What Actually Breaks When You Switch from Zapier to Make

1. Variable handling differences that quietly destroy multi-step flows

One of the things that hit me fast when rebuilding a 9-step Zap into Make — same workflow, different world — was how differently variables get passed around. In Zapier, you sort of just… reference stuff by label. It’s like carrying coffee by the lid and hoping it stays sealed. Not ideal, but it kind of works most days.

In Make, on the other hand, variables behave like sites with strict ID badges. Everything’s nested and property-keyed and context-sensitive, and you can mess it up just by thinking in the wrong format. For example, a field in Zapier that just said “Customer Email from Trigger” becomes {{1.email}} in Make — but only if the previous module was exactly set up to expose email at the root. Otherwise, it’s buried a few layers deep, and you’ll accidentally pass null or the string “[Object]” if you click the wrong suggestion.

I once watched a Make flow pass customer data to Airtable as actual HTML for the object structure. Not even the field I mapped. Just raw serialization. Took half an hour of digging through Execution History and JavaScript run modules before I figured out it was because I dropped an unparsed output from a Google Docs module.

On the plus side, once I stopped trusting Make’s suggestion dropdown and started clicking “Switch to formula” full-time, the consistency was great. Zapier never gave me that control — mostly because it assumes context, which works until it really doesn’t.

2. Real-time error handling actually works better in Make except when it stalls

The UI in Make gives you this almost intoxicating sense of control. Seeing modules turn green or red in real time? Wonderful. Until it freezes because a webhook fired but nothing consumed it. You sit there watching the little spinning loader and… nothing.

Zapier isn’t perfect, but at least when a Zap fails, it tells you clearly — often with red text, a timestamp, and a replay button. Make sometimes just hangs, especially in multi-route paths. There’s no visual clue unless you dig into each branch’s execution separately. I had a six-route scenario just stop halfway for no logged reason. No error. Each route showed one or two modules ran. That was it.

If a webhook comes in and no module is configured as the first step, Make just shrugs. You won’t see an error. You’ll just wait forever.

But — and it’s a big but — the ability to retry just the failed module in Make? Game-changing. Zapier forces you toReplay the whole thing, which means you can accidentally double-send emails or edits if the early steps aren’t idempotent (and let’s be honest, most of ours aren’t).

3. Team collaboration works fine until folders start lying to you

I should have known better than to try to share a private Make scenario through a shared folder. I assumed “move to shared folder” would make the scenario visible to the team. Instead, it just… moved the icon. Not the access.

So our designer tried to edit something I swore was shared, and the UI calmly told them the object didn’t exist. Meanwhile, it showed up on my dashboard perfectly fine. Turned out I needed to explicitly click into Scenario Settings > Permissions and manually assign team roles. That doesn’t happen automatically with the folder move. There’s nothing in the UI telling you that.

I actually found a support thread on this on Make’s community site, with a staff member quietly saying, “Yes, moving to shared folders does not share permissions.” Classic platform trap.

Zapier’s Teams structure is definitely more limited (you basically get folders and billing roles), but at least it’s predictable. If you put a Zap in a shared folder, other org members can open and edit it. With Make, the first week I basically played role-based roulette.

4. Database support goes way deeper in Make but breaks if field types mismatch

One of my longer rebuilds was a CRM-to-Airtable automation that originally ran in Zapier. When I recreated it in Make, I gained control over record-level updates and multi-input mapping — but it instantly broke when Airtable changed a single field from “single line text” to “single select.”

Zapier just skips the update and logs an error if the data type doesn’t match. With Make, it tried to convert the text into a dropdown choice, failed silently, and returned a 200 OK anyway. The record updated, but half the fields were missing — and there was no red flag in the execution log to indicate the issue.

Some modules in Make count a failed field as a partial success. Zapier doesn’t. That’ll mess with your tracking logic.

Eventually, I learned to wrap critical Airtable update modules inside a router with conditional checking, comparing the list of current field options to the value being passed. Clunky, but necessary.

The win? I could update linked records and create nested records in one execution on Make. Zapier still makes you chain that stuff, and you burn tasks like matches during a blackout.

5. Pricing models fake you out unless you monitor module depth

Zapier’s pricing is straightforward until it isn’t. Tasks-per-month sounds simple, but any filter, formatter, lookup, or delay? They all count. So your five-step flow is suddenly 12 tasks deep. And then you hit the plan cap mid-month with no warning because those utilities stacked up invisibly.

Make uses an “operations” model — one execution per module. That sounds more granular, but honestly, it can be cheaper if you’re chaining big logic trees together. For one workflow with three routers, I was running almost 40 operations per execution without realizing it at first. Then I split it into two scenarios, and my usage dropped by a third.

Here’s a nasty edge case: Make sometimes re-runs earlier modules if one downstream branch fails, unless your error handler is properly scoped. That means retries can double your usage quietly in the background, especially if you’re using Repeater or Iterator modules. I had a date-based iterator run off last month’s calendar instead of this month’s due to a timezone shift mid-run, and it spun through 31 repetitions automatically — two weeks ahead of schedule.

There’s no budget safety net on Make yet. If your scenario accidentally loops, you just get a huge number and a sad invoice.

6. Trigger timing is predictable in Zapier until Zap sharing resets IDs

I thought I was crazy for weeks wondering why shared Zaps fire differently depending on who owns them. Turns out Zapier assigns unique IDs per user-saved version, even if it’s technically copied and pasted through folders. So a “New Airtable Record” trigger might pull updates based on your last copy date, not the original creator’s.

I only learned this after duplicating a team Zap, tweaking a lookup step, and noticing that none of the newer Airtable records were triggering. The duplication preserved filters but broke the polling cursor. The Zap looked fine. It just stopped triggering because its internal cursor got stuck in 2023.

Make’s triggers are real-time or webhook-based, so this doesn’t happen quite the same way — but if you use an instant webhook connected to something flaky (like Mailparser), and the request comes in malformed, Make accepts it anyway and passes null. Then the trigger logs green… but passes an empty payload. You won’t know unless you add a logging step immediately after each webhook.

You have to treat webhooks in Make like untrusted input — they will lie to you if you don’t decode them yourself.

7. When to use Zapier over Make based on human final steps

This is something I kept circling back to: in workflows where a human still has to click one last approving button — like publishing a social post, sending payment, or locking a doc — Zapier handles the pause-and-wait chaos better.

Its Delay and Approval steps fit right into the flow without ballooning task count. It’s also better at connecting with calendar-based tools like Google Calendar, where the polling feels more reliable, probably because it’s tuned for slow-moving triggers.

Make, even with all its modules, kind of hates waiting. I’ve seen scenarios time out after exactly 40 minutes of human indecision at an approval step, especially when the webhook was holding it open. You’ll blink and the scenario’s gone red or just vanished with an empty log.

If someone needs to click a final Publish button from an email or Slack, I’m still using Zapier. But if the whole process is machine-to-machine — like spreadsheets, parsing, record creation, and sending output to an API — I’m reaching for Make without hesitation.