Integromat changes name to Make

From Integromat to Make: the rise, rebrand, and reinvention of a no-code automation leader

In October 2020, a bootstrapped Czech startup with no outside investors and roughly $10M in annual recurring revenue sold itself to Germany's Celonis for more than $100 million (TechCrunch, 2020-10-14). Sixteen months later, that same startup — Integromat, the cult-favorite visual automation platform — rebranded itself as Make, traded a unique, unsearchable brand name for a generic English verb, and set off one of the most-debated SEO disasters in no-code history (BusinessWire, 2022-02-22; Make Canny board).

Today, in 2026, Make runs as a semi-autonomous business unit of a ~$13B Celonis, claims more than 100,000 paying customers, roughly €100M ARR, and ~350 employees under CEO Fabian Q. Veit, and is pushing hard into agentic AI with Make AI Agents and bi-directional MCP (Model Context Protocol) support (SaaSiest Ep. 200, 2025-11-11; make.com blog). It is also, still, harder to find in Google than it was when it called itself Integromat — and that matters more than anyone at the company wants to admit.

This is the full story: origins, acquisition, rebrand, current state, and how Make actually compares to Zapier in 2026. Written for practitioners by a consultancy that works in Make every day.

Origins: a bootstrapped Prague project that hid from the world for four years

The popular version of Integromat's founding has it launching in 2012 as a Zapier rival. The real story is messier and more interesting.

In October 2012, Patrik Šimek — then Lead System Architect at Mediasoft s.r.o., where he had spent three years building a billing system and online payment gateway for one of Central Europe's largest gaming platforms — left to work on a side project (Clay.earth profile). That project was an internal integration tool inside a small Prague company called Cloud Service s.r.o. The Czech-language coverage is unambiguous on this point: CzechCrunch's 2020 acquisition report states the project was "founded in 2013 and has operated without external investment or debt ever since," and the Czech Wikipedia entry, sourced to the Czech commercial register, confirms the platform "arose in 2013 in Prague as a project of the then-company Cloud Service."

The public product did not launch until May/June 2016. In Patrik Šimek's own words, from a later CzechStartups interview: "Integromat is a project whose primary purpose was to save us time, and the idea that we could turn it into a cloud integration platform came only later. The end-user experience played a significant role, and it therefore took us several years to get the feeling that it was time to show Integromat to the whole world" (CzechStartups.gov.cz).

The six co-founders — and a persistent myth

Integromat is often described in English-language coverage as having been founded by "the Šimek brothers." This is wrong. There were six co-founders, with different surnames and distinct roles, and none of them are publicly documented as siblings (Crunchbase; Lupa.cz, 2020-10-14):

• Ondřej Gazda — CEO and commercial lead (10% stake)
• Patrik Šimek — CTO, "father of the UI," widely respected open-source contributor (author of the vm2 Node.js sandbox) (10%)
• Michal Toman — Platform engineer (25%)
• Pavel Duras — CFO (20%)
• Tomáš Schel — Co-founder / investor (25%)
• Roman Bršlica — Co-founder / partner (10%)

The legal entity that would become famous was Cloud Service s.r.o., renamed to Integromat s.r.o. in October 2015, one year before the public launch.

No VC, no debt — a Czech anomaly

What made Integromat genuinely unusual inside the early-2010s Czech tech scene was not the product but the funding story. The Prague ecosystem at the time was dominated by cybersecurity (Avast and AVG together controlled ~37% of the global antivirus market before Avast acquired AVG for $1.3B in 2016), B2B SaaS (Kentico, GoodData, Apiary.io, Socialbakers), and gaming (2K Czech, Madfinger). Productboard, the other big Czech SaaS unicorn, did not exist yet — it was founded in 2014.

Integromat never raised a round. Gazda to CzechCrunch in November 2018: "We financed ourselves from our own resources, there is no external investor or loan. Before we reached the phase where we cover operating costs, we invested roughly 15 million CZK" (CzechCrunch, 2018) — about €600,000. TechCrunch confirmed the same fact at the time of the acquisition: "Integromat was launched in 2012 and has not raised any money" (TechCrunch, 2020).

