Agentic Index
Make vs Zapier (2026)
Make versus Zapier is the biggest question in workflow automation, and the 2026 split is price versus polish: Make offers visual scenario building with operations based pricing from 9 dollars a month, typically far cheaper per task at volume, while Zapier connects 6,000+ apps with Zapier Agents, an MCP server, and enterprise governance from 19.99 dollars a month. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Zapier wins on connector breadth and ease; Make wins on cost at scale and visual control of complex flows. Both have real AI agent features now, so the classic tradeoffs decide it.
On the Agentic Index automation platform ranking, neither Make nor Zapier clears the bar, which asks for all five unattended run loop capabilities documented in full. Make does not document testing, debugging and optimization in full, nor human oversight and guardrails; Zapier does not document testing, debugging and optimization in full. 11 of the 26 vendors in the lane clear it. See the automation platform ranking
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Make and Zapier are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 956 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Make if
- Cost per operation at volume matters: Make is typically several times cheaper for heavy usage.
- Visual scenario building with branching, iterators, and error handlers fits complex flows.
- You are comfortable trading some polish for pricing power.
Choose Zapier if
- Maximum connector coverage (6,000+ apps) means your stack is always supported.
- Zapier Agents and MCP support give you the more developed agentic layer.
- Team adoption ease and enterprise governance justify the premium.
| At a glance | Make | Zapier |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Agent builder | Agent builder |
| Entry price | Free plan · Core $12/mo · Pro $21/mo · Teams $38/mo (monthly, 10,000 credits each) · Enterprise custom | From $19.99/mo · free tier |
| Free / trial | Free plan: up to 1,000 credits a month with no time limit, 2 active scenarios, a 15-minute minimum interval and a 5-minute maximum run time. | Free tier |
| Pricing confidence | public partial | public partial |
| Feature | M Make |
Z Zapier |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Full / Explicit
Agent tools are modules, whole scenarios, MCP server tools and other agents, drawn from the same app catalog as Make's automations and grouped with MCP toolboxes. |
Full / Explicit
A catalog of 9,000+ apps, with 66,000+ triggers and actions exposed through Zapier MCP, is granted to each agent as named apps and actions that administrators can restrict per team. |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
Full / Explicit
Agents call other agents, scenarios and modules as tools inside scenarios that route, branch and handle errors. |
Full / Explicit
Agents delegate work to each other, run as steps inside Zap workflows with deterministic steps around them, and keep version history on their instructions. |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
Full / Explicit
Agents start from chat, Slack, Telegram, email, form and webhook triggers or run on a schedule. |
Full / Explicit
Agents start on demand, on a schedule, from a Zap or from another app's trigger across the catalog, and the Chrome extension invokes them from any browser tab. |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
Full / Explicit
Knowledge files are chunked and vectorized into a retrieval store that returns only the relevant chunks per request, managed at organization level and deleted after 180 days without a query. |
Full / Explicit
Knowledge sources are a maintained index over uploaded files and connected apps, resynced every 24 hours and within an hour of new records, with up to 75,000 records. |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
Partial
A Conversation ID keeps a user's interactions in one thread across runs, but no scope beyond the thread, retention or delete path is documented. |
No / Not documented
No first-party page documents agent memory or state retained across runs; agents draw context from knowledge sources, and Zapier states they may behave differently between runs. |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Partial
Builders limit which modules, scenarios and MCP tools an agent may call, but no step where a person approves an agent action is documented. |
Full / Explicit
A Needs action state pauses an agent at decision points the builder specifies, and administrators restrict apps and individual actions per team. |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Full / Explicit
ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 audits, with a public SOC 3 report, sit beside own-SSO on Enterprise, role and team management and VPN-only hosting access. |
Full / Explicit
SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 are audited annually, beside SAML SSO and SCIM, app and action restrictions, audit trails with log streaming and automatic model training opt out for Enterprise. |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Full / Explicit
Each agent run returns its execution steps, token usage and a Reasoning tab, inside scenarios that keep the platform's run records. |
Full / Explicit
Every execution and connection is logged with streaming to existing monitoring tools, each agent keeps a full task history, and every MCP action is recorded in History. |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Partial
Downloadable on-prem agents (beta) run an execution component on the customer's own Windows or Linux servers, while the platform itself stays in Make's AWS cloud with no region choice. |
No / Not documented
Zapier runs only on AWS in the United States with no region choice, and VPC Peering connects Zapier's cloud to private data sources rather than deploying Zapier into the customer's network. |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
Full / Explicit
The AI Agents Library offers ready-made agents such as Account Researcher, Lead Qualification and Competitor Price Monitor as starting points. |
Full / Explicit
About a hundred ready made agent templates, from lead enrichment to a GitHub PR auto reviewer, are listed in the agent templates hub. |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
Full / Explicit
Agents connect to OpenAI, Gemini or Anthropic Claude, or to Make's own provider with no provider account needed, and paid plans add custom provider connections. |
Full / Explicit
Builders pick standard, advanced or premium model tiers or bring their own provider account, and AI model policies sit among the governance controls. |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit
The Make MCP server lets clients such as Claude and ChatGPT run scenarios and manage the account, with toolboxes to limit what is exposed, and the Developer Hub documents the API and custom apps. |
Full / Explicit
The Workflow API creates and lists Zaps over OAuth and a Zapier SDK is documented, while Zapier MCP exposes 66,000+ triggers and actions to outside AI clients. |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
Partial
Reasoning views, an error handling tree and output bundles support debugging, but no evaluation, scoring, test dataset or regression surface is documented. |
Partial
A test panel, instruction version control and task history support iteration, but no scoring, test cases or regression runs measure one agent version against another. |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
No / Not documented
Agents act only through modules, scenarios, MCP tools and other agents, and web content arrives through app modules and HTTP requests rather than a browser the agent drives. |
No / Not documented
Web browsing here means search over HTTP, and the Chrome extension invokes Zapier's API-backed actions from a browser tab, so the agent never operates a rendered interface. |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | M Make |
Z Zapier |
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free plan · Core $12/mo · Pro $21/mo · Teams $38/mo (monthly, 10,000 credits each) · Enterprise custom | From $19.99/mo · free tier |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, partial | Public, partial |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
credits | tasks |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | High variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tier
|
Free tierTrial
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Mixed |
Make has been owned by Celonis since its Integromat era acquisition; it operates as a standalone product within the Celonis portfolio.
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