Make.com Review (2026): The Visual Automation Platform That Actually Earns Its Credits

Verdict

Make.com is our pick for any UK solopreneur whose Zapier bill has started to sting. The Core plan at $9/month billed annually (roughly £7) gives you 10,000 credits, unlimited active scenarios and a 1-minute scheduling interval — the same outlay buys you 750 tasks on Zapier's Professional tier. The trade-off is honest: a real learning curve, a credit system that punishes lazy polling, and a smaller app directory than Zapier's. If you can give it a Sunday afternoon, the savings compound for years.

We're not claiming we've migrated a hundred client stacks. We've read everything the named reviewers have published in the last six months, cross-checked the vendor's own pricing page, and pulled the sharpest complaints from developers running it in production.

Who should pick something else

• Total beginners who just want "new lead → Slack message" — Zapier's linear builder gets you live in 30 minutes. Make's canvas needs two to four hours of orientation before it clicks.
• Anyone whose stack is full of niche vertical SaaS — Make has 1,400+ apps; Zapier has 6,000+, and niche vertical-specific tools are more likely to have Zapier-first integrations. Check your specific stack before committing.
• Teams that want automation to "just adapt" — if you want decisions handled with less setup and fewer pricing surprises, Lindy is a softer landing.

Make.com: what reviewers and real users actually report

Make (formerly Integromat) is a visual workflow automation platform. Founded in 2012 as Integromat, they rebranded to Make in 2021, and the platform now serves over 500,000 users and connects 3,000+ apps. The vendor's own homepage now claims over 400,000 organisations across 200+ countries, which is the figure to quote if you're being conservative.

The thing that consistently separates Make from Zapier in published reviews is the canvas. Unlike Zapier's linear workflow editor, Make presents your automation as a flowchart on a canvas, making it immediately clear how data flows through your workflow. You can visually branch, merge, and loop data paths, which is genuinely useful for complex automations like lead routing, order processing, or multi-channel marketing workflows. Builts.ai put the case slightly more practically: when a scenario fails, you see exactly which module errored and why, and when you're debugging a complex flow, the canvas is faster to read than any step-by-step builder.

The reviewer consensus on pricing is settled. Builts.ai's April 2026 review states bluntly that at every level above the free tier, Make is significantly cheaper for equivalent operation volumes, and per Zapier's published pricing and Make's current rates as of April 2026, this gap hasn't narrowed over the last year. BlogRecode's writer ran both platforms side-by-side for 90 days and concluded he was saving $720 a year by switching — about £570 at current rates.

The honest grumbles, from the Capterra/G2 aggregation Gist and from developers on DEV Community:

• The autosave situation. The reviews across Capterra, G2 and various communities paint a pretty consistent picture: people love the visual builder, the 3,000+ app catalogue and the transparent credit pricing, but the friction points that come up repeatedly are the steeper learning curve than Zapier (especially around iterators and aggregators), the autosave situation has burned people more than once, and live chat support is only available on Teams and Enterprise plans.
• Iterators silently eat credits. A developer thread on DEV Community in late 2025 captured it well: "I didn't realise how fast iterators were burning through credits until I got the invoice. Feels like Make.com quietly made bulk data processing a premium feature."
• Polling triggers are a credit sinkhole. This one nearly bit us when we modelled the maths. A polling trigger set to "check every 1 minute" wakes up and burns a credit whether there's new data or not — that's 1,440 checks per day × 30 days = 43,200 credits/month from a single idle trigger, which will blow your Core plan in days. Use webhooks. Always.

The August 2025 billing change matters. On August 27, 2025, Make switched from "operations" to "credits", and AI-related features can consume credits differently from standard module runs. Developers on DEV Community report that under the old system 100 operations consumed 100 units from your quota; under the new system, 100 modules may now cost 150 to 200+ credits depending on API call complexity, data size, external services and number of records processed. Budget accordingly — and if you're a heavy iterator user, budget generously.

Pricing (verified against make.com/en/pricing, 22 June 2026)

Make bills in USD only. Cards charged in GBP will get the standard interchange rate plus whatever your bank fancies adding that week. The conversions below use the rate at the time of writing — Wise it if your bank is being precious.

A few footnotes the marketing pages bury:

• Annual billing saves around 15% or more compared to paying monthly. Zapier's own write-up on Make pricing puts Core at $12/month billed annually — that's the monthly equivalent; the $9 figure quoted by most reviewers reflects the annual upfront discount maths.
• Add-on credit packs can be purchased on top of any paid plan, but as of late 2025 these additional packs are priced at approximately 25% more per credit than the base allocation, so heavy reliance on add-ons may signal it's more economical to move to a higher tier.
• All paid plans start at 10,000 credits — the slider on Make's pricing page lets you scale to 20k, 40k, 80k and beyond at proportionally higher prices.
• Data transfer is 5 GB per 10,000 credits. Worth knowing if you're shifting big files.

Our verdict: For a UK solopreneur or small agency running multi-step workflows with any kind of branching logic, Make at roughly £7/month is the most cost-effective hosted automation platform on the market in 2026. It's not the easiest, and the credit system will catch you out at least once before you respect it. Worth the brief humiliation.

The positives:

• Visual canvas makes debugging genuinely faster than scrolling a linear list of steps
• Native modules for OpenAI (GPT-4o), Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and Azure OpenAI ship out of the box
• Built-in Data Store (key-value database) is included on all plans, including Free
• Free plan has no time limit — 1,000 credits/month forever, useful for genuine testing
• HTTP module connects to any REST API, so "unsupported" apps usually aren't

Didn't make the shortlist, and why

• Zapier — the obvious comparison. Wins on first-day simplicity and total app count (around 6,000+), but for branching flows reviewers and our own pricing maths agree Make is materially cheaper. We'll review Zapier separately on the strength of its app catalogue.
• n8n — the open-source self-hosted option. Lower per-month cost if you're happy to run your own infrastructure, but the moment you cost in a £6/month Hetzner box, the time you'll spend patching it, and the support you won't get at 11pm on a Sunday, Make's hosted offer wins for anyone who isn't already a sysadmin.
• Lindy — better for conversational, judgement-based AI workflows; weaker if you want the granular control of a visual canvas and explicit module-by-module logic.
• Zapier's own AI orchestration — bundled into paid Zapier plans now, and a legitimate reason to stay if you're already paying for Zapier. Doesn't change the underlying maths if you're starting fresh.

One last quip, because we promised one: the August 2025 switch from "operations" to "credits" is the kind of rebrand that fools precisely no one who's ever paid a phone bill in pence. The platform is still excellent. Just don't set a polling trigger to one minute and walk away for the weekend.