Make vs Trigger.dev
Both are automation tools. Here is what separates them.
| Make | Trigger.dev | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Automation | Automation |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Price from | Freemium | Freemium |
| Upvotes | 9 | 8 |
| What it does | Visual automations with branching, loops and error handling that hold up. | Long-running background jobs in your own codebase, with retries that work. |
What Make is
Make is a visual automation platform for connecting apps, data sources and AI models into scenarios, its name for a workflow drawn on a canvas. Alongside scenarios, Make AI Agents can act and orchestrate workflows across the connected app catalogue. A scenario is assembled from modules and control blocks: routers for branching, iterators for stepping through lists, error handlers for when a call fails, and notes for documenting the canvas in place. HTTP and webhook modules let a scenario call any API and be triggered by an external system, so a missing connector is not a dead end. Make Code runs custom JavaScript or Python inside a scenario, AI Mapping transforms and maps data between apps, and custom apps can be built to reach proprietary in house systems. A templates library provides prebuilt scenarios to start from, and an analytics dashboard tracks scenario performance and provides observability. More than 3,000 verified prebuilt integrations are available, grouped into categories including AI and automation, commerce, communication, CRM and sales, marketing, HR and operations, and finance and accounting. More than 300 of those are generative AI apps. Maia builds automations and agents from a natural language conversation, and the Make MCP Server exposes existing scenarios as callable actions to AI clients, which turns work already built into tools an AI client can invoke. Make Grid gives a single view across an organisation's whole automation estate. Billing runs on credits, and each module action, adding a row to a Google Sheet for instance, counts as one credit. The Free plan costs 0 USD a month and includes up to 1,000 credits, but holds a team to 2 active scenarios, a minimum interval of 15 minutes between runs, 5 minutes of execution per run and 5 MB file transfers. The Make plan starts at 9 USD a month for 5,000 credits and lifts all four: unlimited active scenarios, a 1 minute minimum interval, 40 minutes of execution per run and 500 MB file transfers. The Company tier is custom priced and raises the file transfer cap to 1,000 MB. Annual billing saves 15 percent or more against monthly. Credits are the number to watch, because scenarios stop running once a team's credits are exhausted and stay stopped until more are added. Account owners are notified at 75 percent and 90 percent of consumption, and credits can be topped up automatically. Make holds SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 attestations, supports GDPR obligations, and offers single sign on, encryption and role based access control.
What Trigger.dev is
Trigger.dev runs long-running background jobs written in your own codebase, without you managing the servers they run on. It is for the work that does not fit in a web request: sending an email campaign, processing video, running a compute-heavy job, or anything that takes longer than a serverless function will allow. The central claim is that tasks have no timeouts. A job can run indefinitely, and a Checkpoint-Resume system means a long task can be suspended and picked up again rather than restarted from the beginning. Every task can be retried on failure, which is the part most homegrown queue setups get wrong. Concurrency is controlled with custom rules, so one noisy job cannot starve the rest, and tasks can be triggered in batches. Because tasks are code in your repository, they are version-controlled like the rest of it. They can be run and tested locally before anything is deployed, then deployed to staging or production, across multiple regions including AWS US West in Oregon. Python scripts can be executed alongside the JavaScript. Human-in-the-loop workflows are supported for jobs that need somebody to approve a step partway through. Operationally it provides queues, logging, tracing and observability, so a failed run can be traced rather than guessed at, and there is a CLI command that reports on health. The dashboard can be customised, including the side menu, and several profiles can be kept for managing more than one account. Plans are drawn on concurrent runs rather than task counts. Free allows 20 concurrent runs, Hobby 50, and Pro 200 with the option to buy additional bundles; Enterprise is custom priced with a configurable ceiling. Pro adds dedicated Slack support. Every plan is limited to 1,500 API requests per minute. Trigger.dev can also be self-hosted, which matters for teams whose jobs touch data that cannot leave their own infrastructure.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.