Make.com vs Activepieces

By Ginikachukwu Nwibe

on Friday, Aug 8th, 2025

This blog takes a close look at Make.com vs Activepieces. We will explore the ideas ****behind each tool, their capabilities, limitations, and how they align with the needs of teams in 2025.

By the end, you should walk away with a clear understanding of:

What each platform offers at its core
Which types of users and teams each platform serves best
Which system supports long-term automation maturity

What is Activepieces?

Activepieces is a user-friendly AI automation ecosystem. This means it not only helps users create workflows. Instead, it provides a range of automation tools that support all business needs, from internal task handling to customer-facing AI interactions to critical workflows that require human-in-the-loop. Activepieces is entirely open-source, with its source code available on GitHub. This gives users the ability to fork, customize, and contribute to the platform freely.

The 5 major products in the Activepieces ecosystem include:

Agents: Intelligent AI agents that can take prompts, carry out tasks, and return structured results. These can be built with natural language to carry out tasks for you. Learn more about how to build AI agents with Activepieces
Workflow Builder: A modern, clean drag-and-drop builder that helps users build intelligent workflows in a user-friendly interface
Tables: Databases for storing and organizing data within workflows. Think of them as native spreadsheet-like objects, ideal for tracking leads, managing queues, or referencing data across automations.
To-Dos: These introduce human-in-the-loop automation, allowing flows to pause until someone on your team completes a task or approves an action. It’s an essential feature for critical use cases like content review, invoice approvals, support escalation, or internal QA processes.
MCPs (Model Context Protocols): This enables you to turn your LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor into agents by giving them access to your tools and workflows. This enables these LLMs to carry out very specific business tasks for you

Who Is Activepieces For?

Activepieces is loved by non-technical teams for its ease of use and by technical teams for its extensibility. It appeals to a wide range of users, like:

Companies that want to easily put automation in the hands of their employees and get ROI without several months of training
Working in cross-functional teams where both humans and automation must collaborate

Needing internal tools that blend automation with real-time decision-making
Enterprises that want control over their infrastructure
Agencies and consultants who serve clients with varied automation and compliance needs

What is Make.com?

Make.com, formerly known as Integromat, allows users to build automated workflows called scenarios by connecting apps, services, and logic modules on a canvas. Each scenario consists of a series of steps that execute either based on a trigger (like a new email or a webhook event) or on a scheduled basis.

Users drag modules onto the canvas to represent different actions or services.

Who is Make.com For?

Make.com leans toward users who are comfortable with abstract thinking and technical logic. It’s not as plug-and-play as some no-code tools, but it offers flexibility to technical users.

Ease of Use

Ease of use is often the make-or-break factor in workflow automation tools. The best features in the world don’t matter if users can’t find them, understand them, or implement them without hitting roadblocks.

Make.com

Make.com’s interface is built around the concept of “scenarios,” where users drag modules (representing apps or functions) onto a canvas and connect them into a logical flow.

However, this comes with a learning curve. The more detailed a scenario becomes, the harder it is to manage. As workflows grow beyond 10–15 modules, the canvas becomes cluttered. Managing nested routers, handling errors, and tracing data paths can feel overwhelming, especially for newcomers.

Here are a few usability pain points of Make.com:

Error Debugging: While Make.com provides execution logs, identifying where and why something failed is not always intuitive. Some modules silently skip steps if the data isn’t formatted as expected.
Hidden Configuration Settings: Many options are nested inside multiple clicks, which can slow down the building process.
Learning Curve: Make.com expects users to understand technical concepts like arrays, iterators, conditional logic, and JSON formatting. This can be a barrier for non-technical teams.

Activepieces

Activepieces is designed to be immediately understandable, even to those with no background in automation. While it also features a visual builder, its interface is far more streamlined.

Some of the features that support ease of use include:

A no-code, user-friendly front-end (for building workflows and configuring steps). The interface is intentionally spaced out, with clearly labeled elements and consistent structure.
Each step in a workflow includes clear status indicators. When a piece fails, users are shown detailed logs and errors at the step level, making troubleshooting intuitive.
AI agents can be built with natural language prompts. There's no need to worry about JSON formatting or fine-tuning complex payloads unless you want to.

