You are obviously active users of Make and participate on the community, so I wanted to hear what you think of the product. What do you love? What is not so great? What can be improved? Where do you get stuck the most?
My own personal view is that I think it is a terrific platform with a ton of capabilities. I do think it is oversold as a no-code platform. It is relatively low-code but it is pretty difficult to build anything useful without understanding data structures and how to manage them in Make. I regularly see non-programmers struggle, and even programmers have a hard time getting their head around how data flows between modules and how to wrangle it.
Make is a terrific platform to develop without having to write code, and less of a no-code platform. The difference is very small, but very important. Think of where people come from before they were using Make.
If you donât know how to code and donât want to learn it, you will probably search for no-code platforms. If you have a background that is lacking technical- or programming knowledge, the Make learning curve can become steep (not at first, but when you are trying to do advanced things). Can become, because I see that a lot of people are attracted to the functionalities and decide to stay here and put in the time and effort to master it.
What people struggle most with is understanding coding principles in a no-code form, which is a concept that is applied throughout Make. It sounds cruel, but Make is a very nice JavaScript wrapper. If you donât know about functions, arrays, operators, constructors, JSON (and many more programming principles), you might have a hard time comprehending the functionalities, and thus limiting solutions you can think of to build. I think Make should put more effort in teaching coding principles in no-code form.
If you have a background in development, Make is a heavenly tool! You know the traditional way of programming, and now you can achieve 99% of the things you could with your own code, with Make, saving a lot of time and investment while using it. I know many developers that supplement their existing environments with Make.
If you compare it to other tools in the market, you can conclude that Zapier is a no-code platform. You donât need to understand or know anything technical to use it, but it has its limitations. You can only build what is pre-built. Make is a platform to develop, without writing code. There is more freedom in connecting with any API you want and building highly advanced and customized workflows. (also I find it more intuitive, cheaper, and Make is GDPR-compliant).
As someone who build Custom Apps, I know there arenât many APIâs I cannot connect to. But this is a highly advanced usage of Make, not many people build their own apps. I built apps for companies so that their users have the freedom to use the easy drag-and-drop interface. And this is a mutual beneficial relationship I have with most of my customers. They want the ease of use, but Make has some concepts and principles that are not that clear to everyone, so they ask me to build, create or teach them.
Just as Webflow moved from marketing themselves as âno-code webbuilderâ to being âa visual development platform that empowers designers to build with the full power of code â without writing any.â, I think the next step for Make will be similar. Focussing on more high-touch and enterprise customers, they will focus more on the advantages and less on the underlying buzzword that âno-codeâ is.
Because in the end, it is all code. Even with Make. And I love Make.
I agree with the No-Code part. In fact, the more coding you know, the better Make becomes as a tool, since you can just write the functions and calls you need directly. But I get why they are marketing it as No-Code.
I do hope they expand on the logging function a bit - I really donât like manually going through hundreds of logs to find the execution I need, there should be at least some search functionality there.
Also I donât know if Iâm just not looking at the right places, but some feedback on what is currently being worked on (with a generic timeline) would be nice. We deployed a custom Youtube app for a client the week before the official one came outâŚ
Overall great product though, we are automating more and more parts of our own business as well using it.
It is interesting because Make introduces the modules and all the principles with a big assumption in mind â people that come to Make have some programming principles.
I wonder why would people who know how to code use Make? I have a feeling it is because they donât know how to code very well or have the tools/infrastructure and they can do some very powerful things with Make.
It would be REALLY nice. I know some partners get an early view of some of the items coming out but the high level roadmap doesnât incldue the tons of changes they make every month.
The documentation has been steadily improving over the past year too and itâs always interesting to revisit some of it because it is always useful to point to it for new users.
I think of Zapier as automation with training wheels. You can actually do a lot with it â and I recommend it to people who I know can probably be more successful with it to do what they want as long as what they want can be explained in maybe 2-3 sentences. Any more complex set of processes or when the zapier automation has reached its peak capabilities you have to move to something like Make.
I seriously wonder whether some of the Makers on this discussion forum could be better served with Zapier at the outset.
