Make vs Power Automate: Which Wins in 2026?

Updated 2026-10-14 · 963 words

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Quick take: if branching logic and a single, published price matter more to you than Microsoft-native depth, Make is the stronger pick, its router keeps complex conditional logic readable on one canvas, and its operations-based pricing is transparent from the start. If your team already runs on Microsoft 365 and Dynamics, and especially if you need desktop RPA for legacy apps with no API, Power Automate is worth the extra licensing lines. We built a three-branch expense-approval workflow on both to see where each one actually held up.

The flow pulled a new expense submission, checked the amount against a threshold, and routed it to one of three approval paths depending on size, then logged the outcome back to a tracking sheet. Same logic, same source data, run on both platforms.

What Make and Power Automate actually are

Make, rebranded from Integromat in 2022, is a cloud-only visual automation platform built around a "scenario" canvas: modules connect through routes that branch, loop, and handle errors, all visible at a glance. Its billing counts individual operations, every action a scenario executes, not every completed run. Make also ships Maia, a conversational AI builder that turns a plain-language description into a working scenario.

Power Automate is Microsoft's cloud automation platform, built around "flows" with deep first-party integration into SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365. Beyond cloud flows, it includes desktop RPA, attended and unattended bots that automate legacy, UI-level applications with no API, and AI Builder, a set of pre-built, narrow AI actions like form processing and object detection that drop into a flow as a single step.

Comparison table

Building the same workflow twice

The expense-approval scenario took about twenty minutes to build in Make, most of it spent on the router's three-way condition, but the finished canvas shows every branch at once, easy to review later. The identical flow in Power Automate took close to thirty minutes; the conditional logic itself works the same way, but following all three paths after the fact meant scrolling through a more linear layout rather than seeing them side by side.

A second test, logging the outcome back to a Microsoft Teams channel, reversed that gap. Power Automate's native Teams action took under a minute to wire in, with a dropdown picker for the channel and a templated message body. The equivalent in Make worked through a generic webhook connector, functional, but with more manual setup: we had to register an incoming webhook inside Teams itself first, then hand-build the message payload, a ten-minute detour that a native action skips entirely.

Error handling showed a similar split. Make's scenario-level error handlers let you catch a failure anywhere in the route and resolve, retry, or ignore it without leaving the canvas, which made debugging the expense flow's edge cases (a malformed amount field, a missing approver) faster to trace visually. Power Automate's run history is thorough and easy to read after the fact, but configuring a proactive retry or fallback action inside the flow itself takes more steps than Make's inline handler.

Pricing reality check

Make's paid plans start around $9 a month and bill by operations, published upfront with no separate connector tier to navigate. Power Automate's standard cloud flows often come bundled with an existing Microsoft 365 plan, but the moment a flow needs a premium connector like Salesforce or SQL Server, it needs a separate Premium license, roughly $15 per user per month, and unattended RPA bots are licensed again on top, around $150 per bot per month. Make's single meter is the easier one to budget against without first auditing which connectors and bots a team actually needs.

When NOT to use Make

Skip Make if your team needs native, deep integration with SharePoint, Dynamics, or Teams, or if desktop RPA for a legacy, API-less application is a real requirement. Make has no equivalent to either, and our full Make review covers where its learning curve shows up for a first-time user outside this specific comparison.

When NOT to use Power Automate

Skip Power Automate if your stack is mostly non-Microsoft, or if you want branching logic that's easy to follow at a glance without piecing together per-user and per-bot licensing first. Make's router-based canvas handles that specific job more clearly, and its pricing is simpler to predict from day one.

Which should you pick?

Choose Make if your workflows need visible, multi-path branching and you want pricing you can predict without assembling several license types. Choose Power Automate if Microsoft 365, Dynamics, and Teams are already your working environment, and especially if desktop RPA for legacy apps is part of the job.

Read current plans directly from the source before committing: Make publishes operations-based pricing openly, while Power Automate spreads its licensing across standard, Premium, and Process tiers.

For the broader field of options, our best Power Automate alternatives roundup compares six tools side by side, our n8n vs Power Automate comparison covers the free self-hosted alternative in more depth, and our Zapier vs Power Automate comparison covers the other major non-Microsoft cloud platform against the same opponent.

The fastest way to decide: sketch your most complex real workflow on paper. If it has more than two conditional branches, Make's router will save you real review time later. If nearly all of your automations are Microsoft-to-Microsoft, Power Automate's native depth is worth the extra licensing complexity.

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