Zapier vs. Make.com: Which Automation Tool Takes the Crown For Business?

Let's build with Zapier and AI (100+ videos)📅 2023-08-27

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Transcript

[00:00] welcome back to Corbin AI where we do daily artificial intelligence videos for your personal and business life in today's video we're going to be answering the age-old question since the beginning of time which should you choose for your business are we going to choose zapier are we going to choose make now the answer that really varies and is contextual to what you want to do when it comes to automation now I know that might not be the best sounding answer here but in today's video here you clicked on it you want to learn what are the pros and cons of each platform

[00:30] so through my experience I'm going to give you why you would choose zapier in what context you would use zapier and do the same thing with make kind of weigh it out and at the end I'm going to give some analysis essentially of you know why I personally choose which platform I currently use and kind of go from there so without further Ado let's go ahead and jump into today's video here we're going to go ahead and start off on zapier's uh front in here so if you've never made an account this is what their new homepage looks like pretty nice I like it's a lot more minimalized and more much more clear of a message but

[01:01] from here let's go and discuss the first most important factor when it comes to choosing a platform which is going to be the plans associated with it and the pricing so if you come down here essentially we can go ahead and compare these two so let me go ahead and make this actually a side by side so it looks a little bit clearer okay so I know visually this is not the most appealing look here but let's just take it step by step here essentially of the different pricings and essentially how to go about it I went ahead and switched each one to monthly due to the fact that a lot of times when you're playing around platforms you want to go

[01:32] on the monthly plan before you would want to secure an annual contract what platform of these sizes but let's go ahead and compare the two here right off the bat as you see here both obviously will offer a free version of the platform this is great in itself because of the fact that now you can just go ahead and test yourself whether you like it or not so I went ahead and left both the links in the description down below um the make one is an affiliate link so the uh that is a disclaimer there also a real quick disclaimer here I'm not sponsored by either of these so everything you're hearing here is very unbiased but if either of these

[02:04] platforms wanted to sponsor us here go ahead and send me an email from here though um we can go ahead and dive a little further here so as you see here what you'll notice essentially is both of the free plans they'll give you access to a lot of the apps available on their platforms and I think one of the biggest selling points that zapier has compared to make is how many natively integrated apps that zapier offers right off the bat as you know or if you don't know essentially make gives a thousand uh apps that are natively integrated while zapper does 5000 but to be honest

[02:35] with you we're gonna go ahead and dive a little deeper into that a little later in this video of why that might not be too important of a factor to you because if you know how to deal with API calls and and that kind of situation you'll be able to do the exact same methods that you do on zapier on make so it might not be that big of an issue here so from here though let's go ahead and dive into their first plan for both what you see right off the bat here is we have a starter plan which costs around 29 this is going to be the cheapest paid plan they have here for make they have a

[03:08] another server plan here right so 10 59 so right off the bat you know you're getting a 66 percent difference in costs but there's a couple things to take into a note here so if you are brand new to automation the first thing you might be thinking your head is wow zapier gives you 750 tasks and make only gives you ten thousand or sorry is that because you 700 for the tasks that's not that much but make gives me ten thousand well makes operations are inflated so just think of it like two different currencies uh you know maybe this is USD and this is Zimbabwe dollars right so

[03:39] the the underlying operations found and make are inflated I don't know the actual math between the two of you know what's one task versus one one what's one task to one operation but keep that in mind when looking at operations and task um from here though as you see we have essentially uh the different features that are provided here so right off the bat what I see is a powerful feature is provided in zapier's starter plan is the ability for filters and formatters right so if you're not familiar with automations this is what's

[04:09] going to allow you to create a little bit more complex flows especially when it comes to formatting data so let's say you get an output that you know maybe has something you don't want in it now you can replace it let's say you can output that essentially what you wanted to go down a specific string or you only wanted to go down the automation you can get a filter here same thing can occur with make here as you see here we get unlimited active scenarios which is really nice this gives you the ability to really play around with a ton of different automations keeping that in mind I'm going to expand this because

[04:40] unlimited active scenarios might be pretty fundamentally fundamental to you early on if you don't want to go with the starter here because as you'll notice on the starter plan here uh if I go ahead and spread this so I'm not hiding it you'll see on the starter plan you only get access to a Max of 20 zaps that means that once you hit the you know that's 20 different automations in that context you only get access to unlimited zaps under the context that you're in a professional plan which in this in this area right here it costs around 73.50 so keep that in mind that

