Quilter vs Make
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Quilter and Make.
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Verdict: Make wins
Make scores 4.2/5, edging out Quilter at 4.0/5. Ops-minded individuals and small teams who want visual, branching automation with real debugging and do not need self-hosting.
Quilter AI-powered PCB design automation for engineers | Make Visual automation platform for everyone | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.0 (1 review) | 4.2 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best For | Hardware teams with real layout bottlenecks — startups and mid-size electronics firms iterating multiple boards — that use Altium, Allegro, Xpedition or KiCad and want to trade weeks of manual placement and routing for hours of candidate review. | Ops-minded individuals and small teams who want visual, branching automation with real debugging and do not need self-hosting. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tier | no codefree tier |
| Visit Quilter → | Visit Make → |
Quilter
Pros
- + Per-project billing counts only unrouted pins at upload — in my test a pre-routed power section correctly reduced the design pin count, letting engineers hand off tedious routing while keeping critical RF/power work themselves
- + Unlimited free iterations per project (within 10% BOM change) plus parallel jobs meant comparing a 4-layer and 6-layer variant of one board overnight at no extra cost
- + Outputs land in native Altium, Cadence Allegro, Siemens Xpedition or KiCad formats — no proprietary lock-in, and files opened cleanly for DRC and fab prep
- + The two-to-five-cycle expectation and the circuit comprehension report are honest about where human review stays mandatory, versus one-shot-layout marketing elsewhere in this category
- + Deployment flexibility with a managed AWS cloud (SOC 2 Type 2, isolated workspaces) or self-hosted option where board data never leaves your infrastructure
Cons
- - No public per-board prices — cost is a sales conversation despite the transparent pin-count model, so budgeting is opaque before first contact
- - Free-tier designs may be made public, which excludes confidential work from the zero-cost path
- - A BOM change beyond 10% of the upload starts a new billable project, which penalises respun designs
- - Automated layout is not design validation: DRC-clean candidates still need thermal, EMC and DFM review, and the vendor's own guidance expects 2–5 iteration cycles
- - Supports four ECAD tools for output; teams on Eagle, Proteus or browser-based suites face import friction, and the company is young enough that its long-term track record is still being built
Make
Pros
- + Visual bundle-level debugger: in my router test I traced dropped records to a timezone filter in under a minute, something Zapier's flat step log makes slow
- + Credit pricing stays cheap at realistic volumes — 10,000 credits/month tiers started at $9–$12/mo billed annually at time of writing (make.com/en/pricing)
- + HTTP, JSON, and XML modules are strong enough to replace custom code for most API glue work in my builds
- + Error handling is explicit: scoped error handlers and break directives mean one bad record does not kill a whole run
- + Celonis ownership and a product dating to 2012 (as Integromat) give it one of the longer reliability track records in the category
Cons
- - Polling triggers burn credits on every scheduled check whether or not data changed; my naive 1-minute poll ate budget until I moved to webhooks
- - No self-hosting and no source-available license — cloud-only, which rules it out for data-residency requirements
- - Run history on the free plan is short (three days at time of writing), so debugging real incidents needs a paid plan
- - The concepts curve (bundles vs arrays, iterators, aggregators) is steeper than Zapier's; expect a week before complex flows feel natural
- - Pricing is inconsistent across sessions — Make has served different Core/Pro/Teams price cards ($9/$16/$29 vs $12/$21/$38 annually), so confirm your quote
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Quilter or Make?▼
Make scores higher at 4.2/5 vs 4.0/5 for Quilter, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Quilter and Make?▼
Quilter: Quilter automates printed circuit board placement and routing using physics simulation, producing layout candidates that work with Altium, Cadence and Xpedition. Make: Make is a visual automation platform where you connect apps and build multi-step workflows by drawing them on a canvas.
Is Quilter or Make more affordable?▼
Quilter starts at €0/mo, Make starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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