Infrastructure and Developer Extensibility

Activepieces:

As user-friendly as Activepieces is, it is also developer-friendly and open-source

Supports JavaScript/TypeScript code steps natively inside workflows
Allows custom piece development using its public SDK
Can be self-hosted
Integrates into CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment
Developers can directly contribute to or fork the open-source repo

This gives engineering teams full control over the automation engine. This is ideal for companies that want to tightly integrate automation into their infrastructure, enforce custom security standards, or scale specific components.

Make.com:

You cannot create native modules or build app connectors directly
You cannot run the engine locally, test in staging, or fork the automation engine
Limited support for versioning, modular reuse, or infrastructure tuning

For developers, this means Make.com often feels like a black box. You can build with it, but you can’t extend, embed, or evolve it beyond the boundaries of the visual canvas.

Pricing & Scalability

Pricing plays a huge role in how teams adopt and stick with automation platforms. Beyond the monthly numbers, what matters is how predictably costs grow as your automations grow.

Make.com: Operations-Based Pricing

Make.com’s pricing is built around operations, which are units of work. Operations are not the same as tasks or actions. An action like collecting form data can take more than one operation. Even simple workflows can consume dozens or hundreds of operations per run, especially when iterators or routers are involved.

For example, a workflow that sends 10 emails with formatting and filtering might consume 30–50 operations. Now multiply that by hundreds of triggers per day, and you quickly outgrow the entry plans.

Many users get caught off guard by unexpected jumps in usage-based pricing, especially when launching a scenario at scale.

Activepieces: Unlimited Tasks

Activepieces' pricing plan takes a different route. Pricing is transparent, generous at the free tier. The free tier provides 1000 tasks per month (renews monthly). For example, a workflow with just 2 steps will consume only 2 tasks per run, no matter how complex the task is.

The paid plans provide unlimited tasks and usage. Your bill will remain the same regardless of how many tasks you run.

The most important takeaway is this:

With Make.com, you can’t easily forecast costs because your “operation count” is a function of workflow complexity, app behavior, and unexpected triggers.
With Activepieces, your billing remains the same according to your plan.

Hosting & Privacy

Make.com: Cloud-Only Infrastructure

Make.com is built as a cloud-only platform, hosted on Make’s infrastructure. There is no option to deploy Make.com privately. All automation scenarios, user data, credentials, and logs are stored and executed within their managed environment. Users access the service on the web, but all execution happens on Make’s servers.

Advantages:

Simplicity: No setup, no maintenance. Users can sign up and start building immediately.
Managed scaling: All infrastructure, uptime, and performance optimization are handled by Make.

Limitations:

With no option to deploy Make.com privately. This will most likely rule out usage for:
- Government agencies with strict data residency rules
- Healthcare or finance teams needing full compliance control
- Enterprises running internal-only systems
No data sovereignty: All data processed by Make.com resides on their servers. Even if encrypted, users can’t audit the infrastructure or control the data lifecycle.

For many startups and small teams, cloud-only is fine. But for security-sensitive sectors or high-volume operations, this can be a deal-breaker.

Activepieces: Cloud and Self-Hosted

Activepieces offers two deployment paths:

Managed Cloud (hosted by Activepieces)
Self-Hosted (Hosted on your premises)

Self-Hosting Benefits:

Full Data Ownership: All data, including logs, credentials, workflow states, and AI agent memory, lives on infrastructure you control.
Regulatory Compliance: Teams subject to GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, or industry-specific compliance can deploy Activepieces within their infrastructure.
Air-Gapped Environments: For use cases where internet access must be restricted (e.g., internal R&D tools), Activepieces can be deployed locally with no external dependencies.
Custom Performance Tuning: Users can scale up memory, CPU, or parallel processing based on internal needs.

Cloud Hosting :

For teams who want ease of use, Activepieces offers a managed cloud platform that mirrors the same features and UX.
Data is encrypted, performance is optimized, and cloud pricing is transparent.

This hybrid model is ideal for teams that want to start in the cloud but maintain the ability to move on-prem later, whether for scale, policy, or integration reasons.

Make.com vs Activepieces: Which Should You Choose?

The right tool depends on the kind of automation you're trying to build and where you want to take it.

Make.com is good for automating straightforward, task-based workflows, especially for semi-technical teams.

But if you’re looking for a tool that is loved by non-technical teams for its ease of use while remaining flexible for developers or technical teams, then Activepieces is what you need. If you also want to build systems that will evolve as AI evolves and scale long-term, then Activepieces offers a more forward-thinking solution.