Integration Middleware Compared: Zapier, Make, and Workato for Business Integrations

When your business systems need to talk to each other, middleware is usually the first solution people reach for. Zapier, Make, and Workato are the three platforms that dominate this space — but they serve very different audiences, at very different price points, with very different strengths.

Choosing the wrong one wastes money. Choosing the right one — and knowing when you’ve outgrown all of them — saves you from building on a foundation that can’t support what your business actually needs.

The Three Tiers of Middleware

Think of these tools as operating in distinct tiers rather than competing head-to-head.

Zapier: The Accessible Starting Point

Zapier is built for people who aren’t technical. Pick a trigger, pick an action, map some fields, done. A marketing coordinator can build a useful automation in fifteen minutes.

Pricing: Free (limited), then $29.99/month for 750 tasks, scaling to $199+/month for higher volumes.

Best for: Small businesses running 5-15 simple, linear automations. Form submissions to CRM. New deals to Slack notifications. If your automations are “when X happens, do Y,” Zapier handles it well.

Limitations: Linear workflows only. Limited error handling. Costs escalate quickly with volume.

Make: The Technical Middle Ground

Make gives you a visual canvas for building workflows with branches, loops, error handlers, and data transformations. Significantly more capable than Zapier, and materially cheaper at moderate volumes.

Pricing: Free tier, then from $10.59/month for 10,000 operations. Substantially better value than Zapier for most businesses.

Best for: Businesses with 10-50 automations needing conditional logic or complex data transformations. Teams with at least one technically-minded person.

Limitations: Steeper learning curve. Can become unwieldy for very complex scenarios. Still runs on someone else’s infrastructure.

Workato: The Enterprise Platform

Workato is a different animal. Designed for mid-market and enterprise companies needing governance, security, team collaboration, and high-volume processing.

Pricing: Starts around $10,000/year. Not published transparently — you’ll need to talk to sales.

Best for: Companies with 50+ integrations, compliance requirements, and multiple teams building automations.

Limitations: Price excludes most small businesses. Setup is involved. Overkill for straightforward automations.

What Actually Matters in Practice

Reliability and Error Handling

All three platforms experience outages — typically a few hours per quarter. When the platform is down, all your automations stop.

• Zapier notifies you when a Zap fails. You can retry manually. Diagnosing the failure means clicking through execution history and interpreting vague error messages.
• Make lets you build error handling into the workflow — retry logic, fallback paths, error notification steps. You can see exactly which module failed and why.
• Workato provides enterprise-grade error handling with detailed logging, automatic retry policies, and dead-letter queues for failed records.

Scalability and Cost

This is where the differences show most clearly.

• Zapier charges per task (each step execution). A business running 30 automations at moderate volume easily hits $500-750/month.
• Make gives far more operations per dollar. The same business might spend $50-100/month.
• Workato handles high volume well but charges an annual commitment regardless of actual usage.

Integration Coverage

Zapier has 7,000+ integrations. Make has around 1,800 but compensates with an excellent HTTP module for connecting to any API directly. Workato offers deeper connectors for enterprise tools like Salesforce, NetSuite, and SAP.

For most Australian SMBs, all three cover the mainstream tools: Xero, MYOB, Shopify, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack, and Google Workspace. The difference mainly matters for niche or industry-specific software.

When You’ve Outgrown Middleware

Here’s the perspective middleware vendors don’t share: for growing businesses, middleware is a stepping stone, not a destination.

Middleware starts breaking down when:

Your automations are interconnected. Automation A creates a record that Automation B depends on. Middleware tools don’t coordinate between automations — each runs independently.

You need transactional integrity. Creating an invoice involves creating a customer, adding line items, and applying payment — all of which must succeed or all roll back. Middleware can’t do atomic transactions. A mid-way failure leaves data inconsistent.

Your monthly bill exceeds $300-500. At that point, the ongoing cost often exceeds maintaining a custom integration that does the job better, with no per-transaction fees.

Silent failures are unacceptable. For financial data or customer orders, “the Zap failed and we didn’t notice for three days” isn’t good enough. Custom integrations give you full control over logging, alerting, and recovery.

Choosing the Right Path

For most businesses, the practical path looks like this:

Starting out (1-10 automations, low volume): Use Zapier. Fastest way to connect systems and test whether automation helps.

Growing (10-30 automations, moderate volume): Move to Make. You’ll save money, gain flexibility, and get better error handling.

Scaling (30+ automations, high volume, business-critical flows): Evaluate whether middleware is still right. Keep non-critical automations in Make. Move critical workflows (orders, invoicing, inventory) to custom integrations.

Enterprise (50+ integrations, compliance needs): Workato or a custom integration platform, depending on your team’s technical capability.

The middleware market is mature and the tools are genuinely useful. But they’re tools — not strategies. The strategy is getting your business systems to share data reliably. Middleware is one way to achieve that. For growing businesses, it’s often not the last way.