The Short Version: My Verdict on the Best Zapier Alternative
Let’s not waste time. The best Zapier alternative for most people building serious automations is Make.com. It’s cheaper, more powerful, and gives you a visual canvas that makes complex workflows understandable at a glance. I switched two years ago and haven’t looked back.
But it’s not for everyone. If you just need to connect two apps with a single trigger-action step and hate thinking about how data is structured, Zapier’s simplicity is still king. You’ll just pay a premium for it. This review is for the people who have hit Zapier’s ceiling, either in price or functionality.
Full disclosure: some links below are affiliate links. I only recommend tools I’ve paid for and actually use.
Why I Ditched Zapier’s Pricing Model for Make
My breaking point with Zapier was its pricing. It’s based on “Tasks.” Every single action, filter, or step in a Zap costs one task. It sounds fine until you build anything remotely useful.
Here’s a real-world example. I had a Zap that did the following:
- Trigger: New entry in a Typeform.
- Action 1: Format the text to be uppercase.
- Action 2: Add the data to a Google Sheet.
- Action 3: Send a Slack notification to my team.
That seems like one automation, right? To Zapier, that’s three tasks every single time someone fills out the form. If you get 100 form submissions a month, that’s 300 tasks consumed from your plan. Now imagine a more complex workflow with five or six steps. The costs balloon ridiculously fast. I was constantly hitting my task limit on their $29.99/mo plan, which only gave me 750 tasks. It felt restrictive and expensive.
Make (formerly Integromat) works differently. It charges based on “Operations.” One execution of a workflow, no matter how many steps it has, is typically just one operation. The workflow I described above would cost one operation in Make. One. The difference in value is staggering. I moved all my automations over and my monthly bill for automation dropped by about 70%, while the complexity of what I could build went way up.
The Visual Workflow Builder is Genuinely Better
This is the feature I love. This is what makes Make worth the initial learning curve. Zapier gives you a linear, vertical list of steps. It’s clean and simple for A-to-B connections. But as soon as you introduce logic, it gets messy. You have paths and filters hidden inside other steps.
Make gives you a visual canvas. A drag-and-drop flowchart. You can see the entire automation, from trigger to every possible outcome, on one screen. Each app is a bubble, and you draw lines connecting them. It looks like a mind map of your process.
The best part of this is the “Router.” It’s a tool that lets you split your workflow into multiple branches based on conditions. For example, after a form submission, a Router can send the data down different paths: if the budget is over $1000, it goes to my CRM and alerts me on Slack; if it’s under $1000, it just gets added to a Google Sheet. In Zapier, this would require their “Paths” feature, which is only available on their expensive Professional plan ($73.50/mo). In Make, it’s a fundamental building block available on all paid plans, starting at $9/mo. It’s a completely different philosophy about what users should be able to do.
Seeing my entire business logic laid out visually has helped me spot inefficiencies and opportunities I would have missed in Zapier’s linear list format.
What Sucks About Make.com?
It’s not perfect. My biggest gripe is the learning curve, specifically around how it handles data. It’s a huge hurdle for non-technical users. Zapier holds your hand, mapping data fields clearly and making it obvious what goes where. Make just gives you the raw data output from the previous step and expects you to know what to do with it.
The most confusing concept is its handling of arrays, which it calls “bundles.” Let’s say you get an order from Shopify with three different line items. Zapier would typically let you loop through these easily. In Make, this comes through as an array of collections. If you want to add each line item as a new row in a Google Sheet, you can’t just map it directly. You have to insert an “Iterator” module to break the array apart into separate bundles, and then pass those individual bundles to the Google Sheets module. If you want to put them back together later, you need an “Array Aggregator.”
It feels like you’re programming, not just connecting apps. The first time I tried this, I spent two hours staring at cryptic error messages like “Invalid mapping” with zero context. The documentation is decent but assumes a certain level of technical understanding. This is the single biggest reason someone might try Make and run back to Zapier. It’s powerful, but it does not coddle you.