March 16, 2026
If you want the easiest possible setup and do not mind paying more, use Zapier. If you want more power, more flexibility, and significantly lower costs, use Make. Most small business owners who are willing to spend 30 minutes learning the interface will save hundreds of dollars per year by choosing Make.
This is where the difference is massive. Zapier's free plan gives you 100 tasks per month with single-step automations only. Their Starter plan is $19.99 per month for 750 tasks. Their Professional plan is $49 per month for 2,000 tasks.
Make's free plan gives you 1,000 operations per month with multi-step automations included. Their Core plan is $9 per month for 10,000 operations. Their Pro plan is $16 per month for 10,000 operations with advanced features.
For a typical small business running 5-10 automations, you will use roughly 3,000-5,000 operations per month. On Zapier, that costs $49-99 per month. On Make, that costs $9-16 per month. Over a year, that is $480-$996 saved by choosing Make.
Zapier wins here. Their interface is a simple top-to-bottom list of steps. Add a trigger, add an action, done. Anyone who can fill out a form can build a Zapier automation. Make uses a visual flowchart builder where you drag modules onto a canvas and connect them with lines. It is more powerful but takes 20-30 minutes to get comfortable with. Once you understand the basics, it becomes intuitive, but the learning curve is real.
Make wins this category easily. Make lets you build branching logic where different conditions trigger different actions. You can run parallel paths, loop through arrays of data, use routers to split workflows, and build error handling into your automations. Zapier's branching is limited and costs extra.
Make also lets you see exactly how data flows through your automation with a visual debugger. When something breaks, you can see exactly where and why. Zapier's error messages are often vague.
For the business owners we work with at LaunchOps, we build most of our automation kits on Make. The cost savings alone justify it, and once the blueprint is pre-built for you, you do not need to learn the interface at all. You just import the blueprint file and connect your accounts.
That said, all of our automation kits include both Make and Zapier versions so you can use whichever platform you prefer.
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