Zapier vs Make (2026): Which Automation Tool Is Actually Worth Paying For?

The Verdict

Buy Zapier if breadth of integrations and a gentle learning curve matter more than the bill — it connects to more apps than anything else and you'll ship your first workflow in minutes. Buy Make if your workflows have branching, data transformation or any real volume behind them; its credit pricing is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper per unit, and its router and transformation modules do natively what Zapier makes you bolt together. The billing unit is the whole argument: Zapier charges per action against a 750-task base, Make charges per module call against 10,000 credits.

Zapier and Make do the same job: they wire your apps together so you stop copying things between them by hand. They look almost interchangeable in a demo. They bill on completely different units, and that single difference decides most buying decisions.

Zapier charges per task. Every action a workflow performs is one task. A four-step Zap running 200 times a month is 800 tasks.

Make charges per credit. Every module call inside a scenario is one credit — but the cheapest paid plan includes 10,000 of them, against Zapier’s 750 tasks.

Once you’ve internalised that, the rest mostly falls out of it.

This comparison is built from both vendors’ published pricing, their documentation, and independent 2026 pricing trackers, cross-checked in September 2026. It is not a hands-on lab test — nothing below is presented as a measured result from us running these platforms. Where sources disagree on a number, that’s flagged rather than averaged into a tidy-looking single figure.

Quick answer

Buy Zapier if you connect unusual or niche apps, you’re the only person who’ll maintain it, and your workflows are short and linear. It’s the easier tool to start with and it has by far the longest integration list. Professional starts at $19.99/month annual (~£14.80).

Buy Make if you’re cost-sensitive, your workflows branch, or you move real volume. Core starts around $9–12/month annual (~£6.70–£8.90) and includes 10,000 credits, and its router and data-transformation modules handle natively what Zapier pushes you into splitting across several Zaps.

Buy neither if you want to self-host or you’re building AI agents — that’s n8n’s territory.

Pricing (checked September 2026)

Zapier

Plan	Annual (per month)	Monthly rate	Approx GBP (annual)	Base allowance
Free	$0	$0	£0	100 tasks, 2-step Zaps, 1 seat
Professional	$19.99	$29.99	~£14.80	750 tasks, unlimited steps, Paths
Team	$69	$103.50	~£51	2,000 tasks, up to 25 users, shared Zaps, SSO
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	—	Custom

Two things people miss. First, the headline price is the base of a sliding scale — Professional and Team both scale with task volume, with Team reported as reaching around $3,999/month at 2 million tasks. Second, monthly billing runs roughly 33–50% above annual, a wider gap than most SaaS.

Make

Make renamed its billing unit from “operations” to “credits” in 2025. A credit is one module call; AI-related modules can consume them at a different rate.

Plan	Annual (per month)	Monthly rate	Approx GBP (annual)	Base allowance
Free	$0	$0	£0	1,000 credits, 2 active scenarios, 15-min interval
Core	$9–12	~$16	~£6.70–£8.90	10,000 credits, unlimited active scenarios
Pro	$16–21	~$28	~£11.80–£15.50	Priority execution, full execution-log search, custom variables
Teams	$29–38	~$51	~£21.50–£28	Team roles, shared scenario templates
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	—	Custom

A flag on those Make numbers. Independent pricing trackers do not agree on Core: some report $9/month annual, others $12. The monthly rate is more consistently reported at around $16. The base credit allowance is the same 10,000 across Core, Pro and Teams — the higher tiers buy features, not headroom. Check Make’s own pricing page in your currency before you commit, because the spread here is real and we’re not going to pretend it isn’t.

The comparison that matters

Both plans scale with volume, so the useful question isn’t “which plan is cheaper” but “how much work does the entry plan actually buy”.

	Zapier Professional	Make Core
Entry price (annual)	~£14.80/mo	~£6.70–£8.90/mo
Base allowance	750 tasks	10,000 credits
Unit consumed	One per action	One per module call
Rough cost per unit	~2.0p per task	~0.07–0.09p per credit

The unit costs aren’t strictly comparable — a Make scenario often burns more credits than the equivalent Zap burns tasks, because Make counts every module including routers and transformations. But the gap is roughly an order of magnitude, and a Make scenario would have to be badly built indeed to close it.

Where the money actually goes

Work it through on plausible volumes rather than headline prices.

Small: one four-step workflow, 200 runs a month. Zapier: 800 tasks — that already breaks the 750-task Professional base off a single workflow, so you’re paying to scale up on day one. Make: the same workflow is perhaps 6–10 credits per run, so 1,200–2,000 credits against a 10,000 allowance. Make wins comfortably.

Medium: eight workflows, roughly 15,000 actions a month. Zapier: well into the paid scale above the Professional base, and the bill climbs steeply. Make: 15,000–30,000 credits, which means a Core overage or a step up the scale. Make is still substantially cheaper.

Large: 100,000+ actions a month. Both get expensive and both will talk to you about a custom deal. Make starts from a much lower base, so the negotiation starts in a better place. At this volume, self-hosting n8n genuinely deserves a look.

The honest caveat: if you only run two or three small workflows, Zapier’s free tier (100 tasks) or Make’s free tier (1,000 credits) may cover you indefinitely and this entire section is academic. Make’s free tier is the more generous of the two by a wide margin.

