Quick verdict: IFTTT vs Make.com
Pick IFTTT if you want personal and smart home Applets. The free plan is permanent, Applet runs are unlimited, and each free Applet is one trigger plus one action. Pick Make.com if you need multi-step business scenarios with routers, iterators and aggregators, a credit-based bill, and AI agents. Price and workflow shape decide the rest.
Every number below comes from the two vendors' own pricing and help pages, read in September 2026. No aggregator estimates. Nothing carried over from older comparisons without a fresh look. Make.com figures are the annual ones, because that is the cheaper of its two billing cycles and the one most readers end up choosing. Where a detail is not published by the vendor, this article says so instead of filling the gap with a guess.
IFTTT vs Make.com at a glance
Nine lines, each vendor's own claims, no interpretation. Read the billing unit row first. It explains most of the price gap further down: IFTTT charges for how many Applets you keep switched on, while Make.com charges for how much work your scenarios actually do. Everything else in the table follows from that single difference, and the sections after it unpack the rows that cost you money. Nothing in it is an estimate or a rounded figure from a review site.
| Feature | IFTTT | Make.com |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 2 Applets, $0 forever | 1,000 credits a month |
| Entry paid plan | Pro $2.99/mo, yearly | Core $9/mo, yearly |
| Billing unit | Applets enabled | Credits per module |
| Workflow shape | Trigger plus action | Multi-step canvas |
| Apps, own count | 1,000+ services | 3,000+ apps |
| Polling on free plan | Every hour | Every 15 minutes |
| AI features | Pro+ plan only | All plans |
| Smart home | Cross-brand Applets | Business apps focus |
| Best for | Personal automations | Business scenarios |
Pricing: Applets versus credits
IFTTT sells slots. The Free plan costs $0.00 forever: 2 Applets with standard Applet speeds and unlimited Applet runs, each limited to one trigger and one action. Pro costs $2.99 a month, billed as $35.88 annually. It raises the cap to 20 Applets and adds faster speeds, multi-action Applets, webhooks and increased rate limits. Pro+ costs $8.99 a month, billed as $107.88 annually, and removes the Applet cap. It also adds queries, filter code, multiple account connections and AI services.
"Each module action in your scenario, like adding a Google Sheet row or fetching Gmail account data, counts as one credit."
Source: make.com
The tier split is that simple: 20 Applets with multi-action support on Pro, no cap plus filter code and AI services on Pro+. Either paid plan bills monthly or yearly.
Make.com sells work. Its Free plan is $0 a month with up to 1,000 credits a month and a 15-minute minimum interval between scheduled runs. Free credits expire at the end of the term. Core is $9 a month billed annually for 10,000 credits a month, and it drops the scheduling floor to one minute. Pro is $16 and Teams is $29 a month on the same yearly billing. Enterprise is priced by quote and adds overage protection and advanced security features.
Each module action in a scenario consumes a credit, such as adding a Google Sheets row or fetching Gmail data. The unit used to be called operations. Code execution is billed at 2 credits per second. Run out before the next billing cycle and you buy more in bundles of 1,000 or 10,000 at a fixed price defined in your subscription. Make.com's own comparison page says each module that processes data typically consumes at least one credit, and that AI or multi-bundle features may consume more. So the bill tracks step count and run frequency.
What you can build: one trigger, one action versus a canvas
IFTTT defines an Applet as a connection between two or more apps or devices that lets them do something they could not do on their own. Mechanically it needs at minimum a Trigger, the data change that starts it, and an Action, the work IFTTT performs in response. That was the entire model at launch: one trigger, one action. It has since been expanded, so an Applet can carry multiple actions or conditional filters. Pro+ adds queries and filter code, and that is where an Applet stops being a straight line and starts making decisions.
Make.com starts at the other end. You build a scenario on a canvas, and most scenarios can hold an unlimited number of modules. Routers split one run into several branches, iterators break a bundle into single items, and aggregators put the pieces back together. Make.com's standing with power users has always rested on those three, a point Zapier concedes in its own comparison against Make.com. Paid plans add the Code app for custom Python and JavaScript, and Enterprise plans include custom functions applied inline. Scenario Run Replay re-runs a workflow against historical data. If-else and Merge modules were in open beta as of Make.com's April 2026 comparison post, so they may have shipped since.
Practical differences show up the first time one event has to produce different outcomes. An Applet that mutes your phone every night at the same time is a good Applet, and nothing about a canvas would improve it. A scenario can take one new record, send it down three branches depending on a field value, loop over the line items inside it, and write one summary row at the end. Both count as automation. Only one of them is a build.
