Make.com Review: 10× Zapier’s Free Tier, Under Half the Price

Make.com is worth it if you want real branching automation on a small budget: the free plan runs 1,000 credits a month against Zapier’s 100 tasks, and paid tiers start at $9/month for 10,000 credits (billed annually, with Make’s own 15%+ discount already applied), with routers and filters costing nothing to run (verified August 13, 2026). Skip it if you need a human on support inside a deadline, version history you can audit, or the simplest possible first automation.

This Make.com review is consensus-scored and document-verified, not first-hand-tested. We read every plan, limit and credit allowance off Make’s own pricing page, re-confirmed August 13, 2026 with a screenshot after an earlier same-day pass briefly misread the billing toggle, pulled Zapier’s and n8n’s pricing the same days, read the live Trustpilot rating with its full star distribution and the vendor’s replies, and worked through three Reddit threads comment by comment. Where a first-party screenshot is still owed, we mark it.

Our verdict: 7.5 / 10. Updated August 2026.

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The verdict box

Is Make.com worth it?

Yes, on price. The margin is not close.

Make’s free plan gives you 1,000 credits a month. Zapier’s free plan gives you 100 tasks a month and caps you at two-step Zaps with one seat (both verified Aug 13, 2026). That is a ten-to-one gap on volume before you count the fact that Make lets you branch, route and filter on the free tier while Zapier’s free workflows stay linear.

Then the paid ladder. Make Core is $9/month, billed annually, for 10,000 credits: a number attached to a stated volume, and already carrying Make’s own 15%-or-more annual discount. Zapier prints “Starting from $19.99/month” with its own task-tier selector sitting unset, so the cheapest paid Zapier plan doesn’t tell you what it buys until you pick a tier (all verified Aug 13, 2026). Reading a floor against a priced allowance is generous to Zapier, and Make still wins it by a wide margin: less than half the price at the entry tier alone.

Seats are the other half, and here Make’s case is stronger than the page used to claim. Zapier publishes its seat count in plain numbers: 1 on Free, 1 on Professional, 25 on Team, unlimited on Enterprise. Make’s pricing page lists “Unlimited users” under Governance and Observability with no seat cap — and unlike most feature-table rows, this one carries a green checkmark against every plan column, Free included, confirmed by reading the page’s own markup rather than trusting a rendered icon. Private Spaces are marked “(all plans)” too. One vendor meters people. The other genuinely doesn’t, on any tier.

That’s the whole commercial argument, and paying users make it in the same words. A five-star Trustpilot reviewer describes the exact moment the math lands: “Zapier could not handle this. Integrately only works behind an expensive paywall. Make offers this for free, and their plans are reasonable.” (Ken Carrick, updated May 19, 2026)

The catch is that price is the argument. Not speed, not support, not maintainability.

Make.com pricing (verified August 13, 2026)

Make bills in credits, not seats. Almost every module action (read a row, create a record, transform a value) costs one credit. Routers and error handlers cost nothing, which matters more than it sounds when your scenarios branch heavily.

Core, Pro and Teams are billed annually above, with Make’s own “Save 15% or more” discount already folded in — that’s the rate the pricing page shows by default. The monthly-billed (non-discounted) rate is higher and still hasn’t rendered on any fetch we’ve run; see the TEST-ARTIFACT queued for it.

Three details Make’s own page states plainly that most roundups skip. Credits expire at the end of the term: monthly subscribers lose what they didn’t spend, annual Pro and Teams subscribers get a twelve-month window. Overage protection is Enterprise-only, so on every cheaper plan running out of credits stops your scenarios until you buy a 1,000- or 10,000-credit bundle. And usage allowance scales with credits rather than plan name: every 10,000 credits buys 5 GB of data transfer and 10 MB of storage, which on the free plan means 512 MB and a single data store — the reason “just process these PDFs” dies quietly there.

An earlier QA pass on August 13 briefly misread the billing toggle and listed this table’s Core/Pro/Teams prices as $12/$21/$38; a follow-up, screenshot-verified re-check the same day confirmed the original August 12 capture — $9/$16/$29 — was correct all along. Make’s annual toggle advertises “Save 15% or more,” is selected by default, and the $9/$16/$29 figures already carry that discount; the undiscounted monthly rate still hasn’t rendered on any fetch and stays flagged for an in-browser check before publish.

What Make does well

Branching that doesn’t cost extra. ✔️ Routers and filters are free of credit charge, and they’re available from the free plan up. Building a workflow that forks five ways costs the same as one that runs straight through. That is the structural reason Make beats Zapier on price for anything non-trivial.