Growth, once the product shipped, was steep. Roughly 4,000 users by end of 2016, 20,000 by end of 2017, nearly 100,000 by November 2018, and 375,000 users / 11,000 paying customers / ~$10M ARR at the time of the Celonis deal in October 2020 (CzechCrunch, Getlatka, TechCrunch). Gartner named Integromat a "Cool Vendor in Business Process Automation" in 2020.

Why power users loved it: the product philosophy vs. Zapier

Zapier had been founded a year earlier (2011, YC S12) and optimized from day one for non-technical users: a linear "when this, then that" flow, a wizard-style builder, a huge app catalog, and SEO-friendly templates. Integromat took the opposite bet. It targeted the technical power user who had outgrown Zapier.

The product differentiators that made Integromat a cult favorite were, concretely:

• A circular, node-graph visual canvas where modules were dots connected by lines, supporting arbitrary topologies instead of a linear flow.
• Routers that duplicated data into multiple parallel branches, each with its own filter — no practical upper limit.
• Iterators and Aggregators as first-class primitives: split an array of items into individual bundles, process each, then merge the results back into an array, a JSON payload, a text string, or a number. Zapier had no native loop construct at the time.
• Error handlers — Break, Commit, Ignore, Resume, Rollback — including a true transactional rollback on ACID-labeled modules like Data Store and MySQL. From the 2018 Crunchbase description: "Thanks to the transaction processing of data, Integromat is able to complete an entire automation as scheduled. In case of error, Integromat reverts all changes and restores the initial state."
• Built-in Data Stores (key-value persistence), a powerful HTTP module that could replace significant custom integration work, and a Custom Apps / Developer Platform that let users wrap any REST API into a reusable visual connector.
• Scheduling down to 1-minute intervals (Zapier was 5 minutes on paid plans).
• Operations-based pricing — 1,000 operations/month free, $9/month for 10,000 operations — which was meaningfully more generous than Zapier's 100 tasks/month free tier and $19.99 starting plan.

A Product Hunt reviewer summed up the reaction: "This is NOWHERE near IFTTT/Zapier. Those have super limited stripped down scenarios. This is a full blown API workflow automation tool with unlimited potential. The only thing I'm shocked about is that this hasn't been acquired already" (Product Hunt).

Gazda's own take on Zapier from 2018 is still instructive: "Zapier is our biggest competitor and at the same time a very significant channel that delivers new users to us. Their shortcomings force users to look for alternatives, and once they find us, in the vast majority of cases they stay. So we love Zapier, and I mean that seriously, without irony" (CzechCrunch, 2018).

An ecosystem built itself around the product. Creators like Gareth Pronovost (GAP Consulting) and Business Automated built entire consultancies around the Integromat + Airtable stack. A dedicated r/Integromat subreddit and an official community forum at community.integromat.com carried the content load. By 2020, Integromat had become the default recommendation whenever anyone on r/nocode asked what to use when they had hit the ceiling of Zapier.

The Celonis acquisition: October 2020 and the EMS bet

On October 14, 2020, Celonis — the Munich- and New York-based process-mining unicorn — announced that it had already closed the acquisition of Integromat (PR Newswire). The price was officially undisclosed. Celonis co-CEO Alex Rinke told TechCrunch it was "a three-digit amount of over $100 million," and Czech press converged on roughly CZK 2.3–2.5 billion (~$100–107M), split across the six co-founders per the ownership percentages above.

Deal structure was a mix of cash and shares. Gazda in Lupa.cz: "We had an offer for a complete cash sale, but Patrik Šimek and I took a combination of cash and Celonis shares, because we believe in the great potential this business has." Both Gazda and Šimek stayed; all six founders remained employed at closing.

Celonis's strategic logic: turning insights into actions

Celonis had just launched its Execution Management System (EMS) — a pitch that combined the company's core process-mining IP with an ambition to automatically fix the inefficiencies its analytics surfaced. Process mining told customers their invoice-processing cycle had a 14% exception rate; EMS was supposed to fire automations to clear the exceptions. For that vision, Celonis needed an execution layer it did not own.

