Make

Make was formerly known as Integromat—built by the Czech systems integrator Integrators.cz as part of their work doing integration consulting work for large Czech companies like banks. After Zapier was founded in 2011 and started to grow quickly, the team at Make realized there was a market for a end-user focused "API of APIs" and they started to pivot around this idea of no-code app automation.

The product launched in 2016, competing directly with products like Zapier and Tray.io, but aiming to position itself as a more work-focused alternative. One of the key lynchpins in that strategy is Make's wider endpoint availability—where Zapier is often limited to a few select endpoints from an app, and has indexed on quantity of integrations, Make has aimed to capture a more business-focused user base by covering a wider range of endpoints, allowing their users to build more sophisticated integrations with them.

This strategy comes with an added operational cost for Make. One of the keys to Zapier's highly capital efficient growth over the last decade has been the fact that they rarely end up building integrations themselves—they mostly rely on their 3rd-party partners to build those integrations for them. Make has a team of people adding new integrations based on user requests, which increases their costs.

Make's main competitor is fellow no-code automation and integration tool Zapier. Both companies are focused on helping "business consumers" or non-technical end users inside corporations build relatively simple automations between tools like Google Sheets, Outlook, Airtable, and so on.

Today, Zapier has a significant scale advantage on Make by way of their decade-long programmatic SEO strategy: Zapier has 5.8M backlinks to Make's 256K and approximately 5.5M monthly visits vs. Make's 104K.

For several years, Make differentiated from Zapier on the basis of being lower-cost, having a visual automation builder (as opposed to Zapier's more linear, table-based builder), and having 2x more API endpoints per app (though fewer apps overall, with Make boasting 1,600 app integrations to Zapier's 5,000+).

In August 2023, Zapier released a visual builder to go along with their more linear builder experience, but the pricing is still a point of differentiation—the core paid plan on Make is $9/month with an allowance for 10,0000 tasks per month, while on Zapier the equivalent plan costs $19/month and only allows for 750 tasks per month.

At the same time, both Zapier and Make risk being disintermediated with the rise of native integration APIs like Tray.io and Paragon, verticalized automation solutions like Alloy Automation and Parabola, and productivity platforms like Airtable and Notion building out their own integrations capabilities, all of which aim to offer a better user experience around integrations.

As a competitive defense, Zapier has the advantage that they built out the most integrations in the market, because they started years prior to companies like Make.