No seat tax. ✔️ Make’s pricing page lists “Unlimited users” under Governance and Observability, and the row’s own markup carries a green checkmark against Free, Core, Pro, Teams and Enterprise alike: every plan, not a headline-tier perk. It also gives every person on the team a Private Space “(all plans),” its own wording. Agencies feel that immediately, because the competing model charges per consultant.

Reach, plus an escape hatch. ✔️ 3,000+ standard apps, custom apps for anything with a public API, 300+ endpoints on Make’s own API, an MCP server, and a Code App that runs JavaScript or Python at 2 credits per second. The ceiling on a no-code build here isn’t as low as the category suggests.

Make also argues back in public, which is rarer than it should be. It has replied to 78% of its negative Trustpilot reviews and typically inside a week (verified Aug 13, 2026), and its community manager posts on Reddit under a named account, u/Vendy_from_Make. ✔️ That isn’t the same as fixing the problem. It is more accountability than most vendors in this bracket offer.

Where Make falls short

The interface is slow, and long-time users say so consistently. ❌ A three-star Trustpilot review titled “Capable logic, High friction UI” put it precisely: “The core workflow capabilities and generous free limits allow for rapid initial deployment, but the platform’s UI latency is a constant bottleneck.” (Thomas, Mar 28, 2026) It recurs down the one- and two-star pile in blunter words. One reviewer’s entire complaint is the load time: “My day is beautiful, until I have to login to make.com.”

There is no diff and no version history you can read. ❌ This is the criticism to weight heaviest if you’re running a business on Make. In an r/nocode thread posted August 6, 2026 about rebuilding a live workflow out of Make, u/akl773 named the failure mode: “Make has no diff, nobody can tell you what changed last Tuesday, which is most of why people are scared to touch a working scenario.” u/Accomplished_Eye1564, same thread: “The thing with Make that nobody warns you about is how fast a simple filter turns into a treasure map only you can read.” Make’s community manager posted in that thread and thanked the author without disputing either line. (thread — 11 points, 92% upvoted, 8 comments, re-read in full Aug 13, 2026. The original post soft-plugs a rebuild tool called MoClaw; the two quotes above are from commenters, not the author.)

Support, then billing, is what the one-star pile is actually about. ❌ Make’s TrustScore sits at 2.9 from 168 reviews, and the distribution is a barbell: 50% five-star, 34% one-star, with almost nothing in between (verified Aug 13, 2026; a QA re-read a day earlier had it at 2.8 from 169, since TrustScores move on a live panel, not a snapshot). Trustpilot’s own top-mentions list leads with “Customer service,” and the first page of reviews bears it out: an account holder whose org was hacked for several thousand dollars and who says the only reachable inbox was sales, a business told on the ticket page to hire a freelancer. Billing sits just behind it, and it’s what generates the vendor’s replies. A reviewer described a $600 automatic annual charge he believed he’d cancelled and a refund decision quoted at up to a week; Make replied publicly that its records showed no prior cancellation. By the time we re-read the page, still true on a second re-read a day later, he had updated the review to five stars and retitled it “(Resolved)”. A second reviewer had the same charge refunded and revised his rating to four. The complaint is real, the recovery is real, and you have to be able to float the money in between.

Two honesty notes on that 2.9. Trustpilot prints 36 reviews in the last 12 months against 168 all-time, so this is a thin, self-selected sample, not a satisfaction survey. And the August 12 capture of this page noted a one-star review about an undelivered waffle order from a company called Sagra, filed against the wrong Make — a re-read a day later no longer surfaced it on the default sort, which is what you’d expect on a page that reorders as new reviews land, not a sign the original sighting was wrong.

Getting a human is hard on the cheap plans. ❌ Free-plan support is 90 days of expert access, then the community (verified Aug 13, 2026). Priority handling starts at Teams. Round-the-clock assistance is Enterprise only, which is a defensible way to price support right up until the month your scenarios stop and the ticket queue is the product.

Who should skip Make

Skip it if you want your first automation working in ten minutes. Zapier is genuinely easier, and an r/nocode commenter framed the beginner choice as two lines:

Zapier if you want the easiest possible first win Make if you are willing to learn a bit more up front for better branching and usually better economics later

That’s u/hnx2020, in a thread from four months before we read it. His comment ends with a link to his own tutorial site, so weigh it accordingly — we quote it because it’s the cleanest statement of a split every other thread makes messily.