Rinke's official quote: "We knew that Celonis' first EMS acquisition had to be Integromat, the leader of the red-hot online automation space. Integromat enables anybody in business to create easy, clean automations with the hundreds of systems that people all use in their jobs every day. Integromat will help our customers turn the insights from Celonis into actions that unlock execution capacity."

Martin Klenk, Celonis's CTO: "We spent years looking for a different way to automate processes across applications. It needed to be a modern, cloud-based approach that is easy to use and scalable to address the challenges customers have with traditional RPA and enterprise integration tools. The answer became clear watching so many thousands of business users rapidly adopt these new online automation systems."

Celonis was itself valued at roughly $2.5B at the time (Series C, November 2019). Eight months after the Integromat deal it would quadruple that to an $11B Series D in June 2021, then add a Qatar Investment Authority-led extension in August 2022 at approximately $13B — still its last publicly stated valuation (TechCrunch, 2021-06-02).

Why did the founders sell at all?

They had, per Gazda, turned Celonis down three times already. Patrik Šimek explained the decision in a CzechStartups interview: "There was interest from the biggest SaaS players, but we didn't consider it. We turned Celonis down a total of three times. The fourth time, they came with an offer that couldn't be refused. The fact that we were acquired by Germans, and not Americans, played a role. There are tremendous cultural differences compared to the United States and neighbouring Germany is simply closer to us in terms of temperament."

For a bootstrapped profitable company growing ~400% year-over-year, a nine-figure cash-and-equity exit to a buyer that promised to keep the product intact — and that shared a continent and a sensibility — was a defensible decision. It was also, with hindsight, the moment Integromat stopped being a Czech startup and started being a line item in a German enterprise software vendor's product portfolio.

The rebrand to Make: a self-inflicted SEO disaster

Sixteen months after the acquisition, on February 22, 2022, the company announced that Integromat would be renamed Make and migrated onto the premium domain make.com (BusinessWire; make.com announcement). The rebrand launched as a new business unit inside Celonis, with Fabian Q. Veit — formerly Celonis's COO — named Founder/CEO of Make. Gazda retained a CEO title of the product business at launch but by 2023–2024 Veit was publicly operating as the sole CEO. Patrik Šimek stayed on as CTO.

The company's own rationale, from its announcement post: "When users describe us, they use words like 'Creative', 'Community', 'Visual', 'Empowering', 'Innovation', and 'Member of my team'. But when we compared the Integromat brand with our product, our community, and our company, there was a disconnect. Put simply, we realized our users are not users: they're Makers."

Gazda's framing: "Make captures the evolution of our platform, the spirit of our customers, and reflects one of the most transformational trends of our era: from rigid, top-down, repetitive jobs to flexible, empowering, and meaningful work." It was a pitch for aspirational brand positioning in the category of Figma, Notion, Stripe, and Monday.com — premium one-word .com domains signaling scale and intent.

Make.com itself was purchased from premium domain holder Digimedia, Inc. The price was not disclosed; comparable one-word .com verb sales suggest $2–5 million. A funny detail surfaced on Indie Hackers the day of the announcement: blog post canonical URLs on the new make.com site pointed back to workapp.dev, revealing that "Workapp" had been seriously considered as the alternate brand before Make.com was secured (Indie Hackers thread).

The community revolt

The reaction from power users was swift and, in many quarters, scathing. A feature request titled "Rebrand Make back to Integromat" went up on Make's own Canny feedback board on August 3, 2022 — six months after the rebrand — and was marked "not planned" by a Make staffer fifteen months later. The thread is a compact history of the complaint (Canny):

• "It's nearly impossible to search on the internet (e.g. Google) using keyword 'make' in order to refer to make.com and not the verb make." — Filip Niko, original poster
• "Integromat was a great name. It speaks of integrations and integrity. Make is a meaningless name that should be left behind. Make is generic, ambiguous, un-trademarkable, hard to search for and hard to talk about." — Kerry Kriger
• "Also when talking about it, nobody understands that 'make' is the actual name of the tool." — Jörg Zeipelt
• "As a new user to Make, searching for help is a nightmare. I usually just search for my problem + 'zapier' to see if I can use the info I find on Make." — Jonas

That last quote is the one that should have ended the debate inside Make's marketing team. Users were literally prefixing their support searches with a competitor's name because that competitor's content was findable and Make's was not.

