n8n bills the run. Make bills every module.

n8n, if your workflows are long — it’s the only one of the three that charges by the whole run rather than by the step. Checked 3 September 2026:

• Zapier bills tasks. A task is one successfully completed action. Triggers, polling, and the built-in tools — Filter, Paths, Formatter, Looping, Delay, Digest — don’t consume tasks (Zapier pricing).
• Make bills credits. “Each module action in your scenario, like adding a Google Sheet row or fetching Gmail account data, counts as one credit.” Only routers and error handlers are exempt (Make pricing).
• n8n bills executions. “An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow” (n8n pricing).

Take a twelve-step onboarding flow: create the folder, send the request, three conditional checks, file four documents, notify the adviser, write the audit line. Onboard 200 clients a month and n8n counts 200 executions. Make counts roughly 2,400 credits. Zapier counts only the real app actions — the three checks are free — so somewhere near 1,800 tasks.

The loop is where it bites

Document workflows loop. Ten files per client, three modules each — rename, upload, log — and one client is 30 credits on Make, not 3. Zapier’s Looping step is itself free, but every action inside the loop is still a task. Your bill isn’t driven by client count. It’s driven by clients × documents × steps per document, and only one of the three ignores the last two.

The counterweight is that n8n’s cheapest cloud plan is the most expensive entry point of the three, so short workflows at low volume are cheaper elsewhere. Prices on all three pages move; treat the ones above as a snapshot, not a quote.

So don’t compare feature lists. Open your longest existing workflow, count the steps that actually call an app, multiply by your monthly runs, and price that number three ways. The tool that wins at 20 clients often loses at 200.