples of per-execution alternatives.
Logic is bolted onto a linear model; Paths and Looping cover common cases but complex branching graphs get awkward where Make and n8n are natural.
Cloud-only and US-processed; no self-hosting or data-residency option exists for regulated or sovereignty-minded buyers.
Per-app integration depth varies: many connectors expose a handful of triggers and actions, so 'supported' does not always mean 'fully controllable'.

Pricing compared

Make

Freemium with operations-based metering: every module execution consumes one operation from a monthly allowance. Tiers scale the allowance, minimum scheduling interval, and team features; operations can be topped up, and unused allowance policies vary by tier. Prices quoted for annual billing; monthly billing runs higher.

Free$0
CoreFrom $9
ProFrom $16
TeamsFrom $29
EnterpriseCustom

Make's claim to Best Value is straightforward arithmetic plus real capability: routers, iterators, and error handlers, the features that gate 'serious' automation elsewhere, are included from the free tier up, and the per-operation price at entry undercuts every comparable rival. For most SMB workloads (moderate volume, moderately complex scenarios) it delivers 90% of what either neighbor offers at clearly the lowest bill. The value case weakens at the two edges: long-tail app coverage (Zapier's game) and very long high-volume pipelines, where per-execution n8n beats any per-step meter, Make's included.

Zapier

Freemium with task-based metering: every action a Zap performs consumes one task from a monthly allowance. Free includes 100 tasks; paid plans scale allowance and features, with pay-per-task overage beyond plan limits. Tables, Interfaces, and Chatbots have free inclusions with their own paid tiers; Enterprise is custom.

Free$0
ProfessionalFrom $19.99
TeamFrom $69
EnterpriseCustom

Zapier is expensive per unit of automation and usually worth it per unit of time. The catalog means the integration you need exists, the editor means a non-technical hire ships it today, and reliability means nobody maintains it, which for a small business often beats a cheaper tool plus an engineer's afternoon every month. The value case collapses at exactly one point: long multi-step workflows at volume, where task metering compounds and Make or n8n deliver identical outcomes at a fraction of the cost. Model your task consumption honestly before and after choosing it.

Editorial verdict on each

Make

Best Value

Make is the category's honest bargain: the logic primitives that make automation genuinely programmatic, branching, iteration, aggregation, error handling, delivered visually, included at every tier, and priced beneath everyone. For the typical SMB workload it does 90% of what either neighbor does at clearly the lowest bill, with an EU-residency option nobody else offers self-serve. Its concessions are the catalog's long tail (Zapier's) and long-pipeline unit economics plus AI-agent depth (n8n's), which mark the two exits power users eventually take. Between those edges sits most of the market, and for it, Make is the value pick without much argument.

Read the full Make profile

Zapier

Category Leader

Zapier is the incumbent for the best possible reason: it removes the most friction for the most people. The ~8,000-app catalog makes it the only automation answer for a long tail of small-business software, the editor remains the fastest path from idea to running automation, and the company behind it is as durable as they come, with Agents and MCP keeping it relevant in the AI era rather than disrupted by it. Its one structural weakness is arithmetic: task metering taxes exactly the multi-step, high-volume work that power users graduate into, which is where Make and n8n win on cost. Default here for breadth and ease; leave knowingly, for economics, when your workflows grow long.

Read the full Zapier profile

Make profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Zapier last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.