Comparing Zapier and Make for Startup Automation Workflows

1. Interface quirks that add five clicks to every fix

I thought I’d migrated everything from Zapier to Make. It looked sleeker, I could add routers midstream without rewriting stuff — great. Then I spent almost ten minutes trying to find how to edit a webhook response. Not the trigger, not the settings — just the actual return body. Turns out, you need to scroll down, click “show advanced settings,” then deep dive into the module’s output section that’s not even visible by default. That’s… weirdly hidden for something you’d need constantly when handling APIs.

This is one of those small-but-constant drags from Make: most modules collapse their settings behind toggles that aren’t sticky. So you scroll, click, scroll again. Zapier is flatter — you get fewer configuration options per screen, but they’re more in-your-face. Which sounds annoying… until you’re switching tabs and just want to see at a glance what payload is going out. One designer got sick of this and rigged a local CSS mod just to force “expanded view by default” in Make.

The lesson: in Make, build a habit to fully open every module you revisit. Stuff hides itself if you’re not paying attention. And when stuff hides, Zaps break later in ways that don’t immediately warn you. I found out the hard way when Make excluded a fallback value because I forgot to click three menus deep and check the “Set if empty” box I’d ticked last week in Zapier without thinking.

2. Filters and routers behave differently under silent errors

Here’s the thing nobody flagged to me early: Zapier fails loudly, even when it’s annoying. Make fails… quietly. This gets weird when something breaks inside a route branch or filter. For example, I had a route in Make splitting “new lead” events by UTM source. When the record had no UTM field — just missing entirely — the route still evaluated, but did nothing and moved on. No error. No log in the failed jobs view. Just… ghosted flow.

In Zapier, the same thing throws a very visible “Missing Input” or whatever, logged with a red bar. In a weird way, that’s saved more good workflows than Make’s silence ever has. Because filtering in Make feels optional while filtering in Zapier demands answers. That changes how you design fallback paths. I now set up dummy test records in Make *before* I trust any filter logic, just to catch this oddly quiet behavior.

Also: Make’s router paths don’t short-circuit unless you explicitly prevent it. You can hit multiple routes at once unless you manually add “stop” modules. I didn’t notice until a Stripe refund email was sent four times through different routes, and one coworker genuinely asked if the startup was going bankrupt. You have to be deliberate. Make gives power with no safety rails.

3. Multi-app debugging is smoother in Zapier but slower to test

My shortest-ever Zap has four steps. My shortest-ever Make scenario has fourteen. It’s not because Make is messier — it’s just more granular. But that granularity has side effects when stuff breaks mid-chain.

Zapier will let you re-test a single task with dummy or real data pulled from the previous step. Easy. Hit “Retest and Review.” Done. In Make, once something breaks mid-scenario — let’s say in a webhook parser inside a split router — your only real way to test it is to replay the entire job. Except Make doesn’t actually store previous inputs by default unless you’re running paid plans with scenario execution memory turned on.

That means I once had to rebuild a fake payload from scratch (re-creating fifteen JSON fields) just to simulate a webhook that failed two hours earlier. I now log a copy of most raw payloads to Airtable for later recreation. Not because I like logging — but because Make makes you redo everything if you don’t preempt the test problem.

“If you want selective testing, Zapier wins. But if you want map-level control, Make forces the issue — and then hides the map until you scream.”

4. Free plans encourage terrible habits you’ll regret later

True story: I built an entire lead routing pipeline on Zapier’s free plan just to test an idea quickly. When it worked, I figured I’d port it to Make so I’d stay under quota. I forgot one thing: free Make plans don’t give you multi-user permission control, so the first time I added a coworker, they accessed everything. Including random test scenarios that pinged a CEO during a customer support test. Awkward.

Here’s where the weird cost/performance tradeoff hits:

• Zapier’s free plan lets you run low-volume but multi-step Zaps safely — you just can’t abuse frequency.
• Make’s free plan shoves you into tight operation limits fast — and its scheduler eats ops like candy.
• Zapier limits webhook access under free or lower plans more aggressively than UI suggests.
• Make doesn’t show you how many ops reruns will eat until after the fact. I blew a month quota reprocessing one failed day.

The “aha” moment for me was looking at console logs and realizing my one Make scenario, which looked trivial, was calling a formatting module nine times because of nested routers I forgot about. Every fork costs ops. You don’t see the true burn until it’s too late.

5. Collaboration in Make is granular but almost too granular

Zapier’s shared folders work like you’d expect: share the folder, they get access to all Zaps inside. Clean. But you can’t lock down steps individually. Make flips that. You invite users with roles, then assign permissions per scenario, and sometimes even per module. Sounds awesome. Until you hit the point where someone clones a scenario and suddenly nobody knows who owns what. Real quote from Slack: “Is this the real Slack hook or just a test one someone forgot to label?”

In Make, I’ve started naming modules like [DEV] Slack - temp preview just so people stop triggering it during live tests. Also, when you assign access at the team level in Make, some modules (like HTTP calls) respect those, and some don’t. There’s no universal override. When one person hits a 403 on a seemingly-safe webhook call, that’s ten minutes of digging through audit history. This is the hidden tax of flexibility.

Also worth noting: Make’s module-level comments don’t show in the overall execution logs, so unless you train your team to click into individual ops, all your warnings (“do not touch this” etc) are invisible during runtime.

6. Structured data behaves better in Make but requires more setup

If you’re working with tables, nested arrays, or APIs that return structured blobs, Make is better — no contest. You can iterate across every item in a list, extract by keys, reassemble payloads. Zapier… kind of chokes. It’ll flatten to line-by-line variables (“Line Items”) and then good luck re-looping nested data from there. I once resorted to splitting text with RegEx because Zapier gave me no other way to handle a multi-address payload.

But the better data access comes with more complexity. In Make, if your webhook returns a dynamic list of objects, you must run the scenario once to let Make guess the shape of that list. Otherwise your iterator fails because it doesn’t know what to iterate yet. Quietly. Without alerting. Again.

The workaround? I now call every new API using Postman, grab a sample response, and manually define structure in the module config instead of trusting Make to guess. It saves weird type mismatches later. Zapier never let me get that picky, but maybe that’s not always bad.

7. Webhook responses and timeouts need wildly different handling

This edge case still burns. In Make, if your scenario includes a webhook response module, the response timeout starts ticking the moment the call hits the webhook — not when the logic actually begins running. So if your execution stack is long (e.g., 3 levels deep with routers), the response often times out before it reaches the output step. What happens? Nothing. No error, no resend. Just… a client timeout and angry app on the other end.

In Zapier, the webhook response gets held until the last step completes or until it hits the hard timeout cap (I think it’s around 30 seconds). That behavior is more reliable for integrations that actually wait for responses (like Slack slash commands).

I learned about this while testing a Zapier command that returned JSON back to a custom-built dashboard. When I moved it to Make, the dashboard always reported “Service Unavailable.” Took me 40 minutes to figure out that Make had dropped the response silently — never reached the response module in time due to an unrelated delay in a search module hitting Airtable.

The fix? Always put response modules as early as possible in Make, and decouple any slow logic using a secondary webhook call. It’s duct tape — but it works.