YouTube creators, who had built libraries of "Integromat tutorial" videos that ranked for a unique brandable term, faced a harder problem. The eventual compromise — adopted by Gareth Pronovost, Business Automated, Scaling With Systems, Nick Saraev and most other Integromat creators — was to retitle videos "Make (formerly Integromat)", preserving some of the old SEO equity at the cost of diluting authority across two distinct brand entities in Google's eyes. Four years later, that "formerly Integromat" parenthetical is still common on YouTube and blog posts, a permanent archaeological trace of the rebrand.

Why "Make" is structurally hostile to SEO

The underlying problem is linguistic, not tactical. "Integromat" is a coined portmanteau with zero lexical neighbors. Before the rebrand, every Google query for the term returned Integromat content — tutorials, the product site, Reddit threads, creator videos. There was no SERP competition because there was no other meaning of the word.

"Make" is one of the twenty-five most common verbs in English. Queries for "make tutorial," "make automation," "make workflows," or "how to make X" are swamped by unrelated content. The direct name collisions alone would be disqualifying for most brand teams:

• GNU Make — the Unix build automation tool that every developer has typed make install into — has owned the developer meaning of "make" since the 1970s.
• Make: Magazine and Make Community (makezine.com) — the long-running DIY/maker movement publication with enormous domain authority and decades of backlinks.
• The automotive use ("vehicle make") dominates another massive content vertical.
• Generic "make money," "make food," "make art" craft/DIY content floods the rest.

Make's own CEO has acknowledged this was the trade. From Fabian Veit's SaaSiest podcast appearance in November 2025: "Brand and positioning pivots: the risky shift from Integromat to Make.com, losing SEO in the short term to win a much bigger global brand in the long term" (SaaSiest Ep. 200). By the company's preferred metrics, the bet has paid off: 15× revenue growth since the rebrand, ~€100M ARR, 100k+ paying customers under the new brand.

But the short-term cost was absorbed by the ecosystem, not the company — and this is where it becomes personal.

A Business Automated case study in brand equity loss

This site, Business Automated, has been publishing Make/Integromat tutorials and consultancy deep-dives since before the rebrand. In the old world, a search for "Integromat tutorial" or "Integromat Airtable" reliably surfaced our content alongside the official docs and a handful of other creators. There was no SERP competition, because no other meaning of "Integromat" existed.

After February 2022, the same content became structurally harder to find. A search for "Make tutorial" now returns cooking, DIY, crafts, GNU Make documentation, and Make: Magazine — a random walk through the English language. Search for "Make Airtable integration" and Google hedges with a mix of make.com results, automotive listings ("make/model/year"), and blog content about "how to make an Airtable base." Posts that once ranked for "Integromat + [specific app]" had to be rewritten, retitled with the "Make (formerly Integromat)" construction, re-submitted to Search Console — and still, four years later, do not capture the same share of relevant queries they once did.

We are not alone in this. Every consultant and creator who built an audience around the Integromat term absorbed a similar tax. The content is just as good; it is simply less findable. The only thing that changed was the brand name, and with it, the searchability of everything that had ever been written about the tool. Our main Make tools hub and Make consulting service page now have to compete with a long tail of generic "make" content that would have been inconceivable under the Integromat brand.

The broader lesson is not that rebrands are bad. It is that rebranding from a unique, coined brandable term to a generic dictionary word transfers SEO risk from the company to its ecosystem of creators, partners, and power users — the very people whose content powered the original brand's discoverability in the first place. The Integromat → Make rebrand is the canonical case study for that trade-off in the no-code automation market. It belongs on a short list with WooCommerce → Woo (another frequently cited "entity migration" cautionary tale) as a reminder that brand equity is not always worth trading for brand ambition.

