Zapier, Make or Power Automate: Which Platform Fits Your Ecosystem?

Zapier, Make and Power Automate all solve the same starting problem: connecting systems that do not talk to each other, without writing code. The difference between these three automation platforms is not the feature list — it is how each one counts what it bills you for, and what your company is already paying for without realising it.

That sounds like a technical detail. It is not. It decides whether the same workflow costs you $12 or $150 a month.

Three billing models dressed up as three interfaces

Zapier bills per task. Its official documentation defines a task as each action step that completes successfully. Triggers never count. Filters that stop a workflow do not count either. Nor do actions that error out. It counts what works — once per step.

Make bills per credit. Every module that runs inside a scenario consumes one credit. The underlying logic matches Zapier's: more steps, more consumption.

Power Automate does not bill by volume at all. It bills per user licence. The Premium plan costs $15 per user per month on annual billing. Execution volume does not move that number. What moves it is who runs the flow, and which systems it touches.

Three different units of measurement. Comparing headline prices without understanding them is the most common way to choose badly.

The example that settles it: 400 invoices a month

Take a concrete SME workflow. A supplier invoice arrives by email, data is extracted from the PDF, validated against the purchase order, posted to the finance system and confirmed back to the supplier. One trigger, five actions. Four hundred invoices a month.

Zapier: five actions per invoice, 2,000 tasks a month. The entry tier of the Professional plan covers 750 tasks at $19.99 a month on annual billing, according to Zapier's pricing page. That tier runs out somewhere around invoice number 150. You move up a tier, and the price moves with you.

Make: six modules per invoice, 2,400 credits a month. The Core plan includes 10,000 credits for $12 a month, per Make's pricing page. The same workflow fits four times over.

Power Automate: if every connector is standard — Outlook, SharePoint, Excel — and the team already has Microsoft 365, the additional cost can be zero. The moment one premium connector is needed, it becomes $15 per user per month.

This calculation is ours, not a vendor benchmark: we multiplied the number of billable steps by monthly volume and checked it against the tiers published in August 2026. The prices are official; the arithmetic is on show so you can redo it with your own numbers.

Notice what actually drives the cost. It is not invoice volume — it is step count. The same volume in a ten-step workflow becomes 4,000 tasks in Zapier, while remaining 400 runs on automation platforms that bill per execution regardless of complexity.

Power Automate: what is already paid for, and where that stops

This is the part most comparisons get wrong, and the one that costs decision-makers the most money.

If your company runs Microsoft 365, your users already have Power Automate rights included. Included with very specific limits, though. Microsoft's licensing documentation is explicit: the licence seeded from Microsoft 365 grants standard connectors and 6,000 requests per user per day. Premium and custom connectors are not included.

In practice, moving a file from Outlook to SharePoint costs nothing beyond what you already pay. Calling an external API, connecting to SQL Server, Salesforce or Dataverse is premium territory — and it triggers the $15 per user licence.

"Power Automate is already included" holds true right up to the day a workflow needs to touch something that is not Microsoft's. Usually that is the second workflow.

For heavier automation there is also the Process plan at $150 per bot per month, and Hosted Process at $215. Those are a different order of magnitude, and they rarely land in an SME budget by accident — they land when someone genuinely needs unattended RPA.

Zapier: fastest to build, most expensive to grow

Zapier still wins on two fronts: app catalogue and time to a first working workflow. If that niche tool you use is integrated anywhere, it is probably integrated here.

The free plan gives 100 tasks a month and exactly two steps: one trigger, one action. Wanting a filter or a second action is enough to push you off it. That is a design limit, not a volume limit.

The task counting itself is fair — you do not pay for errors or filters. The problem is not the counting, it is the multiplier. Every step you add gets multiplied by volume, every month, indefinitely.

Make: the middle ground, with a scheduling caveat

Make is visibly cheaper per operation, and the visual editor helps anyone who wants to follow the data flow without reading it as code.

Two limits that rarely show up in comparisons. The free plan allows only two active scenarios and a 15-minute minimum interval between scheduled runs — and that same minimum applies to the Core plan. Minute-level scheduling requires the Pro plan at $21 a month.

If your process tolerates a 15-minute delay, this is irrelevant. If it is a notification to a salesperson about a lead that just landed, it is not.

The second caveat: Make moved from billing operations to billing credits. Ordinary modules still cost one credit per run. But Make's native AI modules no longer carry a flat cost — they reflect actual usage. A scenario with AI in it can no longer be budgeted by counting modules alone.

When none of the three is the right answer

Three situations where the choice is not on this list.

The data cannot leave your infrastructure. All three are third-party cloud services. If you handle clinical, legal or financial data subject to internal residency rules, the conversation changes: the alternative is a platform that runs on your own server, as we covered in our article on n8n.

The workflows have many steps. Platforms that bill per execution rather than per step change the maths entirely once workflows get long. Four hundred runs are four hundred runs, whether each has five steps or twenty-five.

The process is not stable yet. None of these tools fixes a process nobody can describe end to end. Automating a confused process only makes it confused and fast. Before choosing a platform, it is worth measuring what the manual process costs today and confirming it is genuinely one of the processes worth automating.

Three questions that settle the decision

Does the company live inside Microsoft 365? Start with Power Automate, and check first whether the connectors you need are standard or premium. That answer moves the cost from zero to $15 per user.

Are the workflows short and the apps obscure? Zapier earns back its per-task price through catalogue breadth and build speed.

Is volume high and are workflows long? Make is the cheapest of the three, and it is worth comparing against automation platforms that bill per execution before you commit.

Before signing up to any plan, do a five-minute calculation: billable steps in the workflow, multiplied by monthly volume, multiplied by twelve. That is the number you are buying, not the headline price.

If you cannot estimate that volume, the problem is not the platform yet. It is the process.