n8n vs Zapier vs Make: which automation platform should your business run on?

The real difference is the pricing model, not the integrations

All three platforms connect to the tools a normal business runs — CRM, email, sheets, accounting, payments, messaging. Integration counts make good marketing and rarely decide anything: if a connector is missing, all three can call an HTTP API. What actually decides the platform is how each one charges, and where the automation runs.

Zapier bills per task, where a task is roughly one action inside one run. Make bills per operation, which is finer-grained but works out cheaper for multi-step scenarios. n8n, self-hosted, bills nothing per execution at all — you pay for the server it runs on, whether that server processes a thousand operations a month or two million.

When Zapier is the right answer

If you have three or four automations, each a handful of steps, and nobody on the team wants to think about servers, Zapier is the correct choice and we will tell you so. The interface is the friendliest, the templates cover most common paths, and at low volume the bill stays small. The point at which it stops being the right answer is usually visible in the invoice rather than in the product.

When Make earns its place

Make handles branching, iteration and data transformation more gracefully than Zapier, and its per-operation pricing means a ten-step scenario does not cost ten times a two-step one in the same way. For a business with genuinely conditional processes — different handling by order value, region or customer tier — but no data-residency requirement, Make is often the best value of the three.

When n8n is worth the extra setup

Four situations push a business toward n8n, and usually more than one of them applies at once.

1. Volume. Once you are running tens of thousands of operations a month, per-task pricing becomes the largest line item in the automation budget. A self-hosted n8n instance handling the same load costs a few tens of dollars a month in hosting.
2. Data residency. Under GDPR, or for anyone handling health, financial or regulated data, routing every record through a third-party cloud is a compliance conversation you may not want to have. Self-hosted n8n keeps the data inside your own environment.
3. Complexity. Real business logic tends to outgrow visual builders — retries with backoff, custom parsing, calling an internal service, a step that needs twenty lines of Python. n8n lets you drop into code inside the workflow rather than bolting on a separate service.
4. Ownership. Workflows are JSON you can export, version and hand to another engineer. There is no platform that owns your automation and no migration project if you change vendors.

What it costs in practice

A small n8n instance runs comfortably on a server in the range of a few tens of dollars a month, independent of execution count. Against that, a Zapier plan sized for tens of thousands of tasks is typically several hundred dollars a month, and grows with usage. The crossover point for most businesses sits somewhere around a few thousand tasks a month — below it, the subscription is cheaper than the attention; above it, self-hosting wins and keeps winning.

Build cost is separate from running cost. A scoped automation — trigger, logic, integrations, error handling, monitoring — starts around $149 with us, and most businesses begin with two or three before adding more once they see the hours come back.

How to decide in five minutes

• Fewer than about 2,000 tasks a month and simple logic → Zapier.
• Branching logic, moderate volume, no compliance constraint → Make.
• High volume, complex logic, regulated data, or you want to own it → n8n.
• You are not sure how much volume you have → measure a month on the simplest platform first, then move. Migrating a working automation is far easier than designing for a load you guessed at.