Make.com: Visual AI Automation for Non-Coders

Make.com (formerly Integromat) is a visual automation platform that connects your apps and services into automated workflows called scenarios. What sets Make apart from competitors like Zapier is its visual drag-and-drop builder that shows your entire workflow as a flowchart, making complex automations intuitive to build and understand. With built-in AI modules for ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI services, Make has become a powerful tool for creating AI-powered business processes without writing code.

Understanding Scenarios

A scenario in Make is a series of connected modules that automate a workflow. Each module represents an action in a specific app — "Watch for new emails in Gmail," "Extract text with OpenAI," "Create a row in Google Sheets," "Send a Slack message." You connect these modules visually by dragging lines between them. When the trigger module activates (new email arrives), data flows through each subsequent module automatically. Unlike Zapier's linear zaps, Make scenarios can include branching logic (if/else paths), loops (iterate over arrays), error handling, and parallel execution, making it capable of handling genuinely complex business processes.

Building Your First Automation

Start at make.com and create a free account. Click "Create a new scenario." Search for and add your trigger module — for example, "Google Forms: Watch Responses." Then add action modules by clicking the plus icon. Each module shows its available fields, and you map data from previous modules using Make's visual data mapping interface. For example, map the form respondent's email to a Gmail module's "To" field. Click "Run once" to test with live data, then turn on scheduling to run automatically. The visual builder makes it clear exactly what each step does and how data flows through the automation.

AI Modules and Integration

Make's AI capabilities are where it gets exciting. The OpenAI module lets you insert ChatGPT into any workflow: summarize incoming emails, categorize support tickets, generate responses, extract data from unstructured text, or translate content. The Anthropic module provides Claude integration for tasks requiring longer context or more nuanced reasoning. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E modules generate images as part of workflows. You can build scenarios like: "When a customer support email arrives, use GPT-4 to categorize it, draft a response, and route it to the right team" or "When a blog post is published, use AI to generate social media captions in 5 languages and schedule them."

Practical Automation Examples

Lead processing: Watch for new form submissions, enrich with company data from Clearbit, score with AI, add to CRM, and notify sales on Slack. Content pipeline: Monitor RSS feeds, use AI to summarize articles, generate social posts, schedule across platforms. Invoice processing: Watch email for PDF attachments, extract data with AI vision, create entries in accounting software, notify finance team. Customer support triage: Incoming tickets analyzed by AI for sentiment and category, routed to appropriate team, auto-responded for common questions. Each of these would take days to code manually but can be built in Make's visual editor in an hour.

Make vs Zapier

Zapier is simpler for basic two-app connections and has more integrations (6,000+ vs Make's 1,800+). Make is more powerful for complex workflows with branching, loops, and data transformation. Make's visual builder makes complicated automations much easier to understand and debug. Make is also significantly cheaper for high-volume automations — you pay per operation, and Make's pricing gives you more operations per dollar. For simple "if this then that" automations, either works. For anything involving conditions, multiple branches, or data processing, Make is the better choice.

Pricing

The free plan includes 1,000 operations per month and 2 active scenarios. The Core plan at $10.59/month provides 10,000 operations and unlimited scenarios. The Pro plan at $18.82/month adds 10,000 operations with priority execution, full-text log search, and custom variables. Teams plan at $34.12/month includes team collaboration features and 10,000 operations with enhanced support. All plans scale with additional operation packs.

Getting Started

Sign up at make.com and explore the template library for pre-built scenarios that match your use case. Start with a simple two-module automation to learn the interface, then add complexity incrementally. The visual builder's immediate feedback loop — build, test, see results — makes Make one of the most satisfying automation tools to learn. Once you connect your first AI module and see it process data automatically, the possibilities become immediately apparent.