Comparing Zapier and Make from a Builder Who Breaks Things

1. Building your first zap or scenario actually matters

If you’re just getting into automation, the first setup you do on either Zapier or Make is going to shape how you think about all of it. I didn’t realize this until I built the same Slack-to-Notion thing in both… and weirdly, those differences stuck with me.

Zapier’s builder walks you through it step-by-step, linear-style. You hit “+ Create Zap,” choose trigger, set up the app and account, the trigger tests, and you move to the next step. There’s always a green checkmark or a red error showing what’s done. It’s very hand-holdy. Which sounds good, but there’s very little room to experiment mid-flow.

Make drops you into a visual drag-and-drop canvas. It took me like 4 tries to realize that if you connect apps in the wrong direction, they’ll basically just… not run. No warning, not even a vaguely helpful tooltip. Just: nothing happens when you click Run Once. Later someone told me it was because data was flowing ‘backward’. That UI doesn’t assume linear logic — it assumes you already know what you’re doing.

Zapier makes initial success easier. Make forces you to get curious. If you want safe, start with Zapier. If you want to flail until it clicks, maybe it’s Make.

2. Real-time behavior and refresh delays across both platforms

Zapier and Make both support instant triggers — in theory. But when you’re pushing real-time data around, the cracks show.

Here’s what happened: I had a user sign up on a Webflow form, expecting instant Slack notification and Airtable record creation. I set it up in both: one as a Zap, one as a Make scenario. Webflow spits out form data via webhook. Same trigger for both setups.

On Make, the Slack message hit immediately. The Airtable module threw a 422 and retried three times before marking itself as skipped. Zapier meanwhile took about 2 minutes to fire — but it completed both the Slack and Airtable parts. Neither told me why there was a delay. No visible queue, no indicator. Just latency or retries hidden under the surface.

This is one of those moments where the interface and logic diverge sharply. Zapier treats everything as a job — with status. Make assumes success unless it sees an HTTP failure. And that difference matters when customers are watching. Latency under Zapier is often due to polling fallback; whereas Make burns retries fast unless you wrap modules in error handlers or routers. It’s not obvious until you watch it break live.

3. Data formatting quirks when sending text to different tools

This one wasted a full afternoon and made me question everything: Rich Text formatting. Specifically going from Notion to Gmail in Zapier, then from Notion to Gmail in Make.

Zapier auto-flattening versus Make’s control-ish chaos

Zapier auto-strips formatting unless you use some kind of HTML injection middleware. When I had a Notion page title like ” Welcome – New User: Abby”, the subject line of the triggered email came out as just “Welcome – New User Abby”. Emoji gone. I had to wrap the field in HTML manually using Zapier’s formatter, which still couldn’t preserve tags like <ul>.

Make, on the other hand, gives you full control — but you have to understand JSON structure deeply. The Notion module gives you a full block array, and unless you map the exact inner properties like text.content, you’ll get [object Object] in your emails. Once I realized that, I had to build this nested reference chain:
{{2.content[1].paragraph.rich_text[0].text.content}}. Yup.

The moment it clicked: I dumped the entire payload from Make into a Code module and just read it out like a detective. The string content was four levels deep. Zapier hides that complexity, Make throws you into it.

Neither tool tells you upfront what kind of data type you’re actually passing into email modules. Zapier flattens your objects. Make wants you to climb inside them with a headlamp and spelunk for keys.

4. Webhook handling quirks trigger different kinds of errors

Simple test: Send the same webhook payload to both Zapier and Make. You expect them both to parse and use it. But Zapier and Make interpret input structures very differently, especially if you’re using an automated scraper or browser plugin for form fills.

When I piped a webhook from a browser-based tool into both — with non-standard headers and a slightly malformed JSON body — Zapier silently ignored the entire payload. It said “No data found in request”. Not helpful. Turns out Zapier’s hooks require either application/json with accurate curly braces or x-www-form-urlencoded with clean key-value pairs. Anything else and you’re debugging with nothing to see.

