How to use routers in Make.com effectively

Understanding how to use routers in Make.com can greatly improve the way you create your scenarios.

In this guide, I’ll help you understand how routers work and will show you how (and why) to implement them in your scenarios.

Let’s dive in! 😄

Video tutorial

What is a router?

A router is a specialized built-in module that lets you split the flow of data through your scenario.

Instead of the data following one straight line through your scenario, the data can follow one or multiple paths of the router.

In the above example you see a router with 2 paths, but you can also create a router with 4 or 40 paths.

By default, the data will follow all paths in the router one-by-one.

It will start with the one at the top that’s marked with 1st, and will then continue to the next path after it finished all steps in the previous path.

Let me show you an actual example that you could use in your online business.

Let’s say you have a contact form on your website, and based on the day of the week you would like to send a different reply on a workday versus the weekend.

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How it works:

• The scenario starts when the contact form has a new submission
• The data goes to the router
• Depending on the day of the week the data follows the 1st of 2nd path.

How did the router know which path to follow? That’s because we added a filter to each path of the router, and it only continues down that path if the condition in the filter matches the data.

I’ll explain more about how filters work in a bit 🤓

But do you see how powerful that is? We can create multiple paths with different actions, and only follow a specific path if the data matches the filter.

You could filter emails, specific sales, calendar events, validate data, and so much more.

How routers differ from other modules

Now, what sets routers apart from the other modules in Make.com?

Most modules perform a specific task like sending an email, updating a spreadsheet, or posting to social media.

But a router is different because it controls the flow of data and decide how that data is processed.

Creating your first router

Ok, let’s create a router from scratch 🤓

We’re going to recreate the example I gave earlier where we send a different email based on the current day of the week.

I will start again with a webhook module as a trigger, because thats how my form sends the submission to Make.com.

(but feel free to use any other module)

Then, add a new module by clicking on the right side of the trigger module, go to Flow Control, and select Router:

Then, we add modules to the newly created paths. In this example I’ll add email modules:

The module in the first path will let people know that we’ll try to reply asap, the other one will send an email to let people know we’ll get back to them after the weekend.

But right now, without any filters, both paths will be followed and both emails will be sent.

We don’t want that.

Using filters in routers

So we’re going to add a filter by clicking the dotted line between the router and the email module:

As you can see I checked if the current day of the week is equal to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.

It’s especially important to set it to or and not to and, because it can never be multiple days at the same time.

Now we do the same thing for the other path, and you can see that we added filters because there is now an icon underneath the dotted line.

And that’s it!

All data will now follow the first path if it’s a weekday, and the second path if it’s the weekend.

It’s just a simple example, you can of course also create a filter based on the data.