What is Make?
Formerly Integromat, Make connects apps on a visual canvas instead of Zapier's linear step list. The canvas gets the marketing attention. The thing that actually moves the buying decision is the billing unit: Make charges per operation, not per task or per zap run. One scenario run that touches eight modules is eight operations. That sounds worse than per-task billing until you do the math on a real workflow, where it usually is not.
Where the operations model wins (and where it bites)
A task-based competitor charges per successful action regardless of internal complexity. Make charges per module execution. For a high-fan-out scenario, one trigger spraying into a dozen conditional branches, you can burn operations faster than a naive estimate. For the median ops workflow, a trigger plus a few transforms plus one or two writes, per-operation pricing comes in well under per-task at the same volume. The trap is the high-branching case; budget against your actual scenario shape, not the list price. Make's Core plan starts at $9/month for 10,000 operations; the free tier gives you 1,000/month, enough to validate a real workflow before paying.
What you actually get
- Branching, looping, error routes, and break/continue, all native rather than bolted on
- Built-in functions for parsing and reshaping data mid-flow, so you rarely drop to a code step
- Data stores: key-value state that persists across runs, which removes a class of external-database glue
- 1,800-plus connectors plus generic HTTP/webhook modules for anything not covered
- Per-scenario usage tracking via the April 2026 API v2, so you can see which scenario burns the budget
Who should pick it
Ops and mid-market teams that need Zapier-grade connectivity plus genuine control over data flow and failure handling, and that run enough volume for per-operation pricing to pay off. Teams that want the simplest possible interface and low volume are better served by Zapier. Engineering-led teams with a residency or private-network requirement should look at self-hosted n8n instead; the April 2026 Make CLI closes the code-review gap but not the hosting-model one.
Pricing
Free tier: 1,000 operations/month. Core: $9/month, 10,000 operations. Pro: $16/month, adds priority execution and custom variables. Operation cost, not connector count, is the number to model before committing.