Make, confusingly, will happily show the malformed body… and then reformat it without asking. I found this in a log:

"{ ""body_raw"": ""{\""name\"":\""Test User\"",\""email\"":no-at-symbol-com\""}" }"

But then Make parsed that botched email as valid anyway and sent it to MailerLite, which… worked. Sort of. Until someone replied to that welcome email and it bounced immediately. Their system interprets malformed fields leniently unless you validate field types manually inside each module. There’s no built-in flag for basic email format validation — just assumptions that your data is good.

Best workaround

I now run every incoming webhook through a JSON Validation module in Make before anything else — basically catching garbage early. Zapier doesn’t actually have a built-in equivalent. You can format or parse, but no structured JSON schema check exists natively.

5. Pricing threshold traps that hit you mid-workflow

This still stings. I had five automations running on a client’s free Make account, doing lightweight stuff: Calendly to Slack, Typeform to Notion, and a few Shopify alerts. They ran fine during testing. But when I turned on scheduling, nothing triggered for hours.

Apparently, Make quietly queues all your scenario executions once you hit your monthly cycle limit — even though the editor lets you build and preview without restriction. There’s no real-time warning when a limit’s been hit during execution unless you check the Usage tab manually.

Zapier, to its credit, starts throwing email warnings once you reach about 80 percent of your task limit. But what Zapier calls a “Task” (one action = one task) is very different from Make’s “Operation” (an action = possibly several operations, depending on config). The math gets hazy with routers, iterations, and conditional flows in Make.

I tripped the Make limit at around 200 form entries — even though nothing obvious showed high volume in the logs.

• Always use test data less than your monthly limit
• Manually trigger Make scenarios during high load testing
• Keep an eye on the green bubble beside “Operations” in Make
• Set up a status Slack alert when usage exceeds 75%
• Use Zapier filters aggressively to reduce task burn
• In Make, wrap routers with break-on-fail logic to avoid loops

There’s no single source on either platform that explains how billing triggers failures. You just notice that some webhook you trusted silently vanished from activity logs.

6. Collaboration and multi-user conflict scenarios hit hard

This should’ve been obvious: Zapier assumes one user per automation. Make kind of does, too — but there’s even less protection.

On a shared Make workspace, someone can rename your scenario while you’re editing it. No log. No version control. I lost about 30 minutes of work when I went to re-test a router setup, and the entire module chain beneath got replaced with a merge conflict. There’s no “last modified by” field unless you’re exporting scenario JSONs.

Zapier creates a new Zap version if you edit and publish. Meaning at least there’s rollback. But if two users open the same Zap simultaneously, the second save wins — silently overwriting the first’s edits.

I’ve had a team member paste a whole Gmail draft block into a Zap just as I was editing filters. When I tested it, the wrong email went out, because it pushed his changes underneath mine — even though we never got an alert about it.

The safest way to collaborate in either tool now? Don’t. Or at least: do it like pair programming. One person drives. One person watches. Screenshare, narrate, don’t trust autosaves.

7. Testing limits and rollback behavior in production automations

If you’re thinking about testing live data in either system: prep for surprises. Make gives you safe “Run Once” previews — but those run the actual ops. You just don’t have scheduling on. Zapier offers test-mode triggers deeper into the UI, but there’s no disabled mode once something’s on.

I once sent a real welcome gift via Zapier just by testing a filter. The filter passed, the next Gmail node fired automatically, and a customer got a handwritten card from a bot… before I even set live triggers.

In Make, a test run doesn’t auto-log unless you save the scenario first. That means you can lose output and error info unless you commit the build. I didn’t, and when a Notion node failed (“object not found”), I couldn’t scrub the logs because the scenario was still unsaved. Huge black box moment.

I now prefix all test scenarios with “zz_” and only save them once I like what I see on a dry run.

If your workflow has side-effects — like inventory updates, external API calls, or customer comms — you need play data. I used this sanitized payload last week in Make:
{"email": "test@nope.fake", "points": 42, "tags": ["dev"]}

Don’t trust built-in test buttons. They carry different meanings in every module. Gmail’s test sends a real draft. Notion’s tester might block the ID. Stripe’s might error if you’re not in dev mode. Always check live mode assumptions before clicking anything with an icon that looks like a lightning bolt.