I build business automation daily on all three of these, so this isn’t a fan comparison — it’s where each option actually wins, and the failure mode of each that the marketing pages skip.
Zapier: fastest to working, priciest at scale
Zapier’s strength is real: 7,000+ integrations and a five-minute learning curve. A non-technical person can connect a form to a spreadsheet before lunch. The failure mode is the task-based pricing. Every step of every run is a task, and a genuinely useful automation — lead in, enrich, route, notify, log — burns five tasks per lead. Busy businesses routinely climb into hundreds per month, paying enterprise money for what is essentially plumbing.
Zapier wins when: the automations are simple, volume is low, and nobody technical is available. It’s the right first step for almost everyone.
Make: more power per dollar, more rope to hang yourself
Make (ex-Integromat) prices by operations and comes out meaningfully cheaper than Zapier at the same volume — often 3–5x cheaper for multi-step scenarios. Its visual builder handles branching, iteration, and data transformation that Zapier can’t without contortions. The cost is complexity: Make scenarios can become spaghetti that only their creator understands, and error handling takes real setup or failures pass silently.
Make wins when: workflows have real logic — conditions, loops, multiple paths — and volume makes Zapier’s pricing sting, but you’re not ready for code.
Custom automation and n8n: own the plumbing
Past a certain volume or complexity, running your own automation wins outright. Self-hosted n8n gives you Make-style visual workflows on a $10 server with effectively unlimited runs. Fully custom code (webhooks, small scripts, cron jobs) goes further — no platform limits, no per-task tax, integrations with anything that has an API, including the internal tools no platform supports.
The trade is honest: you need a developer to build it and someone to keep it healthy. That’s a one-time build cost — my setups start at $399 — against a subscription that never ends. For a business burning $200+/month on tasks, the payback is a few months.
The decision rule I give clients
Under ~$50/month in platform fees and it works? Stay put — switching costs more than it saves. Paying $150+/month or fighting platform limits? Move the heavy workflows to n8n or custom code and keep the simple ones where they are. Automating something business-critical? Custom, with real error handling and alerts — silent failures in lead routing cost more than any subscription.
The verdict
Start on Zapier, graduate to Make when logic gets real, own the plumbing when volume gets real. If you send me the workflow you’re trying to automate, I’ll tell you which tier it belongs on — including “keep your Zapier, it’s fine.”