Make vs Zapier: the unit you are billed in matters more than the price
Both connect apps you already pay for, and both publish a monthly price next to an allowance. The allowances are counted in different units, so the two numbers on the pricing pages cannot be compared directly — and the difference compounds every month.
Summary
Zapier bills you per task. Make bills you per operation. Those words look interchangeable and are not: a task is roughly one action Zapier completes for you, while an operation is roughly one module Make executes — and a single workflow that does one useful thing can consume several. That means the cheaper headline can be the more expensive product depending on the shape of your automations, and no amount of comparing $19.99 to $9 will tell you which. What follows is how to work out your own answer, and where each product stops being the right tool regardless of price.
What this comparison weighs
- What one unit of billing actually buys, in each product’s own vocabulary
- What the free plan permits — and what it silently prevents
- The premium you pay for billing monthly instead of annually
- Where the ceiling is: the automation you eventually want and cannot build
Which one, for whom
- Someone automating a handful of simple two-step flows
- ZapierZapier’s free plan allows unlimited two-step Zaps within 100 tasks a month. For "when a form is submitted, add a row", the unit is favourable and setup is faster — one action, one task.
- Anyone running high volume through multi-step workflows
- MakeMake Core is $9/month for 10,000 credits against Zapier Pro at $19.99/month annually for its entry volume. When a workflow branches, iterates or transforms data, the visual builder is also the more natural fit — you can see the shape of what you built.
- A team that needs someone other than the author to maintain the automations
- MakeMake’s canvas shows the whole scenario at once, including branches. Zapier’s linear step list is faster to write and harder to inherit — a fair trade if you are the only person who will ever open it, a bad one if you are not.
| Field | Make | Zapier |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Automation | Automation |
| Entry price | $9/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | 14-day trial |
| Tagged for | Small Teams | Freelancers |
| G2 rating unverified | 4.7 / 5 | 4.5 / 5 |
| Capterra rating unverified | 4.8 / 5 | 4.7 / 5 |
Capability comparison
| Capability | Make | Zapier |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan exists | ✓ | ✓ |
| Make: 1,000 credits/month, 2 active scenarios. Zapier: 100 tasks/month, unlimited Zaps but two steps each. | ||
| Multi-step workflows on the free plan | ✓ | ✗ |
| Zapier’s free plan is limited to two-step Zaps (one trigger, one action). Make’s free plan does not cap steps per scenario, but caps active scenarios at 2. | ||
| Runs more often than every 15 minutes on the free plan | ✗ | Not recorded |
| Make’s free plan enforces a 15-minute minimum interval between runs. Zapier’s free-plan polling interval is not established here. | ||
| Execution logs retained beyond 7 days on the free plan | ✗ | Not recorded |
| Make free retains execution logs for 7 days. Not established for Zapier free. | ||
Where they differ
- Billing unit: Zapier counts tasks (roughly one completed action); Make counts operations (roughly one module execution). They are not equivalent and cannot be compared directly.
- Free plan: Zapier gives 100 tasks/month with unlimited but two-step Zaps; Make gives 1,000 credits/month across at most 2 active scenarios with no step cap.
- Entry paid tier: Make Core at $9/month; Zapier Professional from $19.99/month on annual billing.
- Monthly-billing premium: Zapier Professional $29.99 monthly against $19.99 annual, and Team $103.50 against $69 — around 50%. Make advertises 15%+ savings for annual.
- Make’s free plan enforces a 15-minute minimum run interval, a 5-minute execution ceiling, 5 MB file size, 512 MB transfer and 7-day log retention.
A task is not an operation
This is the part that decides the bill, so it is worth being precise. In Zapier, a task is counted when a Zap completes an action for you — the trigger itself is generally not billed, but each action step is. In Make, an operation is counted when a module runs, and a scenario is built from modules: the trigger, each transformation, each router branch that fires, each iteration of a loop.
Consider a workflow that watches a form, looks up the submitter in a CRM, branches on whether they already exist, and writes to one of two places. In Zapier that is roughly three actions, so roughly three tasks per submission. In Make the same logic might be five or six modules, so five or six operations — but Make’s allowances are an order of magnitude larger at comparable prices.
The arithmetic that matters is therefore your own: take one representative workflow, count its billable units in each product’s terms, multiply by your monthly volume, and only then look at the pricing tables. Doing it the other way round — comparing $9 with $19.99 and picking the smaller — is how people end up on the wrong plan and blame the vendor.
One honest caveat: exactly which steps count as billable differs by connector and by workflow shape in both products, and neither vendor’s pricing page is a substitute for running your real automation for a month. Treat any estimate, including one you do carefully, as an estimate.
What the free plans really restrict
Zapier free allows unlimited Zap workflows within 100 tasks a month, but each Zap is limited to two steps: one trigger and one action. That single constraint rules out most automations worth building — anything with a lookup, a condition or a formatting step needs a third step and therefore a paid plan. The free tier is best read as a way to confirm the connectors work, not as a place to run anything.
Make free is shaped differently. You get 1,000 credits a month and a maximum of two active scenarios, but those scenarios are not step-limited, so you can build something genuinely multi-step and run it. The costs sit elsewhere: a 15-minute minimum interval between runs, a five-minute maximum execution time, 5 MB maximum file size, 512 MB of data transfer, and execution logs kept for only seven days.
That last one deserves attention. Seven days of logs means that if a scenario fails quietly on a Monday and you notice the following week, the evidence is gone. For anything you would be upset to have silently broken, the log retention is a stronger argument for paying than the credit allowance is.
What it costs in year two
Both vendors price by volume as well as by tier, so year two is mostly a question of how fast your usage grows rather than your headcount.
