Make vs Zapier

Make

Make is the visual automation tool for people who outgrow Zapier's straight lines and want routers, iterators and error handling on a canvas without running their own n8n. The credit model is the thing to understand before committing: most steps cost one credit, AI steps cost more and purchased top-ups expire, so a chatty scenario can burn a month's allowance in days. The MCP server and agents make it a reasonable home for assistant-driven automations, but they draw from the same credit pool.

Pros

• +Branching, iteration and error handling on a visual canvas, with routers and error handlers free of credits
• +3,000+ native apps plus custom integrations for any API
• +AI agents with goals, tools, limits and visible reasoning, plus an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini
• +Free plan with 1,000 credits a month and SOC 2 Type II, SSO and audit logs on paid tiers

Cons

• −Plan prices are not readable without a browser session; the pricing page shows credits, not dollars, to fetchers
• −Credits expire at the end of the term and purchased extras expire sooner
• −AI-provider steps consume more than one credit, making agent-heavy scenarios hard to budget
• −No self-hosted option

Zapier

Zapier is still the default when the job is 'connect these two SaaS tools and stop thinking about it': the app catalogue is the moat, and Copilot cuts setup time further for people who would never write a webhook. The cost model punishes volume — tasks are counted per step, overage on monthly plans is 2.5× — so once an automation runs thousands of times a day, Make or self-hosted n8n gets cheaper fast, and the AI Agents are a separately billed add-on rather than part of the plan.

Pros

• +More than 9,000 app integrations, the widest catalogue in the category
• +Copilot builds a multi-step Zap from a description, so setup needs no documentation reading
• +Free plan runs real two-step automations, not a time-limited trial
• +Published prices for every tier short of Enterprise, including the overage multipliers

Cons

• −Tasks are counted per step, so a five-step Zap burns five tasks per run
• −Overage costs 2.5× the base rate on monthly plans
• −Agents and Chatbots are add-ons with their own bills
• −Multi-step Zaps need a paid plan

Is Make cheaper than Zapier?

Zapier starts at $19.99/mo. Make has a free tier; what its paid plans cost is not confirmed by us yet.

Does Make or Zapier have a free tier?

Both: Make has a free tier, and Zapier has a free tier.

Which has a public API, Make or Zapier?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.