Ease of use

Zapier is deliberately simple. Trigger, then action, then action. The builder walks you through it and the mental model is a list. Someone with no technical background can build a working Zap the first time they open it, and that is a genuine and underrated feature. The cost of that simplicity shows up when you need conditional logic: Paths exist and they work, but complex branching tends to fragment across several Zaps that are then harder to reason about as a set.

Make is a canvas, not a list. You connect modules on a visual scenario and you have to understand how data maps between them. The first hour is harder. In exchange, branching (routers), iteration, aggregation and data transformation are all first-class — the things that make Zapier feel fiddly are simply where Make lives.

The rule of thumb reported consistently across user reviews: Zapier wins your first workflow, Make wins your fifth.

Integrations

Zapier: 6,000+ apps. This is its strongest and most durable advantage and it isn’t close.

Make: roughly 1,800–2,000 apps. Fewer, but coverage of mainstream SaaS — Google, Microsoft, Slack, HubSpot, Stripe, Airtable, Shopify — is complete.

For most small businesses this is a theoretical difference. It stops being theoretical the moment one tool in your stack is niche, industry-specific or UK-only. Check both directories against your actual app list before you decide anything else; if only one of them has your CRM, the pricing debate is over.

Both also offer generic HTTP and webhook modules, so an unsupported app with a public API is usually reachable on either platform — with more work on Zapier, where custom API calls are a less natural fit.

The things each one is genuinely bad at

Zapier

Cost at any real volume — the task model punishes multi-step workflows specifically
Data transformation is thin; you’ll reach for Formatter or a second tool
Complex logic fragments across multiple Zaps, which gets hard to maintain
Monthly billing carries an unusually harsh premium over annual

Make

The learning curve is real, and the canvas is genuinely intimidating on day one
Credit consumption is hard to predict before you build, so early budgeting is guesswork
Fewer integrations, and the gap sits in the long tail where it hurts most
Smaller community and less third-party documentation than Zapier
Published pricing is inconsistently reported, which is a mild warning sign in itself

Which to buy

Zapier if

You’ve never automated anything before and want the gentlest possible start
Your workflows are short — two to five steps — and don’t branch
One of your apps is niche and only Zapier supports it
You want to hire help: there are far more Zapier consultants than Make ones
Your volume genuinely fits inside the free tier or the Professional base

Make if

Cost matters, which for most small UK businesses it does
Your workflows branch, loop, or transform data
You expect volume to grow rather than stay flat
You’re willing to spend an afternoon learning the canvas to save on the bill every month afterwards

Both, honestly

Plenty of teams run Zapier for the two workflows that need a niche connector and Make for everything else. At roughly £14.80 and £8.90 that’s about £24 a month, and each tool does the part it’s actually good at. It’s a legitimate answer rather than a fence-sit.

FAQ

Can I migrate my Zaps to Make automatically? No. There’s no export path between them; you rebuild manually. Simple workflows take minutes, complex ones take a couple of hours each. Budget for the rebuild before you switch on cost grounds alone — with thirty Zaps, the saving may not clear the effort for a year.

Is Make’s free tier actually usable? More so than Zapier’s. 1,000 credits a month and two active scenarios covers light personal automation properly, where Zapier’s 100 tasks and two-step cap is closer to a demo than a plan.

Why did my Zapier bill go up when my usage didn’t? Almost always because a workflow gained a step. Tasks are counted per action, so adding one step to a Zap that runs 500 times a month adds 500 tasks. Multi-step growth is the most common cause of Zapier bill shock.

What happens if I run out of tasks or credits mid-month? Both platforms handle this by moving you up the scale rather than switching you off outright, but the specifics change and vendors revise them quietly. Check your account’s current overage behaviour before you rely on it.

Which has better support? Zapier, on volume of documentation, community answers and available consultants. Make’s support is competent; there’s just less of it and less written about it.

Should I look at n8n instead? If you want to self-host, control where your data sits, or build AI agents — yes, seriously. n8n bills per workflow run rather than per step, which flips the maths again for long workflows. We cover that in Make vs n8n and n8n vs Zapier vs Make.

The verdict

Choose Zapier if the integration list decides it, or if the person maintaining this is not technical and never will be. You are paying a real premium for breadth and simplicity, and for some businesses that premium is obviously worth it — an automation nobody can maintain is worth nothing.

Choose Make if you’re cost-sensitive and willing to spend an afternoon learning it. For the same practical work it’s dramatically cheaper per unit, and its handling of branching and data transformation is the thing you’ll want on your third workflow, not your thirtieth.

For most small UK businesses the answer is Make, with Zapier’s free tier kept on the side for the one integration Make doesn’t have. That combination costs under £10 a month and covers almost everything a team under ten people will need.

See Zapier pricing → See Make pricing →

Pricing checked September 2026. Both vendors revise pricing and allowances regularly — Make renamed operations to credits in 2025 and independent trackers still disagree on its Core rate. Confirm current rates on the vendor’s own pricing page in your currency before you buy, and trust your billing screen over any comparison article, including this one.

Further reading: Make vs n8n | n8n vs Zapier vs Make | Best Zapier alternatives | Zapier review