Zapier’s AI Workflows Are Quietly Replacing Make for Social Automation

The Quiet Shift Happening in Social Automation

Zapier has been the default automation tool for small businesses and marketing teams for years – reliable, well-documented, and just boring enough to be trustworthy. Make (formerly Integromat) carved out its own loyal following by offering a visual workflow builder that felt more like a flowchart than a form, attracting the kind of power users who wanted to see exactly how their data moved. That dynamic is changing. Zapier’s push into AI-native workflow building is pulling attention – and budgets – away from Make in ways that weren’t happening even twelve months ago.

The shift isn’t about Zapier suddenly becoming flashier or Make dropping the ball. It’s about where AI fits into automation, and which platform made the smarter bet on where social media managers actually spend their time. Zapier’s AI layer is embedded directly into the workflow creation process, not bolted on as an add-on feature. That design choice is doing a lot of work.

What Zapier’s AI Workflows Actually Do Differently

Zapier’s Canvas feature, combined with its AI-assisted Zap builder, allows users to describe an automation in plain language and receive a working draft workflow in seconds. For a social media team trying to connect Instagram mentions to a Slack channel, route new leads from a LinkedIn form into a CRM, and automatically schedule repurposed content to Twitter and Facebook, the process used to involve building each connection manually, step by step. Now a team member without any technical background can describe what they want and get a functional starting point immediately. The friction that once separated casual users from power users is shrinking fast.

Make still has genuine strengths – its visual scenario editor is genuinely easier to audit at a glance, and its pricing structure gives heavy automation users more operations per dollar at certain tiers. But Make’s AI integration has been slower to arrive and narrower in scope. The platform added AI-assist features, but they sit alongside the workflow builder rather than inside it. For a social automation use case, where speed and flexibility matter more than raw technical control, that distinction matters more than it might seem.

The practical difference shows up in onboarding time. A new hire tasked with setting up automated social posting workflows in Make typically needs several hours of documentation review before building anything useful. With Zapier’s current AI builder, that same person can have a working draft in under twenty minutes. For agencies managing multiple client social accounts, that time compression has real dollar value attached to it.

Why Social Automation Is the Specific Battleground

Social media automation has always been a uniquely messy workflow category. Posts need to go to multiple platforms, images need to be resized, captions need variations, engagement needs to be tracked, and all of it needs to happen on a schedule that doesn’t care about weekends. The number of apps involved – scheduling tools, analytics platforms, CRMs, content libraries, image editors – creates more connection points than almost any other marketing workflow. That complexity is exactly where AI-assisted workflow building has the most visible impact.

Zapier’s app library has also grown to include native integrations with nearly every social platform and adjacent tool a modern marketing team would use. When combined with AI that can suggest which integrations belong in a workflow based on a plain-language description, the barrier to building sophisticated social automation genuinely drops. Make supports a comparable number of integrations, but the discovery process – finding the right module, configuring it correctly – still requires more deliberate effort.

The Competitive Pressure Make Is Facing

Make’s community has historically been one of its biggest assets. The platform has a passionate user base that shares templates, troubleshoots publicly, and builds custom integrations. That community isn’t disappearing, but the conversation in social media marketing circles has tilted. Teams that were firmly in the Make camp a year ago are now running hybrid setups, using Zapier for the AI-assisted workflows while keeping Make for the complex, high-volume scenarios where its visual logic still wins on clarity.

The pricing conversation is also getting complicated for Make. Its free tier and lower-cost plans have been a draw for solo operators and small agencies, but Zapier’s AI features are now bundled into plans that weren’t significantly more expensive to begin with. For a team spending $50 to $100 a month on automation tools, the calculus has shifted. Paying roughly the same amount for a platform with a functional AI workflow builder versus one where AI feels like a roadmap item rather than a current reality changes how people evaluate their options at renewal time.

There’s also the question of where each platform is directing its engineering attention. Zapier has made a visible, public bet on AI as the central product direction. Product updates, blog content, and feature announcements all center on what the AI layer can do next. Make’s recent updates have focused on performance improvements and enterprise features – sensible priorities, but ones that don’t create the same kind of excitement among the social media marketing audience that tends to switch tools based on what they’re hearing in communities and group chats.

The audience that drives word-of-mouth in the automation tool space is predominantly marketing professionals, freelancers, and agency operators who care about speed, simplicity, and keeping up with what’s new. That audience is currently more interested in Zapier’s direction than Make’s. Whether Make closes that perception gap depends on how quickly it can make its AI features feel native rather than supplemental – and right now, Zapier has a meaningful head start on that specific experience.

Make still processes a staggering volume of automations daily and has no shortage of devoted users who will not give up its visual editor without a fight. But the social automation category specifically rewards the platform that makes the first workflow feel effortless – and for a growing number of marketing teams building their first AI-assisted Zap right now, Make isn’t even in the room.