Make has 2 types of triggers:
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Instant triggers: These will instantly fire when something takes place. Instant triggers don’t use up extra operations because they will only fire when something actually happened. If you look at Make’s list of Airtable triggers, you’ll see that both triggers are instant. So you can choose to watch records (either new records or updated records) or watch new form entries. For watching updated records, this is based on a modified time field in Airtable, so you can set it (in Airtable) to only be watching specific fields.
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Scheduled triggers: Almost everything else in Make can be put on a schedule. These will take up extra operations if nothing happens while it is polling for changes, but operations are super cheap in Make. Make is significantly less expensive than Zapier.
While you’re working in Make, you can move whatever module you want to begin your scenario by moving it to the left of everything else (i.e. nothing should be connecting to its left), and then dragging that little clock / lightning bolt icon to the first module. That’s another way to tell if that module is an “instant trigger” or a “scheduled trigger”, because the icon will change between a clock & a lightning bolt icon. (Although note that even instant triggers can be scheduled, if you have a need to “delay” the instant from not happening so instantaneously. Lol.)
Webhooks & mailhooks are also instant triggers, so I will often start my Make automations by having an Airtable automation trigger a Make webhook. You could do this by just having somebody click on a link that triggers the webhook (which will open up a webhook response page in a different tab), but I like to hide the magic behind a Javascript that controls it. I wrote up another post below on how to do that:
So for me, I will most frequently do the webhook method of triggering my scenarios.