Have you ever calculated how much time you spend on repetitive tasks every day? Moving information from an email into a spreadsheet, sending a welcome message to a new customer, scheduling social media posts. All of these can be automated, and with automation tools you can get hours of your time back.
Over the last four months, we tested three different automation tools in our real business processes. We tried everything at every level, from simple automations to complex multi-step workflows. Here are our detailed experiences.
Zapier: The Gateway to the Automation World
Zapier is the first name that comes to mind when you say automation. With more than six thousand app integrations, you can connect almost any tool to any other. You set up automations by drag and drop, without knowing any code.
My first automation with Zapier sent messages from our website's contact form to a Slack channel automatically. It was ready in five minutes, and we haven't missed a single message since. We used to check the forms once a day, and sometimes we'd see important messages hours later.
Then we made things a bit more complicated. We wanted each new blog post to be automatically shared on Twitter, announced on LinkedIn and sent out to the email list. With Zapier's multi-step feature, we did this in a single automation. A blog post is published and three platforms are updated at once.
An entrepreneur friend says that thanks to Zapier, his one-person team can work like a team of ten. A customer form is filled out, automatically added to the CRM, a welcome email is sent and a notification goes to the team. The whole process happens without human intervention.
The downside is the price. Zapier's free plan is very limited, and paid plans climb quickly with the number of tasks. With heavy use, it can exceed a hundred dollars a month.
Make: The Visual Workflow Designer
Make, formerly Integromat, stands out for its visual workflow design. You design automations like a flowchart, so even complex scenarios are easy to understand.
We used Make on an e-commerce project. We built a conditional workflow: when a new order comes in, check stock; if it's in stock, send a confirmation email; if not, automatically place an order with the supplier. Make's visual editor handles this kind of branching very easily. You can see every step with your own eyes.
Make's biggest advantage over Zapier is its price-to-performance ratio. With the same budget, you can run far more automations in Make. Even the free plan gives you a thousand operations, and that's enough for most small businesses.
A web developer I know uses Make on client projects. He can create custom triggers with webhooks, make HTTP requests and process data in JSON format. He says it's much more flexible than Zapier for technical users.
However, Make's learning curve is steeper than Zapier's. Where everything in Zapier is very intuitive, understanding some concepts in Make takes a bit of time. Advanced features like iterators and aggregators can be confusing at first.