We’re doing a serious evaluation of moving away from Make and our decision hinges partly on how disruptive migration would be. The key question: how much of our existing workflow investment can we preserve?
Make has been solid for us but we’ve hit scaling limits. Licensing is getting expensive and some of our more complex workflows are expensive to run because of how Make charges per operation.
What’s making me hesitant is that migrating fifteen established workflows is not trivial work. If we have to rebuild 70% of them, that’s a significant project. If we can port 80% with minimal changes, that’s very different math.
I’m trying to understand the technical reality. How different is the workflow logic syntax between platforms? Are data mapping patterns compatible? Do the error handling approaches translate? Or is this more of a structural difference where the concepts are the same but the implementation is fundamentally different?
Be honest: of the workflows you’ve ported from Make or Zapier to other platforms, what percentage required zero modifications? What percentage needed light tweaking? And what percentage basically required rebuilding?
We migrated about eighteen Make workflows and got real data on this. It was messier than I expected.
Simple workflows—integrations with minimal logic like “new row in Sheet X trigger Slack notification to channel Y”—ported almost perfectly. Maybe 95% worked unchanged. We literally copied the logic and it ran.
Medium complexity workflows—multi-step with conditional branching and some data transformation—about 50% ported with minimal tweaks. Data mapping usually worked, but logic conditions needed adjustment because the conditional structure is different. Not huge changes but not zero changes either.
Complex workflows with heavy data transformation and nested conditionals? Basically had to rebuild. Maybe 20% of the logic flow ported directly. The architectural concepts translated but the specific implementation was different enough that reusing the workflow structure was often slower than building from scratch.
Another issue: Make’s specific modules sometimes don’t have direct equivalents in other platforms. If you were using specific Make integrations heavily, those might require different approaches. We had to refactor three workflows because the integrations they relied on needed different connector setups.
Overall across eighteen workflows: four required zero changes, eight needed light tweaking (20-30% rework), six needed significant rebuilding (60%+ rework).
So about 22% fully portable, 44% mostly portable, 33% basically new builds. Tax your planning accordingly.
The honest answer is “it depends on your workflow complexity and how well the platforms’ logic structures align.”
We ported workflows and found the migration tax was highest for workflows that were heavily optimized for Make’s specific operation-counting model. Workflows that were elegantly designed to minimize operations needed rethinking because the new platform’s pricing doesn’t penalize complexity the same way.
Some workflows actually looked worse when ported because they were solving for Make’s operational economics rather than solving the business problem elegantly. We took that opportunity to rebuild them properly instead of just migrating the optimization inefficiencies.
Data mapping usually translated well. If you use consistent field naming and structure, that stuff ports pretty cleanly.
Conditional logic was the biggest friction point. Different platforms structure branching and condition evaluation differently. What’s three nested-if blocks in Make might be one decision block in another platform, or might require a different approach entirely.
I’d estimate about 30% of workflows ported directly, 50% needed adjustment, 20% needed significant rework. Your mileage depends on how your teams write workflows. Conservative, simple workflows port better. Heavily optimized, complex workflows usually need more rework.
We migrated about twelve Make workflows. Zero required absolutely no changes. Every single one needed at least minor adjustments. The range was from “change two field mappings” to “completely rebuild the architecture.”
Simple workflows: maybe 80% similarity, needed 20% tweaking on average.
Medium complexity: about 50% similarity, 50% rework.
Complex: about 20% reusable, 80% needed rebuilding.
Data transformation logic ported better than I expected. Conditional routing needed rethinking. Error handling patterns were different enough to usually require adjustment.
Budget-wise, assume 25-30% of your migration effort is admin and learning curve, and 70-75% is actual workflow rebuilding or significant modification. That’s probably the most realistic planning assumption.
We migrated eight Make workflows and found it was more straightforward than expected because of how the builder is designed. The visual interface is similar enough that the logic transfer is usually intuitive.
Simple integrations ported almost perfectly. The API connections, data mapping, basic conditional logic—that translated directly. Maybe 85% of the structure copied over without issues.
Medium complexity workflows needed adjustment but not massive rebuilding. The execution-based pricing model means you can structure workflows differently than you would in Make, which actually simplified some of our migrations. Workflows that were convoluted in Make because they were trying to minimize operations became cleaner when we ported them.
Complex workflows with heavy nested logic needed architectural review. But the builder’s conditional logic structure was actually clearer than Make’s in some cases, so the rethinking was often an improvement rather than just rework.
Important note: the new platform understands JavaScript, which gave us options Make doesn’t have. Some workflows we ported cleanly became elegant one-line scripts because we could use code for what Make required two dozen operation steps to do.
Across our eight workflows: one ported with zero changes, four needed light modification (20% changes), three needed significant architecture review (around 50% rework). Overall better portability than I expected based on industry experience.
Data mapping translated perfectly. Error handling needed slight changes because the exception structure is different. Those were trivial updates.
If your Make workflows are reasonably well-designed, budget 30-40% migration overhead on average. Some will be faster, some slower depending on complexity. The builder’s similarity to Make actually helps—it’s not like learning a completely different interface.