Albato vs Make: Free Triggers or a Branching Canvas

The short answer: if your flows are short and frequent, such as a form fill that becomes a CRM contact and a Slack note, Albato is the easier meter to live with: the trigger is free, and Pro costs $22 a month on monthly billing for 1,000 transactions, checked on 26 October 2026 on Albato's pricing page. If your flows branch, loop over lists or need an agent that reads your brand files before it acts, Make is the better canvas for the job, and its Free plan gives 1,000 credits a month to prove it (Make pricing).

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What Albato changes is the meter. It bills the steps after the trigger, never the check itself, while Make bills each module run and in return shows every branch of a flow on one screen.

What decides it:

1. The cost of one lead, counted both ways. Albato charges a transaction for each step that runs after the trigger (pricing FAQ). Make counts an operation each time a module processes a bundle, and a trigger as one operation per check (operations guide). For example, a trigger plus three actions for 300 leads a month is 3 x 300 = 900 transactions on Albato. On Make it is 4 x 300 = 1,200 credits if each lead starts its own run, already past the Free plan's 1,000.
2. The apps you already pay for. Albato lists 1,000+ apps on its pricing page and Make 3,000+ native apps on its own. Find your CRM and form tool in both before comparing anything else.
3. How fast a new record has to move. Albato checks API triggers every 15 minutes on Free, 5 on Pro, 3 on Teams and 1 on Custom (pricing page). Make runs a new scenario every 15 minutes by default, and the shortest interval depends on the plan (scheduling guide). Webhook triggers start at once on both.
4. Where you will see that it worked. Albato keeps execution logs for 7 days on Free and 30 on Pro (pricing page). Make prints operations and credits above each module after a run (operations guide). Size the plan from a week of those counts.

Side by side

Three differences that settle it

A trigger that costs nothing, or a trigger that counts

Start here. Make's operations guide counts a polling trigger as one operation per check, so a scenario that looks for new rows every 15 minutes runs 96 checks a day before it moves a single record. Albato's pricing FAQ says triggers consume no transactions at all. For a flow that rarely finds new data, that alone can decide the bill. For a flow that always finds data, the two meters land close together, and the canvas matters more.

What each canvas lets you build

Make's scenarios are built for branching: routers split a flow (router guide), filters stop bundles that fail a condition (filtering), and data stores hold records across scenarios (data stores). Albato's builder covers the everyday tools, delays, format changes, if-then conditions and filters (first automation guide), and its Copilot drafts an automation from a plain description (Albato).

What an AI step costs on each

Albato's AI Agent step costs 3 transactions a run however many tools it calls, plus one transaction per 2,000 tokens if it uses Albato AI; an outside model such as OpenAI or Claude adds no token charge on Albato's side (agent guide). Make's agent uses 1 credit per operation, plus credits for tokens when it runs on Make's AI Provider; a custom OpenAI or Claude connection, available on paid plans, moves the token bill to that provider (credit usage for agents).

One agent step, with the human check

Albato documents this job: a new HubSpot contact arrives, and the agent sends a Slack notification if the person asked for a demo, adds senior job titles to a high-priority Google Sheet, and does nothing when neither holds (agent guide). The check is the Slack message itself: a person reads the note and the record before anyone calls the lead. Make documents a longer version: the agent researches the company, scores the lead, saves a Gmail draft and posts it to a private Slack channel for you to send or bin (sales outreach agent). The agent never presses send in either.

What it costs

Albato, checked on 26 October 2026 on its pricing page, in USD a month:

Make's pricing page loads its plan prices with a script behind a security check, and they could not be read from it on 26 October 2026, so they are left out rather than guessed. Its text does state that annual payment costs less than monthly and that credits expire at the end of the term.

Albato is built so that an undersized package never stops a flow: it keeps running on extra transactions priced 50% above the package, per the pricing FAQ. That is kind to the workflow and expensive for whoever sized the plan, so check the transaction count weekly for the first month. Albato takes half as much again on every transaction past the package, and because nothing stops, nobody is ever made to resize the plan.

The free test first

Before paying either vendor, build the same flow twice on the free plans: Albato's Free plan has no time limit and needs no card (Albato), and Make's Free plan carries 1,000 credits a month (Make pricing). Two steps is Albato's free ceiling, so test a trigger and one action, run it for a week, and compare the counts in Albato's log with the credits in Make's run history. That week tells you which meter your volume suits, at no cost.

Choose Albato if your job is

• Moving records between everyday apps, such as forms to CRM or CRM to a messenger, at a low, predictable price.
• Running flows whose trigger fires often and finds data rarely.
• Letting a non-technical marketer describe a flow to Copilot and refine it.

Choose Make if your job is

• Building flows with several branches, loops over line items, or stored state between runs.
• Running an agent that draws on knowledge files such as brand guidelines and calls whole scenarios as tools.
• Connecting a niche app that only Make's larger directory carries.

FAQ

Is Albato's free plan time-limited?

No. Albato states there is no time limit and no card required (Albato); the limits are 100 transactions, 5 active automations and two steps each (pricing page).

Can Make's agent run on the Free plan?

Yes, with Make's AI Provider. The agent app is in open beta and available on all plans; connecting your own OpenAI or Claude account needs a paid plan (Make agent intro).

What happens to webhooks when Make runs out of credits?

They wait in a queue up to the plan's queue size and are processed once credits are added; polling scenarios then search from their last successful run (Make pricing).