Where Make stands in 2026

Four years after the rebrand, Make is a more serious business than Integromat ever was. Per CEO Fabian Veit's public statements and the Make About page: over 500,000 organizations registered, 100,000+ paying customers, ~€100M ARR, roughly 350 employees, 15× revenue growth since the rebrand. The product runs on AWS across multiple EU and US regions — a migration off Integromat's original Prague-based infrastructure at Casablanca INT that was completed during the rebrand transition.

AI agents are the whole strategy now

Make's 2025 product calendar was a three-beat rollout around agentic AI:

1. Make AI Agents — Beta, April 14, 2025. Natural-language goal-driven agents embedded in scenarios, using any OpenAI-compatible LLM. At launch the company cited "more than 200,000 businesses" on the platform (Make AI Agents announcement). Head of Applied AI Sebastian Mertens and VP of Product Anton Danilov framed them as a move "beyond rule-based workflows."
2. Next-generation Visual AI Agents — announced at Waves '25 in Munich, October 16, 2025; general availability January 14, 2026. Agents now live directly on the Scenario Builder canvas, support multi-modal inputs (PDFs, images, CSVs), show visible chain-of-thought, and can be shared as reusable artifacts (next-gen Agents post).
3. Maia — previewed Oct 2025. A Copilot-style natural-language scenario builder that generates full scenarios from a chat prompt. Rolling out through 2026.

The equally important announcement is Model Context Protocol (MCP) support on both sides of the wire. Make shipped an MCP Server (spring 2025) that exposes scenarios as callable tools to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any other MCP client, using token-based auth with scoped permissions. It then shipped an MCP Client (July 16, 2025) — a scenario module that lets Make scenarios call remote MCP servers (GitHub, Webflow, PayPal, Asana) as tools. Being a bi-directional MCP citizen is a genuine architectural differentiator vs. Zapier, which ships a strong MCP server but has not shipped a comparable client. As of November 2025, Make's server defaults to Streamable HTTP transport and supports SSE as a fallback (Make MCP docs).

Other 2025 shipping highlights: Make Grid (a visual map of an organization's entire automation landscape), Make Code (inline Python/JavaScript), a new HTTP app with built-in pagination, real-time web-search inside scenarios (November 13, 2025), scenario-run replay with custom names, and new If-Else and Merge modules previewed for early 2026.

For anyone building modern AI workflows, this is the frontier Make is racing on — and it rhymes with the broader pattern we've written about in AI automation for business and the distinction between AI and classical automation.

The Operations → Credits repricing, August 2025

The most consequential non-AI change in 2025 was billing. On August 27, 2025, Make replaced its decade-old operations billing unit with a unified credits system (help.make.com). The 1:1 conversion left headline prices unchanged on standard modules, but AI modules now consume variable credits based on token usage, file size, and runtime, making costs less predictable for AI-heavy scenarios.

Pushback from power users was loud enough that Make responded on November 6, 2025 with a mid-course correction: baseline credit allowances on Core and Pro plans increased, the overage markup was unified at 25% (previously up to 30% for automatic purchase), Pro was repriced with up to 8M credits/month available, and — notably — custom AI provider connections (bring-your-own OpenAI/Anthropic keys) were opened to every paid plan, including Core, having previously been gated to Pro+. The Nov 6 adjustments were widely read as a concession to the community complaints.

Current list prices, for reference:

• Free: 1,000 credits/mo, 2 active scenarios, 15-min minimum schedule interval
• Core: from ~$9/mo annual, 10,000 credits base (scales higher)
• Pro: from ~$16/mo annual, 10,000 credits base, up to 8M/mo available; includes AI Agents
• Teams: from ~$29/mo annual; role-based permissions, shared templates
• Enterprise: custom; SSO/SCIM, audit logs, 24/7 support, dedicated AWS environment, 99.5% uptime SLA

Leadership today

Fabian Q. Veit — former COO of Celonis, math MSc from TU Munich and Sorbonne — is the public CEO of Make in 2025–2026 and has been the dominant executive voice since the rebrand. Ondřej Gazda's post-2024 title is less cleanly documented in public sources; some trackers (Tracxn, legacy About pages) still list him as CEO, but Veit is unambiguously the current public-facing chief executive per multiple podcast and conference appearances. Patrik Šimek remains CTO and is still based in Prague, still maintaining open-source projects including vm2. Other executives shaping the 2025–2026 product direction: Sebastian Mertens (Head of Applied AI), Anton Danilov (VP of Product), Darin Patterson (VP of Market Strategy), and Dan Etheridge (Head of Brand).