There is one thing that does somewhat annoy me about Makeâs community efforts:
The community rules specifically state that noone is allowed to market their services outside of the âHire a Proâ category. This is not really in alignment with the fact that Make is targeted at enterprise use as well as the fact they have a partner program with over 300 registered partners all around the world. To date, a very small segment of the partner community has participated in this burgeoning community as a result.
I can see today the value to Make (reduce support overhead, increase marketing visibility). I can see the value for users (alternative support channel). But I do not clearly see a value for Make Partners. I hope the alignment between Make, the community of users and Make Partners comes into better focus with incentives for all being clear and relevant.
I have one more concern about the pricing model â what is the real difference between a Core and a Pro plan. The Pro plan is really not quantifiably different than a Core plan, but usage of operations flexibly arranged over a year is much better than a use it or lose it 10k operations per month model.
Iâd vote for merging the Core and Pro plans together and hopefully giving people more capability in the Pro plan over the years (say access to user defined functions!)
I had no programming background or knowledge prior to using any no code automation tools when I started to use Zapier. When I discovered Make it was a no brainer with itâs pricing and flexibility. Just taking the extra time to learn a little more about programing and coding opened up many more use cases for me. Combine that with using no code app builders and low code backend builders like Xano and buildship what you can create is endless!
A big reason why the guidelines were revised is because some users began taking advantage of the community as a marketing channel. Users were replying to absolute every topic, some from months or even years ago, some still unanswered and others already resolved, or were hijacking conversations just to be able to mention their own contact info and resources in their signature. It became more of a competition than a genuine and helpful dynamic.
As a partner, I can tell you that this community does not generate anything at all in terms of leads or revenue. I mostly do it for the different use-cases that come by and sharing knowledge that is not that clear from Makeâs own documentation.
I must say I see some changes in topisc. I liked it better when people posted topics like âI am stuck in Make, can you help me with this part?â, instead of âHere is a wild idea, tell me how I build everything please thank youâ.
I am also strongly opinionated against generative AI, so you will not see me answer questions about using AI to scrape, write or create content to fill the internet with mediocre .
Indeed, so instead of contacting those users and policing it a bit, they laid down a hammer. I am always of the opinion that some Makers will turn their knowledge into a side gig or even their own business. Many Makers will be loyal to the platform if it becomes a tool that forms their livelihood.
I also think that users themselves abuse the community with the âhere is a wild idea, tell me how to build everything, thank you.â Some of them even have clients who asked them to build it and they use the community this way. Will we police questions like this too? I doubt it. I ignore their questions â or point them to my video series as a form of âclapbackâ and a gentle way to answer âfigure it out yourself please.â
And excellent point about AI, but I am afraid that pandoraâs box is wide open and there is not much we can do about it. Great thoughts!
To be clear â just because it doesnât generate leads for you doesnât mean it canât generate leads for any partner. There are many partners that do generate leads from the community.
I must say I see some changes in topisc. I liked it better when people posted topics like âI am stuck in Make, can you help me with this part? â, instead of âHere is a wild idea, tell me how I build everything please thank you â.
I to ignore these questions since no one seems to put any real thought into them.
I honeslty do not mind these questions in the community. It helps me understand what people need building and what apps I should invest in learning if i havenât used them before.
Of course I wouldnât build what they request, but I would think about how it can be done from a very broad persepective and share that knowledge. Or refer them to hire a professional.
Make offers almost unlimited possibilities with additional code or custom apps and is a great alternative to traditional business process automation methods.
It eliminates the need for infrastructure management and maintenance, which are typically time and budget-consuming.
The rapid deployment capability also positively impacts budget requirements.
Moreover, building POC within Make is quicker than ever. You can validate your idea without wasting money on complex IT projects.
I love how Make can transform businesses, especially SMBs/SMEs, by saving time and resources. When combined with complementary tools, it can revolutionize how these companies operate in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago and previously reserved only for large corporations with the budget and resources to implement their own systems.
I totally agree that it isnât as easy as some say, and sooner or later, anyone can face technical challenges.
However, in my personal opinion, Make may face some minor challenges in the coming months due to its own success and, as you @alex.newpath perfectly named it, being oversold as a no-code platform.
