The 7 best Make alternatives in 2026, compared

The short answer. The strongest Make alternatives in 2026 are Zapier if you want the same visual model with a wider catalog, n8n if you want to self-host and escape per-unit metering, and Tray.ai if you need integration and AI agents governed on one platform. Workato and Microsoft Power Automate cover managed governance, Boomi suits ERP-heavy stacks, and Celigo fits NetSuite-centric teams.

Two very different groups look for Make alternatives. One wants the same thing cheaper or with more connectors. The other has had a compliance conversation. Those lead to opposite ends of this list, so it is worth being clear which one you are before you start.

Make alternatives at a glance

Microsoft, n8n, Make and Zapier pricing last checked against their published pricing pages on 18 September 2026; Make, Zapier, n8n and Boomi re-checked 8 October 2026. n8n publishes in euros. Platforms marked no published price do not publish list prices, including Tray.ai.

Make is the cheapest published entry point on this list, and the unit changed: what used to be described as operations is now metered in credits, most actions consuming one and AI-provider actions consuming more. The headline price and the bill can diverge quickly on a busy scenario.

Enterprise platforms with built-in governance

Tray.ai

Best for: teams that need integration, automation, and AI agents governed on one platform and one contract.

Tray.ai is where teams land when the automations have stopped being departmental. Integration, automation, and agents sit under one governance model, with audit trails on every plan, and SSO and HIPAA on Enterprise or as add-ons. We also bill by Tasks, so moving here is not a way to escape metering.

There is a second product on the same foundation. Tray Helix is a governed runtime for the apps your people are already building with Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor: one command takes an app from an AI assistant to a live URL, with identity, managed credentials, and an audit trail attached as it ships. If Make spread through your company because capable people built their own tools, this is the same story one step further on.

On evidence: Cue cut custom integration builds from about a month to about two days. Wavo saved over $500K and increased campaigns managed per person by 69%. There is a direct comparison with Make for feature-level detail.

Trade-offs: we do not publish list pricing, so you cannot evaluate cost without talking to us, and it is managed cloud only. We are also the wrong answer for a small team running lightweight scenarios. If $12 a month covers what you need and nobody has asked you about access control, staying on Make is the better decision and we would rather say so.

Workato

Best for: large IT-led teams that want a polished builder and a broad recipe library.

Workato is a comfortable step up for teams that want governance without giving up a visual builder that non-engineers can use.

It also ships Agent Studio and an MCP Gateway with per-user auth and audit logs.

Trade-offs: the recipe abstraction constrains deep branching and nested logic, which will feel restrictive after Make’s routers and iterators. At volume, recipe concurrency defaults to 1 and tops out at 30, a quota Customer Success can raise, and jobs time out at 90 minutes by default. Workato publishes no prices, so you are trading a published rate for a quote.

Boomi

Best for: IT-led teams where SAP, Oracle, or EDI is the centre of gravity.

Boomi is on this list for the case where Make scenarios have quietly become ERP integration. That is a different discipline and Boomi has the depth for it, with Agentstudio and Boomi MCP for agents.

Trade-offs: a platform grown through acquisitions including Rivery, APIIDA, and Mashery, built for IT-led integration work. Boomi publishes a $99 a month Pay-As-You-Go plan plus usage, and enterprise plans are quoted. The gap between this and a $12 plan is not a gap you cross casually.

Microsoft Power Automate

Best for: organizations already standardized on Microsoft 365, Azure, and Copilot Studio.

If everyone already holds a Microsoft licence, Power Automate is the cheapest governed option available, because identity and admin are already solved.

Trade-offs: Premium is $15 per user per month billed yearly, so the bill tracks headcount rather than execution volume, which is better or worse than credits depending entirely on your shape. The full integration story spans Power Automate, Logic Apps, Azure Data Factory, and Copilot Studio for agents, and flows are automatically disabled after 14 days of consistent throttling. Microsoft counts more than 1,400 connectors against Make’s 3,000-plus apps.

Visual automation, no infrastructure

Make

Best for: visual builders running lightweight automations at the lowest published price.

Staying is right for a lot of teams. The canvas is more structurally flexible than a linear trigger-action chain, routers and iterators make branching genuinely workable, and the Core plan at $12 a month with a free tier underneath is the cheapest published entry on this list. Make has also moved into AI, with Make AI Agents (labelled beta), an MCP server that runs and edits scenarios, and Maia, a conversational builder. For a small team without a compliance requirement, nothing here beats it on value.

