## Zapier vs Make Best for Marketing Automation Speed
## Dashboardbehaviorduringhightrafficwastotallydifferent
Okay — so here’s what happened mid-way into automating a newsletter campaign push for a client. I had both Make (formerly Integromat) and Zapier open. Same client, same data, same general copy-paste flow — Airtable to Mailchimp to Slack to Webflow CMS, the usual suspects. But the way the dashboards responded under pressure? Wildly different.
Zapier was clean-ish. It didn’t freeze — but it felt like trying to finish a puzzle while someone’s pulling pieces away. You click a dropdown, wait, wait some more, then it loads one option. Then you search for a mailchimp field and the whole thing stutters for a half second. Still manageable — like driving a car when the AC and GPS are one button too many.
Make, though — oh boy. When things got heavy, the UI didn’t just slow down. It *changed*. The canvas-based builder didn’t reflect status properly. Like, the blue bubbles that say “Success” would stick around even when the modules just errored. And the run history tabs were out of sync with reality. I was watching a Webhook trigger connect to a flow that wasn’t enabled. ಠ_ಠ
I had to double-check the scenario IDs in the URL just to confirm I wasn’t clicking the wrong one. Apparently, Make doesn’t lock scenario history in when you re-edit a module — which led to at least one situation where I was debugging from a stale config, and didn’t notice until 15 minutes of poking.
Zapier doesn’t have that issue, but it kind of hides the complexity instead. You can’t see the entire chain at once. So, sure — it showed success. But when I wanted to rebuild part of the step logic, there was no visual anchor to figure out why something was skipped.
Both slow, both weird in their own way. But under load, I’d probably trust Zapier’s patient slowness over Make’s quietly incorrect state. There’s a calm in slowness. Broken visualization? That’s much harder to fix.
## Triggerlatencycanbreakfastorjustvanish
Trigger speed isn’t sexy, but it matters way more in marketing chains than you’d think. Let’s say you’ve got a lead submission happening via a popup (Unbounce, Elementor, whatever). You’ve got stuff firing from that — CRM tagging, Slack pings, analytics logs, lead score updates, personalized email sequences.
Here’s where things went sideways for me in Make: a webhook I set as an instant trigger just didn’t fire. Like, no clue why. I triple-checked the headers, tested directly in Postman (it hit fine there), tried a simple JSON body payload. Nothing. At one point, I even ran:
“`
curl -X POST https://hook.us1.make.com/abcd1234 -H “Content-Type: application/json” -d ‘{“name”: “Test Trigger”}’
“`
Nothing showed in the Run history. No error. Just crickets. Eventually I duplicated the whole scenario, changed the webhook key manually, then it fired. Magical thinking fixes, basically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zapier — slower, yes. But it will *always* pick up the webhook. I’ve never had a hook straight-up not fire. Sometimes there’s a one or two-minute delay if the plan tier isn’t high enough, and yes, that’s annoying. But at least you know what kind of annoying you’re getting.
Also funny: Make *calls* their triggers “instant” way more often than Zapier actually calls theirs that, even though in practice Zapier was more reliable in 3 out of 4 real campaigns I ran.
## Buildingloopscanbeamessinboth
Oh boy — loop logic. If you’ve never hit this wall, congrats. If you have: you already know it’s a hot mess in both platforms, but in very different moods.
In Make, it’s visually easier. You can literally drag from an iterator module and loop things to a router or array aggregator. It *feels* good. You can see what you’re doing. You know a do-while chain when you draw one. But here’s the trap: Make’s loop logic is super easy to build, super easy to break, and very *very* hard to debug if the array is malformed. I had a schedule fail 17 times one week because my JSON string had an empty object in it (“{}”) which Make interpreted as one valid item — but then two modules downstream choked on it with no visible error 😤
With Zapier, loops exist now (via Looping by Zapier) but they’re almost grudgingly bolted-on. And you can’t loop over dynamic keys easily. You have to predefine an array or pull it from a parsing template. If you want to loop over, say, the properties of a CRM object you got from HubSpot, you’re wasting an hour. And all error messages boil down to “The zap encountered an error” — which is as helpful as blinking twice in Morse code.
