If you are comparing automation platforms for your business, Power Automate and Make.com will both come up early in your research. They both let you connect apps, automate workflows, and reduce manual data entry. But they are designed for different environments, and choosing the wrong one can mean paying more for less, or building something that does not fit your existing tools.

This is a practical comparison based on how each platform works in real small business setups, not feature-list marketing.

The short version

Choose Power Automate if your business runs on Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Excel, OneDrive). Power Automate is included in most M365 licenses, integrates deeply with the Microsoft ecosystem, and handles internal workflows (approvals, document routing, notifications) better than anything else.

Choose Make.com if your business uses a mix of platforms from different vendors (Xero + HubSpot + Slack + Shopify, for example). Make.com connects to a wider range of third-party tools, gives you more control over data transformation, and handles complex multi-step workflows more naturally.

Integration depth vs breadth

Power Automate has around 1,000 connectors. Make.com has around 1,500. But the numbers alone are misleading.

Power Automate's Microsoft connectors are genuinely deep. You can trigger a flow from a specific column change in a SharePoint list, route an approval through Teams with custom adaptive cards, create a PDF from a Word template stored in OneDrive, and file it back automatically. These are not surface-level integrations. They reach into features that third-party platforms cannot touch.

For non-Microsoft tools, Power Automate's connectors are more basic. They cover the standard create/read/update/delete operations, but they often lack the fine-grained control that complex workflows need.

Make.com takes the opposite approach. Its connectors tend to expose more of each platform's API, which means more options for filtering, transforming, and routing data. For workflows that span multiple vendors (accounting to CRM to email marketing to e-commerce), Make.com is usually the more capable choice.

Workflow design

Power Automate uses a vertical, card-based designer. Each step stacks below the previous one. Branching is supported, but the visual layout gets cluttered once a workflow has more than ten or twelve steps. Debugging is functional but not intuitive, as you often need to expand each card to see what happened.

Make.com uses a visual canvas where you drag modules and draw connections between them. Parallel paths, error handling branches, and iterators (loops over arrays) are all visible at a glance. For complex workflows, this makes a significant difference in readability and maintenance.

For simple two-to-five step automations (new email arrives, create a task, send a notification), both platforms are equally capable. The design differences start to matter when workflows grow.

Pricing

This is where the comparison gets interesting for small businesses.

Power Automate is included with most Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium plans. If you already pay for M365, you get Power Automate at no extra cost for standard connectors. Premium connectors (Salesforce, SAP, custom APIs) require a separate Power Automate licence starting around $22 AUD per user per month.

Make.com has a free tier (two active scenarios, 1,000 operations per month) and paid plans starting at around $14 AUD per month. Pricing scales with the number of operations (data processing steps), not the number of users.

The practical implication: if you are an M365 shop, Power Automate is effectively free for most internal automations. If you are not on M365, or your workflows span non-Microsoft tools, Make.com's pricing is straightforward and predictable.

Where each platform struggles

Power Automate's weaknesses:

  • Non-Microsoft integrations are often shallow. Complex operations require custom API calls (HTTP connector), which demand technical knowledge.
  • The designer becomes hard to navigate with complex, branching workflows.
  • Error handling is less flexible than Make.com. Retry logic exists but is harder to customise.
  • Testing individual steps mid-flow requires running the entire flow from the trigger.

Make.com's weaknesses:

  • No native Microsoft integration depth. You can connect to Outlook and SharePoint, but you lose the deep features (adaptive cards, document generation, granular permissions) that Power Automate offers.
  • The operation-based pricing model can get expensive for high-volume workflows (thousands of records processed daily).
  • No built-in approval or forms system. You need external tools for those.
  • The learning curve is steeper. The visual canvas is powerful but less intuitive for beginners than Power Automate's step-by-step approach.

Can you use both?

Yes, and many businesses do. A common pattern is using Power Automate for internal Microsoft workflows (approvals, Teams notifications, SharePoint document management) and Make.com for external integrations (CRM to accounting, website forms to marketing tools, e-commerce order processing).

The two platforms can even trigger each other via webhooks, so a workflow that starts in Power Automate can hand off to Make.com for the steps that need deeper third-party access, and vice versa.

Making the decision

The right choice depends on your existing tools, not on which platform has more features.

If Microsoft 365 is the centre of your operations, start with Power Automate. You are already paying for it, and the Microsoft-native integrations are unmatched.

If your stack is mixed (which is the reality for most Australian small businesses), start with Make.com. The broader integration support and visual workflow design will serve you better.

If you are not sure which fits your setup, an Automation Assessment is a free session where we look at your current tools and recommend the platform (or combination) that makes the most sense. No lock-in, no sales pitch, just practical advice based on what you are actually using.

We have also written a Make.com vs Zapier comparison if Zapier is on your shortlist.