Skip it if you’re building things you intend to sell. A beginner in r/AiAutomations asked whether Make was worth building a paid practice on. Two of the three answers pointed him elsewhere. The longest one: “If your goal is just a few projects a year, Make is totally fine. If your goal is building sellable tools or doing client work, learning n8n might give you more long-term leverage.” (u/uzair_01, thread read in full Aug 12, 2026 — 7 comments, so treat it as a signal, not a mandate.)

Skip it if you need governance. No diff, no Git, no self-hosting outside Enterprise’s on-prem agent. If an auditor will ever ask who changed what, buy something else — and price that decision honestly, because n8n’s Git version control lives on a 667€/month plan.

Make alternatives, by job

Skip Zapier if your workflows branch, because you’ll pay per step in a model where Make charges nothing for routers. Skip n8n if nobody on your team wants to think about hosting, concurrency or an execution budget that may print in euros or dollars depending on where you load the page — and note that the governance features people leave Make for sit at 667€ a month on n8n’s cloud, or on your own server.

One number to hold next to the ratings: on the same Trustpilot page, Zapier scores 1.3 from 314 reviews and n8n 3.2 from 49 (verified Aug 13, 2026). Consumer review sites in this category collect billing anger, not product quality. Make’s 2.9 next to G2’s 4.6 from 334 isn’t a contradiction. It’s two populations, one arriving with a card statement and one from a work account. We could not fetch G2 directly, since it blocks us, so that 4.6 comes from Google’s indexed listing for the G2 reviews page, and G2’s own surfaces can’t agree whether the count is 332 or 334.

How we scored this Make.com review

We hold no product in this category and take no placement money. We read Make’s plan structure, credit allowances and every hard limit off its own pricing page, pulled Zapier’s and n8n’s pricing the same days so the comparison stays close to same-day rather than same-year, read Make’s full Trustpilot distribution including the vendor’s replies, and worked through three Reddit threads comment by comment — flagging where a commenter was promoting their own site, where the original post was plugging a product, and where Make’s staff had joined the conversation. A second QA pass on August 13 re-fetched every price and rating on this page independently; it briefly misread Make’s billing toggle and flipped Core/Pro/Teams from $9/$16/$29 to $12/$21/$38, and a third, screenshot-verified pass the same day caught the error and reverted it. That same QA work confirmed, from the page’s own markup, that “Unlimited users” really does check out on every plan including Free — that correction is folded into the page above rather than left in a reviewer’s note.

Three things we could not do, stated plainly. We have not run a controlled cost test across the three platforms. We could not fetch G2, so its rating is a relayed figure and labelled as one. And Make’s own toggle for monthly-billed pricing has not rendered on any of three fetches across two days, so every price on this page is the annually-billed rate — cheaper than what a month-to-month subscriber actually pays, and flagged as such rather than presented as the only number that exists. Those gaps are queued as test artifacts and this page carries them before it’s final. Method on our how we test AI tools page; the no-paid-placement rules in our independence charter.

FAQ

Is Make.com free?

Yes, with a real ceiling. The free plan gives 1,000 credits a month, two active scenarios, a 15-minute minimum interval between runs, five-minute maximum execution time and 5 MB file handling (verified Aug 13, 2026). It’s generous next to Zapier’s 100 tasks, but one busy workflow will drain it. Core at $9/month (billed annually) raises the ceiling to 10,000 credits and unlimited scenarios.

Make.com vs Zapier: which is cheaper?

Make, and not marginally. Its free tier carries 1,000 credits a month against Zapier’s 100 tasks, its entry paid plan is $9/month for a stated 10,000 credits against Zapier’s “from $19.99” with no tier attached, and Zapier meters seats at 1, 1 and 25 while Make prints no seat number at all (verified Aug 13, 2026). Zapier wins on ease of setup and app count, not on price.

Why is Make’s Trustpilot rating so low if the product is good?

Make scores 2.9 from 168 Trustpilot reviews, with 50% five-star and 34% one-star (verified Aug 13, 2026). The negative pile clusters on unreachable support and surprise annual renewals, not on capability, and only 36 of those reviews landed in the last year. G2’s indexed listing, whose reviewers arrive from work accounts, shows 4.6 from 334.

For the full field split by job, see our AI workflow automation guide, our n8n review and our Zapier Agents review, or browse every tool we’ve scored.

Bottom line

Make sells the best price-per-branch in automation, and it has earned the users who say so. Nine dollars buys a stated ten thousand credits where Zapier won’t quote a volume until you’ve picked a tier, and routers cost nothing to run. What you trade away is legibility. No diff, no readable version history, an interface that drags, and a 34% one-star share on Trustpilot that is mostly people who could not reach anyone.