[05:10] might be a huge deal to you uh due the fact that you may need to do a lot of automations off the bat but you don't necessarily have the money to back it up you know right away obviously there's a reason that it's cost that much because there's a lot of other stuff you can do as every which I'll get into later in this video but keep that in mind I think that's a pretty big one especially early on because you can get bottleneck there if essentially you only have 20 automations you can make I mean this will give you an example of some context I think I don't even know the amount of Zap automations we have in our backend I

[05:40] think it's at least over 200 if not more so keep that in mind uh from here though obviously the way they associate cost is going to be uh basically off usage so you know 20 000 Ops a month and then 750 tasks a month the one thing that you know kinda is not amazing about both platforms is the fact that these tasks and operations they don't roll over so let's say in the month of June I used 500 tasks and then Elation of 250. the month of July I'm not going to get that extra 250 on the

[06:10] overall amount of tasks so keep that in mind that tasks don't roll over so what I would encourage you to do in that context is with the amount of tasks let's say you're getting to like a couple days before your automation platform expends you know resets to like new amount of operations or tasks but I encourage you to do in that context is go ahead and mess around create some automations that you're thinking of doing because when you're in you know draft phase and sandbox phase you're still expending tasks you're still expanding operations mess around see what you can do and use up those 250

[06:42] tasks maybe in the last three days because why not why not take the extra steps to maybe you know attempt an automation that you were interested in attempting burn the tasks that would have already been burned anyways when the new month started you know get a lot of value out of it from here though as you'll see you get access to mace API which is nice and then with the professional plan so one thing that zapier does that is a little different from make is that it can do things where quote-unquote gatekeeps uh certain apps and this is what they deem as premium

[07:13] apps um so in this context let's go ahead and just click this and we can kind of check them out here these are all the apps that they gatekeep now when I say gatekeep I don't mean in the sense that if you were on a lower plan you wouldn't be able to access these you would still be able to access these apps on a lore plan the only difference is is that it's not going to be as nice of an experience where essentially you know for example Shopify I would have to set up authorized authorization tokens a bunch of different stuff involved here when when I get access to it this way you know I get the nice little new blog

[07:45] entry customer account enabled so and so forth so that kind of nice UI you get access to that doesn't mean you can't access it on Lower plans it just requires a lot more complex API web plugs authorization tokens and so on from here though as you see we kind of get up here um one thing that I will point out that I really like about the make platform right off the bat is the ability to add more users on Lower plans uh which is nice in order for you to add users on zapier if I scroll down here uh

[08:16] you're gonna have to do teams and as you see the minimum amount for teams is one of three dollars a month all these other plans is under the preface here that you're an individual so these are all individual plans as you can see in the description here in order for you to add more people uh folders and so on that you can share you cannot do a team plan here now that was nice about make here is the ability to add more users at lower cost than you would see in uh zapier I mean right off the bat you can kind of see the price didn't write so

[08:48] the teams over here is 34 12 cents a month and then it's 29 just to start now there's reasons for this and we'll get into that later it isn't just like wait why would I just to choose make like they seem like the most most cost effective platform well there's a reason you're playing a premium with zapier and you know there's stuff entailed with that right so there's gonna be a lot of value you get out of paying that premium but from here I think this is the most important stuff to understand with both platforms when it comes to pricing I say you're just starting out

[09:19] do both why not they're both free sign up for both play around with both uis play around with both uh structuring and how they how they present stuff and then from there you can kind of make a decision on how you want to proceed uh when it comes to pricing but sometimes paying that premium is going to be worth it so let's go ahead and jump into the next phase of this video here where we're going to jump into both of these platforms back ends I'm going to show you the differences between these black uh these platforms backends and essentially what I really like here at web Cafe Ai and what you could possibly like as well alright so we're gonna do

[09:51] our sweetheart child here at webcaf AI which is gonna be zapier this is actually where we started as a company um and kind of give you why I think zebu can be advantageous here and then we'll jump into make and tell you why that could be possibly advantageous here so right off the bat if you are not familiar with zapier or just Automation in general this is going to be the most user-friendly platform that currently exists for automation I went ahead and just opened a new tab here real quick and just to prove my point right so the

[10:21] reason this is so user friendly is due to the fact that it has so many Integrations that are native on its platform um essentially you know you could I mean it has this really nice index directory directory where you can essentially search through apps that you would possibly want to integrate with and a lot of times I mean this can come up with apps that you're just like wow I can't believe zapier has an app for this right Apopka if you're not familiar with this is a stock trading so essentially you can access the API and trade stocks and equities with automation pretty cool stuff

