Where each company came from
Zapier launched in 2011 out of San Francisco. Make has a different lineage: it started in Prague in 2012 as Integromat, was acquired by the process-mining company Celonis in 2020, and was renamed Make in February 2022. That history matters less for day-to-day use than for support and roadmap, Make now operates as a business unit inside a much larger enterprise company.
The actual pricing unit, compared
The unit names hide a real structural difference. A Zapier task is one action step firing once. A Make operation is roughly the same idea, one module executing, but Make's multi-step workflows are allowed even on the free plan, where Zapier's free plan restricts you to single-step Zaps entirely. That's the bigger practical gap for anyone starting out: Make lets you build and test a real multi-step workflow for free, Zapier doesn't.
Where Zapier still wins
App catalog size and polish. Zapier connects over 9,000 apps with generally deeper, more actively maintained integrations for mainstream SaaS tools. Make's catalog is smaller, and some integrations are community-built rather than officially maintained, which shows up as occasional gaps in less common apps.
Where Make usually wins
- Visual workflow builder. Make's canvas shows the full branching logic of a scenario at once; Zapier's linear step list hides branches inside collapsed paths.
- Price per unit of work. At equivalent volume, Make's credit pricing is consistently cheaper than Zapier's task pricing, largely because Make counts some multi-step logic as a single operation where Zapier would count each step.
- Free-tier usability. Covered above, multi-step on free is a real difference for evaluation.
Sources
- Make pricing, make.com
- Integromat evolves to Make, make.com
- Zapier pricing, zapier.com