Trade-offs: metering is per credit, most actions consuming one and AI-provider actions more, so cost compounds with execution volume rather than with value. A single scenario run is capped at 40 minutes on paid plans and 5 on Free. Access control is organization and team roles, and Make’s security page does not mention HIPAA, which is where a regulated-industry review will look first. Cloud only, with no self-hosted option.

Zapier

Best for: the widest connector catalog and the fastest path from idea to running automation.

Zapier connects more applications than anything else here, which is the main reason to move sideways rather than up. If the thing blocking you is one missing connector, this is the shortest path.

Trade-offs: a Zap is a more linear chain than a Make scenario, so you would be giving up some of the structural flexibility that made Make attractive, and a Code step runs for 30 seconds on Pro and Team. Per-task billing is a different meter rather than no meter, and at the entry tier it is more expensive than Make. Governance is not the reason to move here: SCIM is Enterprise only, and Zapier does not support HIPAA.

Application-centric automation

Celigo

Best for: NetSuite-centric teams running template-driven automations.

Celigo is worth naming if the Make scenarios you care about are order-to-cash or inventory flows around NetSuite. The templates cover that ground properly and you stop maintaining the logic yourself.

Trade-offs: outside NetSuite-adjacent work the fit drops off quickly, and pricing is on endpoints and flows rather than published. Celigo’s Agent Builder (March 2026) and MCP Server (January 2026) are both new, so test them on your own flows.

Open source, self-hosted

n8n

Best for: technical teams that want self-hosted control over cost and data.

n8n is the direct answer to credit metering. The Community Edition is free and genuinely unmetered, with no execution counter at all, and the builder is at least as capable as Make’s for branching and code steps. For a team with somewhere to run it, the cost argument is decisive.

Trade-offs: self-hosting moves the operational burden to you. Our n8n security tracker lists 127 high and critical advisories published against n8n since December 2025, 41 of them critical, last checked 18 September 2026, each with the versions it affects and the release that fixes it. On 11 March 2026 CISA added one of them, CVE-2025-68613, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Every one has a patch, and self-hosted, that queue is yours. Free is a price paid in someone’s time rather than a price of zero.

How to choose

• Lightweight scenarios, small team, no compliance requirement: stay on Make
• The same model with a wider connector catalog: Zapier
• No metering, and you can operate the infrastructure: n8n
• Integration and AI agents governed on one platform: Tray.ai
• Governance with a builder non-engineers can use: Workato
• Already standardized on Microsoft: Power Automate
• The scenarios have become ERP integration: Boomi
• NetSuite is the system of record: Celigo

What actually moves teams off Make

Three things come up repeatedly.

The meter runs on the wrong thing. Credits are consumed per action, so the bill grows with how many steps a scenario takes, not with what the scenario is worth, and the AI steps cost more than the rest. The workflows that matter most are usually the busiest, so cost rises fastest exactly where you can least afford to turn it off. Teams notice the month a new high-volume scenario goes live.

A scenario hit the wall. The 40-minute execution cap is fine until a job has to process a backlog, reconcile a month, or wait on a slow API. Splitting one scenario into several to get under a time limit is the point at which people start asking what else they are working around.

Somebody asked who has access. Organization and team roles are a reasonable design for the product Make is, and it is not an answer to a regulated-industry review that wants per-user permissions, audit, and a list of every connection to a production system. That conversation, more than price, is what sends teams up-market.

Make is a good product and the cheapest published option here, and plenty of teams should stay on it. The reason to move is that the automation stopped being a convenience: once a workflow is load-bearing, the questions are about cost shape, execution limits, and who approved it, and those are answered somewhere else.

Sources

Vendor pricing, last checked 18 September 2026 (Make, Zapier, n8n and Boomi re-checked 8 October 2026):

• Boomi pricing

• Microsoft Power Automate pricing

• n8n pricing

• Make pricing

• Zapier pricing

Vendor and public-body documentation:

• Microsoft Power Automate limits and configuration, for the 14-day throttling shutdown
• Make pricing, for the 40-minute scenario run limit and credit rates; Make security; Make AI Agents; and the Make MCP Server docs, read 8 October 2026
• Zapier pricing for Code step limits and SCIM, and Is Zapier HIPAA compliant?, read 8 October 2026
• Workato recipe settings and recipe limits, for concurrency and job timeout
• CVE-2025-68613 in the National Vulnerability Database
• CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
• Advisory counts from our own n8n security tracker, refreshed 18 September 2026

Customer figures are from the case studies linked above: Cue and Wavo.

Vendor facts about agents, MCP, limits, and compliance are linked to each vendor’s own pages above and set out in the side-by-side comparison. Tray.ai, Workato, and Celigo do not publish list pricing, so no figure is quoted for any of them.