Zapier vs Make: Which Automation Tool Does Your Business Need?

The short answer: Zapier for most UK small businesses, Make if you have genuinely complex data flows and someone technical enough to enjoy them. Zapier trades some power for reliability and ease; Make trades some ease for power and price. The right choice depends on who'll maintain the thing in eighteen months.

I'm Jack, founder of Toki, an automation consultancy in Norwich. Full disclosure of bias: Toki is a Zapier Silver Solutions Partner, and Zapier is where I build the overwhelming majority of client work. But I've inherited plenty of Make (formerly Integromat) scenarios from clients, so I know both sides of this fence well enough to compare them honestly.

What Zapier and Make both do

Both connect the software your business already uses so that when something happens in one tool, things happen in others — no code required, at least in theory. Enquiry arrives, task created, email sent, spreadsheet updated. The concept is identical. The experience of building and living with them is not.

Where Zapier wins

App coverage. Zapier connects more apps than anyone — 8,000+ at last count — and for UK small business software specifically, if a tool has any integration at all, it has a Zapier one. With Make, you'll hit gaps sooner.

Buildability by normal humans. A Zap reads like a sentence: when this, do that, then that. A business owner can look at their own Zaps and broadly understand them. That matters enormously for the eighteen-month problem — automations outlive the enthusiasm that built them, and a system the owner can read is a system that survives.

Reliability of the boring kind. In years of client work, Zapier's platform has been the least of my problems. When things break, it's almost always the process, not the platform.

Where Make wins

Complex logic. Make's visual scenario builder handles branching, iteration over arrays, and data transformation more elegantly than Zapier. If your automation genuinely needs to loop through fifty line items and treat each differently, Make does it more naturally.

Cost at volume. Make's operations-based pricing tends to work out cheaper than Zapier's task-based pricing at high volumes. If you're running tens of thousands of executions monthly, the difference is real money — check both current pricing pages, as the maths shifts.

Fine control. Error handling routes, granular scheduling, HTTP modules for anything with an API. Powerful — in the right hands.

The eighteen-month test

Here's the question that actually decides this, and neither sales page will ask it: who fixes it when it breaks and the person who built it is gone? A Make scenario built by a clever contractor is a wonderful thing until the contractor moves on and nobody in the business can read the diagram. I've been called into exactly that situation more than once — it's most of the reason Toki builds in Zapier by default. Power you can't maintain is a liability with a subscription fee.

If you have (or are) a technical person who'll be around, Make's power is genuinely yours. If not, Zapier's readability is worth more than any feature.

Can you use both?

Yes, and occasionally that's the right answer: Zapier for the everyday business flows the team needs to understand, Make for one isolated, genuinely complex data job. Just keep the boundary clean and documented — two automation platforms with overlapping duties is how businesses end up frightened of their own systems.

Frequently asked questions

Is Make cheaper than Zapier? Often at high volume, because of how the two price their usage — Make counts operations, Zapier counts tasks. At typical small-business volumes the difference is modest, and the cost of someone's time maintaining the harder tool usually outweighs the subscription saving.

Is Make harder to learn than Zapier? Yes. Make's visual scenarios are more powerful and correspondingly more demanding. Zapier's linear when-this-then-that model is readable by non-technical people, which is most of your team.

Which does Toki build in? Zapier, primarily — it's what our Silver Solutions Partner status is in, and its readability protects clients after the engagement ends. We'll work with existing Make scenarios where a client already has them, but new builds default to Zapier unless the complexity genuinely demands otherwise.

Almost done! When you're ready, here are four ways I can help you:

1. Read it. A guide on how to use ClickUp and actually make it work for you.
2. Connect it. Let's be LinkedIn pals. I make funny videos sometimes.
3. Workshop it. Book a 30-minute chat to talk processes and build a Miro together.
4. Go for it. Fill in my contact form — let's talk ClickUp or Automations. Whatever tickles your pickle.

Wanna hear from the unfiltered version of me? Sign up to my newsletter. The Working Notes. 2 minute reads. Behind the scenes. Hopefully helpful. Maybe funny.