[10:52] now just so I don't feel like I'm rambling here what I'm gonna do real quick is show you what I mean when I keep saying natively integrated uh so it's more clear to you if you're completely brand new to the industry or Automation in general so I'm just going to say uh test run here and if you really want to learn a lot more in depth about these platforms you can check out our channel here we do a ton of stuff when it comes to complex flows step-by-step tutorials but from here let me just show you what I mean when I say like not natively integrated so let's say I wanted to integrate an app that was uh essentially not found on zap your

[11:24] spec and as an app all right so let's go ahead and just say hypothetically YouTube wasn't natively integrated into zapier's back end therefore we would have to call upon it with custom API calls in order to do so essentially one you'd look in this director where you didn't show up um in this context let's just assume that YouTube doesn't so you would essentially search the app's name so either YouTube and then you would add API documentation now there is a chance here that the underlying app or software that you're trying to integrate doesn't have API

[11:54] documentation and that generally just means you can't do automation with it the the there is a possibility that some of these softwares and some of these apps either one have closed or private API documentation that essentially can't be accessed by outside sources or some just straight up just gatekeep it so keep that in mind not every single app you can integrate with but in this context let's go ahead and see what we can do with YouTube so when you go to API documentation you're going to go to something called references and essentially this gives us all the different abilities of what we can do on

[12:26] YouTube um so just to give you an example let's say you know we're going to playlist here and we want to update a playlist and maybe we want to upload update a playlist title or something like that so snip the title here so I mean right off the bat you're not familiar with automation at all you're like what is going on that's kind of the point of native integration right so let's just say you know uh or assume that you know just pretend this has happened right so we're gonna say new video on channel kind of continue doing that flow so

[12:57] assume that there's a new video in the channel so let's just say we're trying to do something you know assuming that we don't have access to a specific function that's not quote unquote natively integrated you know we would just do a web hook here and for example let's just do like comment list and essentially what we do is we come over here we get the HTTP request and then we'd come over to git and the reason I'm choosing gits is because of this little function here and essentially git is just receiving data so I put in the URL here and the next step what I would do essentially is come down here I'm like okay what am I trying to get here uh

[13:27] let's just come down here uh you'd get all this different information I could possibly get on top of that with API documentation seem to sometimes you can see code examples here and kind of run through this whole shabam and kind of proceed from there and essentially I put a query string parameter so let's say I'm trying to get um you know uh the string or and this is in this context we're getting a list or uh the underlying ideas associated with the comments for that specific video here it also gives you like uh the structured

[13:58] code out if you want to use that and use a custom request but point being essentially is this whole process and on top of that let me just throw this out there uh essentially another thing you would have to do is you'd have to set up an authorization token with Google Cloud's backend and essentially do authorization barrier and then provide your access token and on top of that with your access tokens they uh at least in the context of YouTube's API they will expire every hour which means you have to do a refresh token and you'd have to refresh the API token I don't

[14:29] mean to go on a tangent here the point I was just trying to prove was essentially this is why having natively integrated apps that's why apps or this white software is like zapier exists it's because of the fact of that whole shabam let's make it simple let's have it so you can just simply go to an app type in YouTube and essentially connect log in give authorization and now we can play with it that's kind of the idea of why having native integrated apps is a pretty big selling point and why is that you can

[15:00] get away with the premium when it comes to pricing but not only that there's a lot of other stuff that zapier has that make doesn't that I find is pretty pretty cool here so the first one being is tables so what tables does here and you got to understand a lot of this stuff here is beta like this stuff just came out probably like two three months ago so two four months ago and we're still working on it um you gotta understand when it comes to tables this is basically um zapier's wave uh you know having a Google Sheets or Excel sheet integrated into the back end but what makes it so

[15:31] cool is with tables you're able to do specific automations and functions within each cell uh and whatever the context may be um that's pretty cool here another one that they have that's pretty fancy here is interfaces so think of interfaces as its own way of creating a front-end for maybe a website a chat watts and essentially with interfaces you're going to be able to any action that takes any action that incurs on that web page any action that occurs throughout the process you could associate an automation with it every throughout the

[16:01] process which can be valuable in multiple ways I saw other use cases with interface where essentially the individual you could set up back-ends for your team so maybe some type of CRM that you don't want to pay for another CRM you can actually build out a CRM within interfaces you know stuff like that that's pretty valuable um you can do and get access to using zapier so knowing all this essentially we can go ahead and jump over to make and kind of see what their advantages are when it comes to this kind of stuff so I know I may be missing some stuff here go ahead and leave in the comments

