Zapier vs Make for Workflow Automation at Scale

Table of Contents

Trying to pick between Zapier and Make

Every single time one of my Zaps breaks without explanation I open another tab and start convincing myself that maybe Make will be my savior. Half my browser at this point is just Zapier task history and the other half is Make scenario logs. The real struggle is not “which tool is better” like all the comparison charts say, it’s which tool breaks less often when you are running tens of thousands of steps in a month.

Zapier calls them Zaps, Make calls them Scenarios. They are the same idea — trigger plus actions. But the difference in feel is real. In Zapier I can spin something up in two minutes with that clean form builder. But if I need a conditional branch — like send to Slack only if the email subject contains the word “urgent” — I end up clicking through clunky filters like I am back in 2015. In Make, I drag a tiny line and suddenly I have branching spaghetti everywhere. It looks confusing, but I know exactly what’s happening under the hood. Beginners find Zapier easier, but the frustration comes when you hit its limits at scale.

At one point I was sending notifications from Typeform into Salesforce with a custom filter. Zapier dropped half the payload because its built‑in field mapping stopped recognizing a nested field. No warning. Just blanks. In Make, pulling that same payload meant building a JSON parser module, which took ten more minutes, but it actually worked consistently. I still remember staring at Zapier’s task history where it just said “Action completed successfully” even though the value was empty. That is the most painful kind of error—when the tool itself is lying to you ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

How each platform handles scaling

If you are automating one little Airtable to Slack reminder, Zapier feels great. You can test and publish in under five minutes. But scale exposes the cracks in different ways.

For Zapier, the pricing creeps up the second your process involves loops. For example I once had a Zap that needed to run a search for every row in a Google Sheet. Zapier counts every single search as a task. Ten rows means ten tasks on top of whatever else you are doing. In Make, the looping feels native. If I search that same sheet in Make, every iteration still looks like one bundled operation. It is cheaper and easier to monitor.

Another thing is speed. Zapier polls triggers on a schedule unless the app supports webhooks. That means some automations run a few minutes late. If you are processing orders, this is a nightmare. I had an order confirmation held up because Zapier was polling every fifteen minutes. Make, by default, pushes instantly if you use a webhook. For logs that do not matter, Zapier is fine. But if a customer is refreshing their inbox waiting for confirmation, I want Make’s setup.

Still, scaling in Make comes with spaghetti. A complex automation with forty modules looks like a UFO on my screen. One wrong branching path and data falls into the void. Debugging that is like following Christmas lights that stop working in the middle of the chain. Zapier at least gives you a clean step‑by‑step task history where you can click through, even if it is sometimes misleading.

Real cost differences once volume rises

On paper Zapier and Make both show pricing tables. But in practice the way they count operations changes your real cost by quite a bit.

Take one automation I set up for client onboarding. A form submission triggered a chain of actions — kick off a folder in Google Drive, send a DocuSign, log in ClickUp, then post to Slack. Zapier counted that entire run as four or five tasks. Not terrible until you realize every time the client uploaded two files, Zapier retriggered some steps. Suddenly I was burning through hundreds of tasks a day on one client.

I moved the exact same flow into Make. It ran as one scenario cycle, regardless of files or subtasks, because it bundled them in one operation. With heavy onboarding weeks, Make ended up costing me about half of Zapier. It did require some trial and error — the Make version broke twice because I misconfigured iterator modules. But once I got it right, it stayed stable.

A table makes this clearer:

That is why at scale, Make can feel dramatically cheaper. But if you only need a couple thousand tasks a month, Zapier’s stability and cleaner UI might be worth the extra cost. The danger is that many of us underestimate usage and Zapier invoices jump fast.

Debugging failures in Zapier versus Make

Zapier gives you a stack of task logs. You open a failed task and see trigger data on the left, step data on the right. It looks neat but half the time it says “Action completed successfully” even though the app never got anything. Debugging often means re‑running the Zap with test data until you catch the error live. That wastes hours.

Make’s error handling is messy but more honest. When something breaks, Make freezes the scenario at that exact step and stores the payload in a queue. You can literally re‑route or replay just that one packet of data. Example: I once had a failed Slack post because the destination channel was renamed. In Zapier, I would never have even realized until a teammate complained. In Make, the log showed “channel not found” and held the packet for me. I fixed the channel name and hit replay. Done.

The downside with Make is staring at those bright red exclamation marks everywhere. If one small branch is failing quietly, you end up with a dozen stuck operations. If you forget about them, Make hits a ceiling and stops running future tasks. Suddenly you wake up to a frozen automation queue :P. So it definitely requires babysitting.

Managing complexity at a team level

When you are alone cleaning up your own automations, the tool choice almost does not matter. But with a team, both Zapier and Make create different problems.

Zapier’s shared folders look easy at first. You can put team Zaps in one folder and give access. But when someone edits a Zap, there’s no version control. I had a coworker add a Slack message step in the middle of a Zap, and overnight it doubled our message count. Undoing it meant scrolling through task history with no record of who added the step. Zapier does not track that clearly.

Make has better visualization for big teams. You can map a scenario that literally shows who built what. Each module has a history. The catch is people get carried away with crazy nested structures. I opened a colleague’s scenario once and it took five minutes just to understand why a path looped back into itself. Great power, but it demands discipline. The average teammate stares at it like modern art.

Which platform actually breaks less often

The million dollar question. Neither is perfect. Zapier fails quietly more often. You think things are working until a lead complains about not getting their email. Make fails loudly. You will see errors, bright red, and frozen queues. It is almost a preference question — do you want quiet failure that trickles through, or noisy failure that halts but is easy to fix.

Personally, when I deal with financial data or contracts, I choose Make because I want to see the breakage and catch it instantly. For simple one‑off emails, Zapier is ‘set and forget’ until the day it explodes.

There was a week Make went down for two hours and every scenario piled up. I had hundreds of stuck customer events. Meanwhile Zapier was fine. So yes, web reliability matters too. Both have outages, neither is immune.

What I actually use today

Right now I use both. About half of my automations are in Zapier — mostly quick wins like Calendar to Slack or Airtable to Gmail. The rest are in Make, especially the ones where cost and branching logic matter. I have even set up some ridiculous loops where Zapier triggers Make through a webhook just because I wanted Zapier’s simplicity on the front end but Make’s flexibility on the back.

If you are trying to choose, the real test is to rebuild one of your trickiest automations in both tools. Run them in parallel for a week. Watch logs, watch costs, watch who complains. That is the only way to know which platform fits your own chaos.

If you want to check the platforms firsthand, go to zapier.com and make.com — those are the official sites where you can start playing with builds right away. Sometimes the only way to figure out what will break is to watch it break live 🙂

Keeping sanity when everything changes

The worst part is not that Zapier or Make are bad tools. It is that whenever an app they connect to updates an API, it silently breaks half your world. You come back from lunch and suddenly invoices stop syncing. No warning, no fix. My Google Drive connectors have died overnight at least three times. I wake up to angry pings.

So what I do now is keep logs in a Notion page of every automation I build, with screenshots. That way when something goes dark, I remember what field mappings I had. Actual sanity saver. Also I set up backup email alerts parallel to the clean notifications. If the clean automation dies, at least I still get an ugly email that says “error code 403.” That’s all it takes to know where to start debugging.

Honestly, neither Zapier nor Make is the “perfect” pick. They just fail differently. You get to choose which flavor of broken you want in your life.