Make.com vs BotFerry: build the relay, or rent it
Make can do this. Its Slack action takes a thread timestamp, so an operator's reply can land in the right thread. The scenario that keeps track of which thread belongs to which is yours to build and yours to maintain, and Make bills you for every module that runs inside it.
Prices checked 28 July 2026. Written by the BotFerry team, so read the Make.com column as a competitor's account of a competitor and follow the source link before you decide.
The short version
Pick Make if the relay is one step in something bigger. Post to the thread and open the Jira issue and page the on-call engineer and write the row in the sheet. Make reaches thousands of apps; BotFerry reaches Slack.
Pick BotFerry if the relay is the whole job. 9€ a month covers 5,000 hops, the thread pairing, the loop prevention and the retries, and there is no scenario to debug at 2am.
BotFerry vs Make.com, side by side
Swipe the table sideways for the other columns.
| BotFerry This is us | Make.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Flat monthly, whole workspace | Per operation, users unlimited |
| Entry price | 9€ / mo Starter: 3 bots, unlimited operators | $9 / mo Core, 10,000 credits; free tier 1,000 |
| Five operators, one month | 9€ / mo | $9 / mo |
| Volume on the entry plan | 5,000 messages | 10,000 credits, near 3,300 relays |
| Operator replies land back in the original thread | Yes | If you build it |
| Flat price, operators not billed per seat | Yes | Yes |
| You create the Slack app and hold the token | Yes | Not published |
| Relay vendor keeps no message content | Yes | No |
| Several separate front doors on one plan | Yes | Yes |
| One private thread per request | Yes | If you build it |
| Attachments relay both directions | Yes | If you build it |
| Internal notes the requester never sees | Yes | If you build it |
| Ticket statuses, assignment, queues | No | No |
| SLA timers and escalation | No | No |
| Reporting and analytics | Activity log only | Scenario logs only |
| AI drafting or AI agents | No | Via AI app modules |
| Email or web chat intake | No | Via other app modules |
| One-click install, no app to build | No | No |
Prices read 28 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page, linked below. BotFerry bills in euro, the others list dollars, so treat the two currencies as separate numbers rather than a converted total.
The volume row does not compare like with like. One BotFerry message is a single hop across the ferry, either a mention carried into your ops channel or a reply carried back. A ticket, conversation, or credit elsewhere covers a whole exchange. Seat prices in the rows above are directly comparable.
Sources: Make.com
What the scenario has to do
Someone mentions your app in #general. A Make trigger picks the event up, and now the scenario has a problem to solve: the reply that arrives in #ops-inbox forty minutes later has to find its way back to that exact thread in that exact channel. Slack gives you nothing to help. The mention and the reply are two unrelated events.
So you write the pairing yourself. A data store row keyed on the ops thread timestamp, holding the source channel ID and the source thread timestamp. The inbound branch writes it. The reply branch searches it, finds the row, and posts to the Slack Create a Message action with thread_ts set to what it found. Miss the row and the answer stays in the ops channel where nobody who asked can read it.
Then the filter that stops your own bot from feeding itself. Your app posts into #ops-inbox, the ops trigger fires on that post, the scenario relays it into #general, and the general trigger fires on that. Without a check on the message's bot ID you have built a loop that spends credits until you notice.
Counting the credits
Make defines an operation as one module run. Triggers count once no matter how many items they return, and every other module counts once per bundle it processes. So price the scenario by counting the modules that fire on a single message.
The inbound branch: trigger, data store write, Slack post. Three. The reply branch: trigger, data store search, Slack post. Three again. Call it three credits per hop for a relay with no attachments, no edit handling and no error branch.
Core is $9 a month for 10,000 credits, which buys around 3,300 relayed messages. Pro is $16 and Teams is $29 for the same 10,000, so the plan you pick is about features rather than volume, and more volume means buying more credits. Matching BotFerry Starter's 5,000 messages takes roughly 15,000 credits. Add file relaying and the per-hop count climbs, because every module you bolt on runs on every message.
The free tier is 1,000 credits with a fifteen-minute floor on how often a scenario runs. That floor is the part that disqualifies it: an answer that reaches the asker a quarter of an hour after your operator typed it reads as no answer at all.
What Make gives you that we cannot
Reach. The relay stops being the point once the same event needs to open a ticket, update a CRM record, and drop a row in a spreadsheet. Make has modules for all of it and BotFerry has none, so a scenario that ends with a Slack reply and starts with six other steps belongs on Make and nowhere else.
Control too. You decide what a mention looks like when it lands, which fields carry across, what gets rewritten on the way. Route on keywords, split by channel, call an AI module to summarise before a human reads it. BotFerry relays the message as written and offers you no hooks.
What we give you that the scenario does not
The tail. Loop prevention, so the bot never relays its own output. Retries when Slack rate-limits you rather than a failed run in the history. Subtype and thread checks that drop the events which should not travel, single-sourced in one filter instead of scattered across branches. Attachments in both directions, with a warning posted into the thread when a file fails rather than a file that silently vanished.
Internal notes as well: an operator reply beginning with // stays in the ops channel, files included. And a per-bot activity log that answers the only question anyone asks you, which is why a particular message never arrived. Type, reason, timestamp, no message content stored.
You also own the Slack app. The wizard writes the manifest, you create the app in your own workspace, and the token stays with you. Whether Make lets you swap in your own Slack app rather than theirs, we could not confirm from their docs, so that row reads "Not published" instead of a guess.
The honest recommendation
If you already run Make and have someone who enjoys building scenarios, build it. A weekend gets the happy path working and $9 a month covers a quiet channel. You will spend the following month on the tail, and that is a fair trade when the scenario is doing five other useful things.
If the relay is all you want, the arithmetic goes the other way. 9€ against $9 plus the credits above 3,300 hops plus the weekend plus whoever gets paged when the data store lookup misses.