[16:33] down below if you use any of these platforms and some of the advantages that you saw I'm just pointing out the ones that I was impressed by and the reason why I chose the ones I chose now one thing I want to point out before diving into the make section here is part of the reason why zapier is such an attractive Prospect so let's say hypothetically you're using zapier in the context of working with other businesses you don't want to just use it for integrating into your own backend and you're doing it to uh you know integrating automation flows for other businesses it's kind of like leaning towards that

[17:03] and what I mean by that essentially is that a lot of businesses at least from my experience are more likely to have zapier already set up in some context and then they need another automation built on top so you know a business approaches you for an automation so this is I'm only speaking with people that you know are doing this to sell to clients right so if you're a business yourself you're watching this then you can ignore this part but if a business essentially approaches you uh you know there's it's very likely that they'll already have zapier in some way or form or a more comfortable zapier

[17:34] based on everything I just described there therefore the selling point in the conversion on an automation for that business will be a lot easier to uh happen rather than let's say that business comes to you they already have zapier in your back end and you're like hey we can do the automation but we got to build it out I'll make so now you have to make a make account you gotta do you have to make logins you got to reauthorize everything on make like that's gonna be a huge barrier of entry in that context so keep that in mind that's another reason why zapier can get away with the premium is do the fact that a lot of businesses already use zapier in the back end

[18:05] um but if you're only using these automation softwares for the purpose of your backend I don't see why make couldn't be an attractive option as well due to the fact that it is pretty cost effective and you can have a lot of people on your team right off the bat which is really nice so knowing this you know right off the bat one of the biggest selling points of this platform is kind of what I described earlier you're going to get access to a lot more features uh then zapier right off the bat for cheaper but you know it's a double-edged sword so you'll get access to a lot of features

[18:35] for cheaper but the fee like you'll be limited on what you can do natively within the platform so you know toss that how you want to toss that I mean right off the bat one of the most powerful things that they give you you know right away is the ability to make unlimited flows on a very low plan uh this is pretty fundamental and pretty powerful in the context that you plan on either building out a lot for your clients or you know you really want to experiment on the possibilities when it comes to automation which I encourage everyone to do because I mean this is really cool stuff um from here though essentially what I

[19:08] meant when I said earlier uh essentially you know it only integrates with a thousand apps you know that whole Spiel um essentially you can still integrate with every single app so you could do web hooks here obviously every single app that gives you access to API documentation and proceed from there but you can still integrate with every single app there's no reason you can't it just requires a lot more work um in the sense of the reason why web hooks can seem scary or just labor

[19:39] intensive a lot of the times doesn't necessarily have to correlate with the fact that you have to learn the API documentation you have to learn how to implement you know git posts all that data passing a lot of times it just has to do the fact that every single one of those web hooks you have to add that header and the authorization token to uh pass it through that specific web hook to you know achieve a certain task and I think one of the biggest biggest reasons why having a natively integrated app compared to you just

[20:10] basically customly calling upon a bunch of API documentations from apps that aren't within make it the biggest thing and I can't stress this enough is the fact that every access token that's associated with every single company's API documentation has its own limits and ways of handling uh expiration on the access token so what I mean by that is what I'm basically trying to say here essentially is for example if I was going to do YouTube

[20:41] and I wanted to integrate YouTubes the only reason I keep bringing up YouTube is because I've been diving into their API documentation a lot lately um their Google or their author or authentication if I can speak token expires every hour so what that means is that let's say I build out an entire flow and essentially it works perfectly well guess what in two hours from now or an hour now from now I'm gonna get an error I think it's a 400 error essentially saying hey you

[21:11] don't have permission to do this because the access token expired so in that context what is that going to force me to do that would force me to essentially do a couple things so either I can set up a virtual machine where essentially I use the refresh token I execute the refresh token every single every single hour and then I send that as a web hook post that to the authorization token in my zapier flows to ensure that every single hour the access token is refreshed and essentially the zapier works or the the make works and just

[21:42] decide to know the reason that they do every hour is just for security reasons it's their way of making sure that you know no one gets access to it so you know what's the best way to always change your password if you don't want anyone to get access to it right but that's it right there that entire process would be like super labor intensive when alternatively you could just have it natively integrated so that's part of the reason why uh there's a premium on this and that's part of the reason why you know zappy is doing so well for itself and a lot of these apps are doing well for itself it's because of the fact that they'll handle that entire process where you have to keep on refreshing the

