I’ve been using different workflow automation tools for a while now and honestly, I’m getting pretty frustrated with all of them. Zapier, n8n, Make - they all have issues that drive me crazy.
Let’s be real about what sucks:
Zapier problems:
Billing tricks where you get locked into expensive plans
Support takes forever to respond and doesn’t help much
Workflows break randomly and you don’t know until damage is done
Costs way too much when you actually start using it seriously
n8n issues:
Crashes when handling larger datasets
Self hosting becomes a full time job
Way too complicated if you’re not technical
Finding bugs in workflows is nearly impossible
Make complaints:
Jobs get stuck and need manual restarts constantly
Interface gets confusing with bigger workflows
Error messages don’t explain what went wrong
Burns through usage limits super fast
What I want to know from you:
What missing feature would solve your biggest headache?
What nasty surprise did you discover too late?
What would you build differently if starting fresh?
What limitation made you switch tools completely?
Really curious what pain points others are dealing with because I’m starting to think maybe these tools just aren’t ready for serious use yet.
Been through this exact frustration cycle myself. What almost made me quit entirely was the complete lack of proper testing environments across these platforms. You’re basically forced to test everything in production, which is insane when you’re dealing with customer data or financial transactions. My breaking point was when a Make scenario silently failed for three days because of an API rate limit change. I only discovered it when clients started complaining. No proper alerting, no rollback capabilities, nothing. Just silent failure and data loss. What finally helped was accepting that these tools are more like prototyping platforms than enterprise solutions. I started building redundancy into everything - backup workflows, manual checks, and way more monitoring than should be necessary. It’s annoying but necessary if you want to sleep at night. The missing feature that would solve most problems? Proper version control and staging environments. Being able to test changes before they go live would eliminate 80% of the headaches we all deal with.
ugh, totally feel ya on that! losing work like that is the worst. it’s like they expect us to be devs just to use their stuff. and seriously, who thought “no-code” meant digging into APIs and JSON? such a letdown. we need a better way to save our work!
The pricing on these platforms is straight-up misleading - that’s what almost made me quit automation completely. They lure you in with decent free tiers, then boom - you’re dropping hundreds a month because they charge for every little operation. Vendor lock-in hit me the hardest though. I spent months building complex workflows on one platform, then found out I couldn’t export anything when I tried to switch. My workflows were stuck there forever. And nobody mentions how terrible the debugging is. When a multi-step workflow breaks, you’re stuck playing detective with garbage logs and error messages that make no sense. I’ve burned entire days hunting down bugs that were just simple config issues. Give me a platform with honest usage tracking, real export options, and actual debugging tools instead of green checkmarks that lie to your face until everything crashes.