Airtable vs Make

Airtable is a cloud platform, founded in San Francisco in 2012 by Howie Liu and two co-founders, that blends the familiar interface of a spreadsheet with the structure of a relational database. Tables link to each other, fields have types such as attachments, single selects, lookups, rollups and formulas, and the same records can be viewed as a grid, kanban, calendar, gallery, form, Gantt chart or timeline.

On top of the data, Interface Designer builds dashboards and lightweight apps for people who should not edit raw tables, automations run actions on triggers and schedules, and syncs bring in data from other bases or tools. AI fields categorize records, summarize text and generate content inside the base. The free plan allows unlimited bases with 1,000 records each and five editors; Team raises limits to 50,000 records per base and adds Gantt and timeline views; Business adds 125,000 records, premium syncs, an admin panel and SAML SSO; and Enterprise Scale is custom-priced with HyperDB and enterprise APIs.

Airtable powers content calendars, product catalogs, lightweight CRMs, inventories, applicant trackers and production schedules at thousands of companies, and it shines when non-developers need a structured database they can build themselves. In recent years it moved upmarket and raised prices, which pushed small teams toward open-source or cheaper options such as Baserow, NocoDB and Grist, or to Notion databases for document-heavy work. Per-seat pricing, record limits per base and automation run limits are the main constraints to check before adopting.

Make, formerly Integromat, is a visual automation platform founded in Prague in the Czech Republic. Celonis acquired Integromat in 2020 and relaunched it as Make in 2022. Its core job is connecting apps and automating multi-step processes, with a visual canvas that handles complex logic better than linear automation tools.

Scenarios are built as flowcharts: modules for each app action are connected by routes, with routers for branching, iterators and aggregators for working with lists, filters, data transformation functions and error handlers for retries and fallbacks. Make supports more than 2,000 apps plus generic HTTP, webhooks and JSON tools for anything with an API, along with AI modules for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude and other providers. Make AI Agents, introduced in 2025, add goal-driven agents that decide which tools to use. Since August 2025 pricing is based on credits instead of operations: most module runs use one credit, AI modules can use more. Plans from the free tier up to Enterprise add more credits, shorter scheduling intervals, team roles and security features.

Make fits operations teams, agencies and technical marketers who build complex, high-volume automations and want them to cost less than on Zapier. The visual approach has a steeper learning curve, and credit consumption needs monitoring as scenarios grow, especially with AI modules. Zapier is easier for simple automations and has more app integrations, n8n is open source and self-hostable for developers, and Power Automate suits Microsoft-centric organizations.