Celonis, the parent company: pivoting hard, laying off regularly

The parent company story is more turbulent. Celonis remains private at its last stated $13B valuation (Aug 2022 extension) — no new up-round, no confirmed IPO despite periodic rumors (CB Insights logs a "Rumored IPO" dated December 2023 that never materialized). Third-party estimates put Celonis at $1.0–1.2B in revenue/ARR in 2025, up from ~$555M in 2022, though these figures are not officially disclosed.

Celonis has executed multiple rounds of layoffs between 2022 and mid-2025, confirmed on Blind, Glassdoor, and Czech/German press. Quoting one February 2025 Glassdoor review: "Can't believe there's more layoffs. Another team just got let go. That article saying it's been 'double digit' layoffs is pretty insulting." The company's public line has been "strategic decisions regarding our team structure." Cumulative cuts across 3,700+ employees are likely in the hundreds, possibly low thousands, depending on how one counts attrition.

Strategically, Celonis has quietly retired the "Execution Management System" positioning in favor of a "Process Intelligence Platform" narrative, centered on the Process Intelligence (PI) Graph. At Celosphere in Munich, November 4–5, 2025, Celonis launched what it called "the industry's first Model Context Protocol server specifically for process intelligence" — a deliberate architectural bridge to Make's MCP work. A Make blog post dated November 25, 2025 describes Celonis itself using Make AI Agents internally to lower its annual expense-auditing costs, which is both a case study and a signal that Make-Celonis integration is finally concrete rather than aspirational.

There is no public talk of spinning off Make, no M&A rumors, and Make continues to operate with substantial autonomy from Prague under Veit. Celonis was ranked #12 on the Forbes Cloud 100 in September 2025 (up from #13 in 2024).

Community and events

Make's community concentrates in three places: the official community.make.com forum (healthy engagement, hosted AMAs with Veit in May 2025), YouTube (Gareth Pronovost, Nick Saraev, and a growing cohort of AI-automation-agency creators), and the annual Waves conference in Munich — Waves '25 drew ~750 attendees across three stages (October 15–16, 2025, Bergson Kunstkraftwerk) and was the launchpad for the next-gen Agents, Maia, and Make Grid announcements. The Solution Partner program (Platinum / Gold / Silver tiers, plus Technology Partners, Agency partners, and Affiliates) is meaningfully more mature than it was pre-rebrand, with a dedicated certification portal at partnertraining.make.com.

Operationally, Make has experienced the usual SaaS turbulence — StatusGator has logged ~1,854 reported incidents across 30 components since February 2022, including a two-hour outage on September 4, 2025 (14:37–16:35 CEST) and a one-hour gateway outage on December 19, 2025. Nothing existential, but enough that power users running production workflows often build retry and escalation patterns (which is exactly where Make's Break/Resume/Rollback handlers earn their keep).

Make vs Zapier in 2026: a practitioner's deep comparison

Both platforms evolved aggressively in 2025. Zapier rebranded itself an "AI Orchestration Platform" at ZapConnect (September 25, 2025), making Copilot, Agents, MCP, Tables, Forms, and Canvas first-class citizens. Make executed the agent rollout and MCP expansion described above. The comparison matters more, not less, than it did before — because the architectural differences now propagate into AI agent design, not just scenario building.

Pricing: the truth is "it depends on your workflow shape"

Zapier charges per task (one successful app action). Make charges per credit (every module run, since August 2025). Zapier starts paid tiers at $19.99/mo for 750 tasks (Professional). Make starts at ~$9/mo for 10,000 credits (Core). At first glance, Make looks dramatically cheaper.