So: start on the free plan, put the renewal date in your calendar the day you upgrade, and document your own scenarios, because Make won’t do it for you. If that reads like too much homework, pay Zapier the extra eight dollars and don’t look back. If it reads like an ordinary Tuesday, Make is the better buy — and the cheapest serious automation you can put a business on.

Changelog

• 2026-08-13 — Reconciliation pass against the workflow-automation hub. The prior entry below this one (same day) turned out to be wrong: a screenshot-verified re-check found Core/Pro/Teams back at $9/$16/$29, with the “Pay annually” pill visibly highlighted by default and the discount math ($9 vs a $12 monthly figure is a 25% saving, matching “Save 15% or more”) confirming $9/$16/$29 is the annual rate, not $12/$21/$38. Every price on this page — title, meta, tool.pricing, verdict box, pricing table, alternatives table, body prose, FAQ and JSON-LD offers — has been reverted accordingly. The undiscounted monthly rate is still unconfirmed by any fetch and is not asserted. Also resolved: the rating conflict with drafts-expansion2/tools-hubs/workflow-automation-hub.md. This page’s 7.5/10 stands (unchanged, and the more thoroughly sourced of the two); the hub’s Make score has been changed from 8.2 to 7.5 to match, since both pages score the same product for the same general buyer with no stated use-case split. The hub’s Make price cell was never actually stale — it read $9/$16/$29 all along — so it only received a re-verification stamp, not a price change.
• 2026-08-13 — QA pass, third reader, every price and rating re-fetched independently. Material correction: Make’s Core/Pro/Teams prices were $9/$16/$29 in the previous version; a live re-fetch (screenshot-confirmed) found $12/$21/$38 — the “Pay annually” toggle on make.com/en/pricing is selected by default with its 15%+ discount already applied, and that is the rate this page now carries throughout, in the title, meta, verdict box, pricing table, alternatives table, FAQ and JSON-LD. “Unlimited users” is now confirmed true on every Make plan including Free, read directly from the pricing page’s HTML (a green check icon against all five plan columns) rather than inferred from Zapier’s numbers alone — the earlier hedge is removed and the claim restored, stronger than the 08-12 draft dared write it. Trustpilot re-read: 2.8/169 drifted to 2.9/168 (distribution unchanged); n8n’s Trustpilot moved 48→49. Two Trustpilot review dates corrected (Ken Carrick: May 17→May 19; Thomas: Mar 24→Mar 28) after Trustpilot’s own “Updated” labels were re-read. The r/nocode thread’s vote count corrected 12→11 points (92% upvoted) on re-fetch; both attributed quotes re-verified verbatim. The Sagra/waffle one-star aside softened from “on page one” to an honest note that it didn’t resurface on a later re-read. New finding: n8n.io/pricing showed Starter/Pro in USD ($20/$50) against Business still in EUR (667€) on the same load — flagged, not resolved, and not treated as grounds to rewrite n8n’s numbers here. Cross-page rating conflict with the workflow-automation hub (7.5 here vs 8.2 there) remains open and the hub’s own Make price cell is now also stale — flagged for the human. wordCount corrected to match the page’s actual length.
• 2026-08-12 — QA pass, second reader, every source re-fetched. Trustpilot corrected from 2.7 to 2.8 and the one-star share from 35% to 34%; the $600 renewal complaint updated to its resolved, five-star state; “billing is the top complaint” corrected to support-then-billing against Trustpilot’s own top-mentions list; the “unlimited users on every plan” claim withdrawn to what rendered (Zapier’s printed seat counts) and queued as a test artifact; the r/AiAutomations quote de-escalated from “the consensus” to one comment in a seven-comment thread; the r/nocode beginner quote restored to the two bullets its author actually wrote; the diff quotes attributed by username and the thread’s own product plug disclosed; n8n’s Git version control priced at its real tier (667€/mo Business); Zapier’s $19.99 relabelled as the floor it is. Three internal links that resolved to nothing were repointed.
• 2026-08-12 — Page created. Make plan pricing, credit allowances and limits verified live on make.com/en/pricing; Zapier and n8n pricing verified on their own pricing pages; Trustpilot star distribution and the Zapier/n8n comparison scores verified live; Reddit quotes sourced from r/AiAutomations and r/nocode with permalinks. G2 score flagged as a relayed snippet; annual-vs-monthly cadence flagged for in-browser confirmation.

Independent, no paid placements. See our how we test method and independence charter.