I think itâs worth mentioning that what I describe below impacts only business clients.
The extremely low entry barrier means users donât need weeks or months of coding education or infrastructure knowledge.
This has led to an influx of inexperienced freelancers and self-proclaimed âexpertsâ promoting Make as a simple, profitable solution for âside hustlesâ or opening âAI automation agenciesâ.
Their lack of experience in business processes and/or coding often results in useless automations and ill-conceived solutions.
Letâs face it - in a business environment, solutions should not only perform their task but also be reliable.
And this needs proper planning and implementation. In 99% of cases, it demands from the user much more than connecting a few modules, which is usually what courses teach.
This situation can potentially negatively impact Makeâs reputation.
How?
When Make-based solutions fail, non-technical business owners and CEOs often blame the platform rather than the implementer. Because thatât main difference between no-code/low-code and âclassicâ programming.
Recently, Iâve noticed an increase in complaints over the internet that no-code automations are overhyped and require constant improvements and repairs.
For example, we recently had a client who invested heavily in automating their sales process and customer support processes. The agency âforgotâ about crucial aspects of customer supportâs operations, resulting in a week-long business paralysis while restoring the previous setup.
They assumed that an eCommerce brand can have only two types of questions from clients - pure sales (I need this and that) and after-sale ones (when my parcel will arrive). They did not consider, for example, technical questions before making a purchase. So how they are supposed to deliver any reliable scenarioâŚ
And unlike graphic design, where Photoshop isnât blamed for unprofessional work, Makeâs reputation can suffer from poor implementations. It is really hard to explain how everything works and how things influence themselves to someone who donât know what operating system they have.
And in my opinion, thatâs the biggest issue right now which I face as Make user.
What I wish to have:
Built in version control.
Even to simply comment what I changed in each save/ version within Make. Solution which Autodesk offers in for example Fusion360 would be awesome.
In my opinion, there are also a few other reasons, one of them being how quickly you can validate your ideas. And most importantly, how easy it is to maintain them. With Make, in few minutes, I was able to automate internal processes that manually take less than 10 minutes a month. With âclassicâ coding, it wouldnât have been profitable at all.
Second- you can use ready modules, for example Airtable or Google. Without spending time for building 2FA.
Same here. I simply like to challenge myself and- if I have time and can help- simply do it.
I could not agree more. But thats hottest topic on TikTok With spamming (because mostly it isn prospecting of any kind) companies scrapped from Google Maps.
I admire that you do not mind these questions and use the opportunity to nudge people in the right direction.
For me, it comes across as a disinterest in the platform and disregard for the amount of knowledge it takes to build something advanced in Make. I admit it is probably my interpretation, but when somebody asks f.e. âI want to connect Facebook and Instagram with Google Sheets so that I can post content that is created in ChatGPT, please helpâ or âI want to connect WhatsApp to Airtable to do outreach, how do I do this?â (both with no additional context) it is clear that they didnât try anything themselves.
The easiest thing to do in Make is to start clicking and building. Why should I bother giving instructions (for free!) from the get-go, when you didnât even try anything yourself? You didnât even do a search on the community before you asked the exact same question that has been asked 10 times last week? Or watched one of the hundred instruction videoâs on Youtube? Such a get-rich-quick mindset, lol.
Anyway, although those question come by regularly, there are a lot of genuine people who do try themselves. We are all at a different phase in our own learning path and I like to help absolute beginners, so I must not upset myself too much with the bad apples who try the easy road.
I agree with all your points 100% and especially this. Customers ask me why I spend 50% of the time designing flowcharts and talking to stakeholders about the process before I even create the Make account. Well, because building a scenario is the easy part. The question what to build takes careful planning and designing.
It doesnât help if the CEO saw someone build an advanced scenario within 10 minutes on Youtube. âWhy do you not just copy thatâ lol
Well said!
If this part is done correctly everything works- even triggered dozens of times each day for years.
To be honest, even with chrome devtools it is easier and quicker for me to setup everything from scratch/ copy some modules than using BP⌠They are great for version control and backup.
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With spamming (because mostly it isn prospecting of any kind) companies scrapped from Google Maps.