But weirdly, when stuff *does* break in Zapier looping, the rollback is more graceful. I’ve had loops fail on contact import where only the failed items stuck. In Make, the failure sometimes hit midway and the whole record set was in an undefined state. I had to re-POST the data manually with adjusted keys.
Loop logic on both makes you feel like you’re explaining recursion to a microwave. But at least with Zapier, the UI doesn’t pretend it’s working when it’s not.
## Catchingdatastructurefailuresinrealusage
Real-world scenario: lead comes in via Calendly. Goes through Clearbit, through a Notion database capture, and into a marketing CRM like ActiveCampaign. Now, imagine two of those tools updated their API key structure, and one nested the email field *inside* a new parent object.
Make will let that run.
Zapier will panic.
And I still haven’t decided which is worse.
In Make, the modules will optimistically succeed until downstream modules start choking. Or worse, post garbage data like `{{email}}` into your CRM field because apparently it couldn’t interpolate the key — but didn’t throw an error about that fact. One time, we ended up routing dummy data into *real drip emails*. You can only mumble “oops” so many times.
In Zapier, when the webhook structure changes — boom, everything fails loudly. Zap stops. Workflow turns yellow. You get emails instantly. That’s actually a relief. When I tested this with a malformed Google Sheet range, Zapier gave me a clear message — “Expected array but found object.” That sentence deserves a hug.
Both have their weirdness re: data structure validation. But Zapier makes the bad stuff visible. Make lets it fly under the radar… until someone’s welcome message says “Hi {name}, thanks for booking!” and you scream into your Slack.
## Pricingtiersreallydoesimpactwhattriggersinstantly
This one is annoying but real real. Over the years, I’ve kept one budget Make account and one mid-tier Zapier plan (you know, the one where logic paths unlock). And yes, the trigger responsiveness is partially tied to what you’re paying.
Zapier has pretty brutal polling intervals on the free and entry plans. If your data source isn’t using webhooks, you’re gonna wait… a while. I’ve had Google Sheets triggers run 10+ minutes late unless you fork over cash. But if you *have* the Webhook by Zapier module? Beautiful. Still subject to rate limiting (yeah, I hit that ceiling once), but consistently instant.
Make, on the other hand, has a lot of flexibility and broke pricing into operations instead of tasks. That feels generous until you hit the one scenario that loops 200 times… and suddenly you’re out of operations for the day. I once spent three hours debugging why nothing was fetching from Airtable just to realize I had used up the quota on a different scenario that tried to sync a product catalog from WooCommerce.
And discovering you hit the op limit isn’t that intuitive. You get these little error banners, but sometimes the scenario *still runs* — just only up to the allowed op count. So you get silently truncated output. No alert. I had a campaign that emailed only the *first ten rows* of a targeted segment because of that.
There’s no clean answer here. Honestly, just test what your scenario costs *before* you assume it’ll run forever.
## Collaborationisnightanddaydifferent
Collab-wise, Zapier tries to assume you’re an admin. You can have shared folders, accounts, and teams logged in — but it’s all very top-down. Only people invited to an org can edit workflows. Multi-account management exists, but switching between accounts feels like poking through cookie jars. There’s no shared console for running test data or checking logs collaboratively.
Make surprised me here — it’s *actually* more team-friendly, despite the smaller brand footprint. Scenarios can be owned but also duplicated easily. I once cloned a full marketing automation flow (Google Ads > webhook copy > internal Slack ping if below click threshold) and just dropped a different set of tokens in for another client.
Also: Make lets you comment. Like, actually *write text* on the scenario builder screen. I’ve used this way too often:
“`
REM: This iterator fixes the campaign burst from March 7
REM: Don’t increment counter here or it’ll break Airtable sync again
“`
That kind of inline guidance keeps team sanity intact.
Only trap with Make: shared scenarios sometimes retain legacy tokens, which might grant too-broad access. I had an intern trigger an old webhook because he found a duplicated scenario with an embedded test token still active 😬
So yeah — both solid, but Make “feels” like you’re designing together more. Zapier feels like you’re copying things from a team leader during a group project, hoping you don’t break the master file.