The nuance is that Zapier's Filters, Paths, Formatter steps, Delays, and Sub-Zaps do not consume tasks — only app actions do. Make, by contrast, charges a credit for nearly everything that runs, including filters that return false, iterators per iteration, and polling triggers that return empty. This inverts the apparent advantage in specific cases.

Practitioner rule of thumb:

• Action-heavy, webhook-driven, linear or moderately branched workflows at scale → Make wins, often 40–60% cheaper at equivalent volume.
• Logic-heavy workflows with many filters, paths, and formatters, and polling triggers that often find nothing → Zapier wins (or ties), because the expensive parts are free.
• AI-heavy scenarios → both platforms now meter AI token usage against their respective billing units; model costs closely.

Zapier's Enterprise tier reaches ~$5,999/mo for 2M tasks; Make's Enterprise is custom. Both offer annual discounts, 14-day trials on Pro tiers, and overage billing — though Zapier's "pay-per-task overage" is more forgiving than Make's +25% credit markup on auto-purchase.

Architecture: the canvas is still the moat

Make's node-graph canvas — modules as circles, arbitrary topology, routers fanning out to 10+ parallel paths, aggregators collapsing array work back into single outputs — remains the single most durable product differentiator. Zapier has closed distance with Paths (conditional branching), Looping by Zapier (iteration), Sub-Zaps, and Zapier Canvas (2024, matured in 2025), but Canvas is a documentation/orchestration layer that sits above Zaps; under the hood Zaps still execute as linear step chains. For any workflow with more than three genuine branches, or any workflow where you need to reason visually about data flow across branches, Make is decisively better.

Power features: Make's error handling is still the gold standard

Five explicit error-handler directives — Break, Commit, Ignore, Resume, Rollback — with the ability to rollback ACID-tagged modules (Data Store, SQL connectors) to their pre-run state, and to route error handling through its own unlogged/no-credit path. Zapier offers auto-retry, error notifications, and a newer Error Handler by Zapier, plus Enterprise "intelligent throttling" and "data checkpoints," but the granular per-module semantics Make exposes are not matched.

Iterators and Aggregators in Make are first-class and elegant; Zapier's Looping is serviceable but requires external state (often Zapier Tables) to recombine results cleanly. Make's HTTP module plus Custom Apps (via developers.make.com) remains the cleanest no-code path to wrapping any REST API into a reusable visual connector — a capability that genuinely replaces meaningful chunks of custom integration work, as we demonstrated in our Frame.io API + Make + Airtable content production tutorial.

App breadth vs. depth

||Zapier|Make| |-|-|-| |Public app count (April 2026)|8,000–9,000+|~3,000| |Typical depth per app|Often shallower|Often deeper (e.g., Xero: 25 actions on Zapier vs 84 on Make)| |Custom app building|Developer Platform + Zapier CLI (versioned, git-friendly)|Make Developer Hub (JSON IML, visual)| |Enterprise apps (Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite)|Premium-tier on Pro+; broader F1000 deployment|Gated to Enterprise tier|

Zapier wins on breadth, especially long-tail SaaS. Make wins on depth per supported app. Zapier CLI is the preferred tool for any team shipping a product integration; Make Developer Hub is pleasant but less developer-rigorous.

AI: different bets, equally serious

Zapier leads on polish and distribution: Copilot on every plan (including Free), Zapier Agents (GA 2025) as an add-on with versioning/Pods/checkpoint rollback, Chatbots, Human-in-the-Loop approval steps, and AI Guardrails (PII/toxicity/prompt-injection detection). Zapier MCP exposes 30,000+ actions across 9,000+ apps and has become a de facto connector layer for Claude and ChatGPT users.

Make leads on architectural flexibility: bi-directional MCP (server and client), AI Agents that live directly on the visual canvas, BYO AI provider on every paid tier (as of Nov 2025), and a native AI Toolkit (sentiment, categorization, summarization, translation, extraction). For consultants building multi-agent systems where the agent must call deterministic workflows as tools, Make has a real edge.