Apps, services and smart home
By its own count, IFTTT connects over 1,000 apps and services. The point is bridging brands that will not talk to each other directly. IFTTT's own smart home hub page gives the example of Philips Hue lights reacting to a Ring doorbell. That is exactly the sort of cross-brand link a single device maker's app will never build for you.
Make.com counts 3,000+ apps, again the vendor's own number, including 350+ AI apps for adding intelligence to workflows. The shape of that catalog is different. To explain its own billing, Make.com reaches for adding a Google Sheets row and fetching Gmail data. That tells you where the platform lives: business software and the APIs behind it, rather than light bulbs and doorbells.
Neither count is audited by anyone outside the company that published it, and neither is a quality score. Neither vendor publishes, on the pages reviewed here, how it arrives at that total. So the only reliable test is to open both catalogs and look for the five services you actually use before paying for anything. What matters is which side your things sit on. If the things you want to automate plug into a wall socket, IFTTT is more likely to have them. If they log in with a work email address, Make.com is.
Speed and reliability
IFTTT checks most triggers by polling rather than in realtime. It explains that those polling-based checks happen every hour on Free and every 5 minutes on Pro and Pro+. On the free plan an Applet can be up to an hour late by design. Fine for a nightly routine, useless for anything you are standing next to.
Make.com sets its floor by plan as well. On the Free plan, scheduled scenarios run no more often than every 15 minutes. Core brings that down to one minute, the lowest regular scheduling interval its help center lists. Scheduling is only half the picture. All Make.com plans include multi-step workflows and instant webhook execution, and IFTTT adds webhooks from Pro upward, so an event that can push itself never waits in a polling queue.
On infrastructure, Make.com states that it hosts on AWS in the EU and North America, with GDPR, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance and AES-256 encryption at rest. A guaranteed 99.5% uptime SLA appears only on Enterprise plans. IFTTT publishes no comparable uptime commitment on the pages reviewed here, so check the vendor's pricing page before you put anything time-critical on it.
AI features
IFTTT keeps AI behind its top tier. Its plans page lists AI services as a Pro+ exclusive, alongside queries, filter code and multiple account connections. The AI Content Creator is available only to Pro+ subscribers, and so is the AI Summarizer, which turns long content into summaries and action items. On Free or Pro, none of it switches on. That makes Pro+ at $8.99 a month, billed as $107.88 annually, the price of AI inside IFTTT.
Make.com spreads AI across the whole lineup. AI agents are in beta, and you can build them either with Make.com's own AI Provider on all plans or with your own LLM key. The vendor's AI agents page says they orchestrate processes across 3,000+ apps on all plans. Agents are built, run and debugged inside the Scenario Builder, and you give one context by uploading files rather than assembling a retrieval workflow first. Maia, described as a co-worker for AI and automation that turns plain language into automation and agents, is included in all plans. Make MCP Server points the other way: it turns scenarios into callable tools for ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and other MCP-compatible agents, covering 3,000+ apps and 30,000+ actions.
Who should pick IFTTT, and who should pick Make.com
Sort yourself by the shape of the job rather than by which platform sounds more serious.
- Smart home and phone habits: IFTTT. Cross-brand Applets are its home ground, and two of them cost $0.00 forever with unlimited runs.
- Two or three simple automations: IFTTT Free covers two. For a handful more, Pro at $2.99 a month, billed as $35.88 annually, gives you 20 Applets and 5-minute trigger checks.
- A business workflow with branching: Make.com. One event, three destinations, a loop over line items and a filter in the middle is a scenario, not something you assemble out of Applets.
- Teams and shared ownership: Make.com Core at $9 a month billed annually is the entry point, and Teams is $29 a month on yearly billing. Enterprise is custom pricing with SSO via OAuth2 or SAML2, role-based access controls, audit logs and on-premises agents.
- Tight budget, heavy volume: count runs before you count features. IFTTT sells Applet slots and speed, with unlimited Applet runs on Free, while Make.com meters module actions, so the same workflow costs more the more often it fires.
A third billing model is worth knowing about before you commit to either. Latenode charges for workflow runtime in CPU seconds, calculated as runs multiplied by average seconds, rather than per operation or per step. Adding steps does not multiply the bill. The first 10,000 CPU seconds each month are free on both of its plans. Its Free plan is $0 a month forever with no credit card, 5 active workflows, a 3-minute limit per run and 10-minute polling, with webhooks instant on every plan. That model is not directly comparable to Applets or to credits, because cost depends on how long a run takes rather than how many steps it contains.
