Three platforms dominate small business automation, they all demonstrate well, and they are genuinely different in ways the marketing does not make obvious.
Here is how to choose, including the licensing details that cause most of the unpleasant surprises.
Power Automate
Choose it if your business runs on Microsoft 365, which for most UK small businesses it does.
The decisive advantage is that a useful subset is already in your licence. Flows using standard connectors — Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Forms, Planner, Excel — cost nothing extra. For a business whose automations are mostly internal, that covers a great deal.
It also sits inside your tenancy, which matters for data residency and for anybody who has to answer client security questionnaires. Your data is not passing through a third party.
The trap is the standard and premium connector split. Anything reaching outside the Microsoft world — a SQL database, an arbitrary HTTP request, most third-party platforms — is premium and needs an additional licence. Roughly £12 per user per month, or around £80 per flow per month.
The per-flow licence is frequently the better buy and is widely overlooked: it covers everybody using that flow rather than each person individually, so one important business-wide automation costs £80 rather than £12 times your headcount.
Where it is weaker: the interface is less pleasant than the alternatives, error handling takes more effort to get right and complex flows become genuinely hard to read. More on getting started is in five flows worth building first.
Zapier
Choose it if your business runs on a spread of smaller cloud tools and you want the shortest path from idea to working automation.
Zapier's advantages are breadth and simplicity. It connects to a very large number of applications, including many niche ones the others do not support and somebody non-technical can genuinely build a working automation in an afternoon.
Typically from around £25 a month for a small business plan.
The trap is task-based pricing. Every step in every run counts, so a flow that triggers frequently or has many steps consumes allowance quickly. Businesses regularly find their bill has tripled as usage grew, and the cost is not obvious at design time.
Where it is weaker: complex logic. Branching, loops and meaningful data transformation are possible and awkward, and past a certain complexity you are fighting the tool.
Make
Choose it if your flows involve real complexity or higher volumes and you want more capability per pound.
Make's visual builder shows the whole flow as a diagram, which makes complex logic far easier to follow than either alternative. Branching, iteration, error handling and data transformation are all first-class rather than bolted on.
Pricing is by operation at a lower unit rate than Zapier, so it is usually cheaper at volume.
The trap is the learning curve. It is not difficult, but it is not the afternoon that Zapier is, and a business without anybody willing to invest that time will not get value from it.
Where it is weaker: fewer connectors than Zapier, though it covers the mainstream well.
A decision in three questions
- Is your business on Microsoft 365 and are your automations mostly internal? Power Automate. You have already paid for it.
- Do you need to connect several third-party cloud tools, with straightforward logic? Zapier.
- Is the logic complex, or the volume high? Make.
Most UK small businesses land on Power Automate with one or two premium flow licences, and that is usually the right answer.
The platform matters much less than whether the automation is owned by a service account, alerts on failure and has been written down. Businesses agonise over the first and skip the other three.
When none of them is the answer
All three are integration platforms. They excel at moving information between systems that already have connectors, and they are the wrong tool when:
- Volumes are high. Per-task pricing that is trivial at a hundred runs a month is significant at fifty thousand.
- A system has no connector. Working around this with generic HTTP steps produces something fragile and hard to maintain.
- Data needs real transformation. Matching records across systems, deduplicating, reconciling. These platforms can do it badly.
- The process is business-critical. When a silent failure would genuinely damage the business, you want proper error handling, logging, alerting and version control.
At that point you want a custom system integration. It costs more up front and less over five years, and it does not have a per-task meter running.
What to do first
Do not choose a platform. Choose a process, using the method in where to start, then pick the platform that suits it. Businesses that select a platform first end up bending their processes to fit a tool they have already paid for.
If you would like a straight recommendation for your business, our business automation team will look at what you actually need to connect and tell you which of the three fits — or whether none of them does. Get in touch.