Neither matches n8n — the open-source self-hostable challenger that has genuinely pressured both Make and Zapier in 2024–2025 — for code-first AI/LangChain agent construction. That is the honest segmentation.

Enterprise readiness

Both carry SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA. Neither is HIPAA-compliant — both explicitly disclaim BAAs, so healthcare PHI workloads need to look at Workato, Tray.ai, or custom builds. Zapier has broader F1000 deployment and a more polished admin/governance package (admin center, audit logs, shared app connections, domain capture, AI Guardrails). Make has stronger EU data residency posture (EU zones eu1/eu2; European corporate ownership) and dedicated AWS environments for Enterprise customers — a genuine advantage for EU-sovereignty-sensitive deployments. Neither supports on-premise or self-hosted deployment; n8n remains the answer to that question.

Learning curve and community

Zapier onboards in five minutes; Make takes a week or two to become productive and a few months to become fast. G2 gives Zapier the nod on ease of use by a wide margin, with roughly 6× more reviews. Once over the ramp, consultants consistently report being 3–5× faster in Make than Zapier on complex scenarios. Make Academy (thinkific-powered) is the better structured learning path for serious practitioners; Zapier's blog and template library is the more SEO-dominant content engine.

When each wins, plainly

Choose Zapier when: the team is non-technical; workflows are 2–6 linear steps; you need long-tail SaaS coverage; polling triggers often return empty; you want safe agent deployment to non-engineers; procurement/InfoSec needs a Fortune 1000-pedigreed vendor; you need MCP access to ~9,000 apps from Claude/ChatGPT/Cursor with minimal setup.

Choose Make when: workflows are complex, multi-branch, array-heavy, or data-transformation-heavy; you need transactional error handling; you are API-heavy and will build Custom Apps; cost matters at high volume on action-heavy workloads; you are an agency/consultancy building reusable scenarios for clients; EU data residency matters; you want bi-directional MCP so AI agents can call your deterministic business workflows as tools; you are in the Airtable-heavy content/ops ecosystem where Make has always dominated.

Choose neither when: you need HIPAA compliance, self-hosted open source (→ n8n), or a truly code-first agent framework.

Conclusion: the Integromat-to-Make arc is the story of the whole category

What looks like a corporate history — Prague bootstrap, German exit, global rebrand, AI pivot — is actually the clearest single narrative the no-code automation category has produced. Integromat won its early years by being the technically uncompromising alternative to Zapier, run by founders who never raised money and hid their product from the world for four years until they were sure the UX was right. It sold to Celonis at the exact moment process mining was trying to graduate from analytics to execution. It rebranded to a generic English verb and paid an SEO tax that was real, measurable, and absorbed mostly by its ecosystem of creators, consultants, and power users — a tax this site is still paying four years later. And it has now arrived at 2026 with a genuinely differentiated agentic-automation architecture — bi-directional MCP, BYO AI providers on every paid tier, visual AI agents on the canvas — that leans back into the original Integromat bet: the technical power user wins.

The interesting question in 2026 is no longer Make vs. Zapier. It is Make vs. n8n for the technical/agentic segment, with Zapier dominating the non-technical mainstream and both incumbents racing to stay relevant as AI agents threaten to subsume the entire category. Make's bi-directional MCP work is its most credible answer to that threat. The rebrand, in retrospect, was a bet on being able to sell that answer at enterprise scale — which requires a brand name that can stand next to Stripe and Figma at a procurement table, not one that sounds like it emerged from a 2015 Prague startup incubator.

Whether the bet was worth the SEO cost depends on who you ask. Ask Fabian Veit and he'll quote 15× revenue growth. Ask anyone who ran an "Integromat tutorial" channel in 2020 and they'll tell you they are still retitling videos. Both answers are true, which is exactly what makes this particular rebrand worth studying.

For teams deciding whether to build on Make today, the answer is: yes, if you are technical, value power, and want to ride the agentic automation wave on the most architecturally flexible platform in the mainstream no-code category. If that describes you, our Make consulting services and Make tools hub are the next click.