On Zapier, Professional starts at $19.99/month on annual billing at the entry volume and scales with tasks up to $3,389/month at two million tasks. Team starts at $69/month annual. Monthly billing is a substantial premium: Professional is $29.99 rather than $19.99, and Team is $103.50 rather than $69 — roughly 50% more in both cases, which is a much steeper flexibility charge than most SaaS.
On Make, Core is $9/month, Pro $16/month and Teams $29/month, with annual billing advertised at 15% or more below monthly. Credit volume is selected separately, so a growing workload moves you along the volume axis before it moves you up a tier.
The practical consequence for a small team: if your automation volume is low and stable, the absolute difference over two years is small enough not to decide anything. If it grows, the unit question from the first section dominates everything else, and a workflow-shape mismatch will cost you more than the tier difference ever will.
Trade-offs worth knowing before you commit
- Zapier is faster to build in and has the broader connector catalogue, but the two-step free plan means you cannot evaluate anything real without paying, and the monthly-billing premium is unusually steep.
- Make is cheaper per unit of work and far better at branching and iteration, but the visual canvas has a genuine learning curve, and the free tier’s 15-minute interval makes anything time-sensitive impossible to trial properly.
- Both are per-usage rather than per-seat, which is kinder as a team grows and harsher as automation succeeds. A workflow that becomes load-bearing gets more expensive precisely as it becomes harder to remove.
- Neither vendor’s pricing page lets you predict your own bill, because both depend on workflow shape. Budget a month of real usage before committing to an annual term.
How hard is it to move?
There is no import path between the two: a Zap and a scenario are different structures, not different file formats, so moving means rebuilding each automation by hand. That is a smaller problem than it sounds when you have five automations and a serious one when you have fifty. The practical defence is documentation — keep a plain-language note of what each automation is supposed to do and why, because that is the artefact that survives a rebuild, and it is also the thing that lets someone else maintain it.
Where this lands
Neither headline price answers the question, and comparing them directly is the mistake this page exists to prevent. Count the billable units in one of your real workflows under each product’s rules, multiply by your volume, and let that decide — it will often point the opposite way to the pricing tables. Beyond cost: choose Zapier if your automations are genuinely simple and speed of assembly matters most, accepting that its free tier cannot host anything real. Choose Make if your workflows branch or loop, if volume is meaningful, or if someone other than the author will have to maintain them. And whichever you pick, run a real month before you commit to an annual term — a 50% monthly premium is expensive, and an annual commitment to the wrong unit is worse.
What this comparison does not cover
- Neither product has been run in production by us. This compares published pricing, published plan limits and documented behaviour, read from the vendors’ own pages on the date below.
- Exactly which steps are billable varies by connector and workflow shape in both products. The task-versus-operation explanation above describes the general model, not a guarantee for a specific automation.
- Zapier’s free-plan polling interval and log retention are not established here and are shown as not recorded rather than guessed.
- Both vendors price by volume as well as tier; the figures quoted are entry points on each tier, not the full table.
Questions this raises
Which is actually cheaper?
For the same work, usually Make — its allowances are much larger at comparable prices. But "the same work" is doing a lot of load-bearing there, because a workflow that costs three tasks in Zapier may cost six operations in Make. The only reliable answer is to count the billable units in one of your own workflows under both sets of rules. If your automations are two steps long, Zapier’s unit is favourable enough to close much of the gap.
Can I run anything real on Zapier’s free plan?
Not really, and this is a plan-design decision rather than a limitation to work around. Two steps means one trigger and one action, so any lookup, condition or formatting step puts you on a paid plan. Treat the free tier as a way to confirm the connectors behave as expected, not as somewhere to run production automations.
What is the catch with Make’s free plan?
Three things, and the third is the one people miss. Two active scenarios, a 15-minute minimum interval between runs — which rules out anything time-sensitive — and seven-day execution log retention. If a scenario fails quietly and you notice the following week, the evidence is already gone.
Is annual billing worth it?
On Zapier the monthly premium is unusually steep: Professional is $29.99 monthly against $19.99 annual, and Team $103.50 against $69, roughly 50% in both cases. Make advertises 15%+ for annual, which is more typical. Given neither pricing page lets you predict your own bill, paying Zapier’s monthly premium for the first two or three months is a reasonable price for finding out whether you chose the right unit.
Sources
- Zapier pricingchecked 7 Aug 2026
- Make pricingchecked 7 Aug 2026
Who wrote this
How figures on this site are sourced, checked and labelled is set out in the methodology. If something here is wrong, send a correction — a link to the source that contradicts the page is the fastest way to get it fixed.
Head to head
Make
Make (formerly Integromat) turns automation into a visual canvas: modules, routers and iterators snake across the screen, exposing logic that Zapier hides. That transparency enables genuinely complex scenarios — loops, aggregations, error handlers — at operation-based prices that undercut Zapier substantially at volume. The trade-off is a steeper on-ramp; it rewards operations-minded builders more than casual users automating a form-to-spreadsheet flow.
Visual automation with serious power.
What we record about Make →Reported strengths
- Powerful logic
- Great value
- Visual builder
Reported drawbacks
- Steeper learning curve
- Fewer apps than Zapier
Zapier
Zapier is the connective glue of business software, with an integration catalog — 7,000+ apps — that no competitor approaches. Multi-step Zaps, filters, paths and now AI steps let non-developers automate real workflows in minutes, and Tables plus Interfaces edge it toward an app platform. Task-based pricing is the perennial complaint: high-volume automations get expensive fast, which is precisely where Make and n8n make their pitch.
Connect 7,000+ apps with no code.
What we record about Zapier →Reported strengths
- Largest app library
- Easy to use
- Free tier
Reported drawbacks
- Task pricing adds up
- Limited logic vs rivals