[22:13] access token you have to keep on you know refreshing the connection I mean if you ever dealt with zappy or make and you had these issues where it's like um disconnected or we don't have access anymore that is typically associated with the fact that that underlying company and however they're handling their tokens they either change them a lot or there's some type of situation there for security um that might have been a little bit of tangent let me know if you don't mind these changes in the comments but I feel like I just need to explain this kind of stuff as in depth as possible especially when it comes to choosing your platform

[22:43] because of the fact that a lot of people might be watching this video right now and be like ah you're telling me I can get teams on make and it's only 35 bucks of course I'm gonna go with make I can handle the extra API documentation I can handle the extra web books well can you because I'll tell you right now I wouldn't personally want to set up a ton of different situations where I have to keep on refreshing the access token I have to keep on you know going through that product like I personally would want to do if you want to do it go ahead I mean honestly it'd be a cool experience would be like a lot of Education I I suppose but

[23:15] it really you know you got to choose what you want to choose now that being said uh once I note on that as well with the web hooks you create I mean that's a lot of naming that's a lot of understanding okay this one was for this task this one's for this task because it isn't like the nice little UI of like new blog entry no no it's like you know send or like it's like a link essentially sending or getting and posting and all that shabam um got my thoughts so the other side note was essentially

[23:45] now saying all that if the apps that are natively integrated into make are sufficient enough to achieve what you're trying to achieve that go all four if you don't want to use tables if you don't want to use interfaces if you don't have intentions of using any other app outside of the Thousand that are provided on makes platform I don't see the downside to choosing make because I mean yeah maybe personally I don't think the UI is as you know nice looking as zapier uh beyond all that though it is a lot cheaper so it is the more more cost effective choice and obviously if it's

[24:17] more cost effective there's going to be downsides to it such as you know limitations to Native integration that random accident um but you know this is something you understand before uh tackling this kind of stuff for your company or for clients now knowing all of that that's why one big section found in uh zap or sorry make is the web hook section right because the fact that we're limited to our access we're going to get a bunch of you know web hooks we can send data through and kind of organize it like this now to be honest with you dude

[24:47] everything I just described there I would hope that in the future make would make a better UI when it comes to web hooks in the sense of like can I use folders so essentially let's say we have like a ton of web hooks that are for a specific API documentation can we make a folder where essentially we have like the 20 web Hooks and each action associated with it found within that folder that would be pretty powerful I mean that would make it so that essentially you could just customly build out the connection out this is all on the back that essentially

[25:17] the access token won't expire in an hour the access token expires an hour then I guess you in theory could go every at the end of every hour you set an alarm on your phone and you basically go back to all 20 flows and every single one of those flows you re-enter your access token that's one possible solution you just gotta do it 24 times a day um Premiere though I think that kind of goes over most of what I was trying to cover in today's video when it comes to zapier and make the benefits of each side now to leave

[25:47] it at that essentially I would say is um if you're completely new to automation choose just do both right free they're both free so might as well white they only hurt because you got to give an email but even then it's just you're giving your email unsubscribe to marketing list if you don't want to get you know spammed or you don't want to get any of the information it provides and kind of proceed from there juggle it I will say personally here at web Cafe AI we are basically backed by zapier and that has to do with a couple reasons but

[26:19] I mean overall the main reason is kind of that API situation of the access tokens and honestly on top of that it's just their user interface I like their user interface more and you know that's a lot of times when it deals with products and software to be completely transparent a lot of people even if I mean in this context there's plenty of reasons why but even if the the underlying product may be better in some ways a lot of people were going to choose the one that just looks nicer that's just life so let me know in the comments which one you are currently using or which one you want to choose let me know if I swayed

[26:50] your opinion so we don't know um if you want to get daily artificial intelligence videos make sure to subscribe below uh we do that here we provide a ton of education on these platforms so if you want to learn more of like complex and actually how to build out automations go ahead and check us out here leave a like if you got value from this video we're gonna go ahead and Link a subscription no sorry link a playlist at the end of this video where essentially we'll show you other softwares when it comes to business and artificial intelligence on we're doing

[27:21] really in-depth videos on a ton of different stuff such as bot Prez voice flow we did an in-depth video on both these automation softwares how to get AI going stuff like that but without further Ado I'll see you in the next video thanks for tuning in and yes surprise I'm an AI Avatar make sure to explore more here at web Cafe where we demystify AI for your personal and business life until next time