Zapier vs Make vs n8n — how the three pricing models bite differently

Every comparison of these three is written by someone with an affiliate link or an agency to sell. What follows is the bit those pieces skip, because it is the only part that actually determines your bill.

The feature lists are close enough to be uninteresting. All three connect to the apps you use, all three do branching and error handling, all three will run your onboarding sequence. What differs is what they count.

	Billing unit	What that means
Zapier	a task — one successful action	a 12-step workflow costs ~11
Make	an operation — one module action	a 12-step workflow costs ~12
n8n	an execution — one whole workflow run	a 12-step workflow costs 1

n8n’s documentation is explicit: “An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes.”

That single sentence is the whole article. Everything below is what it does to the numbers.

A worked example

Take a client onboarding flow that most small firms would recognise. New client signs → create a record → send a welcome email → create a folder → request documents → wait → check what arrived → notify you → chase if incomplete → update the record → notify the team → mark complete. Twelve steps.

Run it once, and here is what the entry paid plan on each gives you:

	Entry plan	Included	Onboardings/month
Zapier Professional	from $19.99/mo	750 tasks	~68
Make Core	$12/mo	10,000 credits	~833
n8n Starter	€20/mo	2,500 executions	~2,500

Prices as published on 6 August 2026. All three tier upward from here — I have deliberately not quoted the intermediate tier prices, because they move and I have not re-checked them. Verify against the pricing pages before committing.

That gap is not a rounding error. Same money, roughly twelve times the capacity on Make, and thirty-six times on n8n. And it widens as you grow, because Zapier’s cost scales with your client count — the axis a growing firm actually scales on.

Where each one actually hurts

Zapier’s free plan is a decoy. It caps Zaps at two steps. No real onboarding workflow is two steps, so the free tier tells you nothing about whether the paid one will work.

Make’s per-operation pricing is worst exactly where document work lives. Iterators multiply. A workflow that loops over twenty uploaded files burns roughly twenty times the credits of a single-file run. If your automations are mostly documents arriving, model your worst month, not your average one — Make’s headline price is excellent right up until the day a client sends forty photos of receipts.

n8n’s cheapness has a different cost: it is the most technical of the three. You will spend an afternoon that you would not have spent on Zapier. Whether that trade is worth £8 a month depends entirely on whether you enjoy that afternoon.

Two things that are not on the pricing page

Where your client’s passport scan actually goes. Zapier’s own data-privacy page states that processing happens on AWS servers in the United States, with no EU-only storage option, relying on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework plus standard contractual clauses. Zap content and history are retained 29–69 days, and the shorter 7–30 day retention setting is only available on Company and Enterprise plans.

For a UK firm routing identity documents and bank statements through an automation platform, that is a DPIA consideration rather than a formality. It does not make Zapier unusable — plenty of regulated firms use it — but it is a decision you should make deliberately rather than discover later. Make lists hosting as “AWS (EU/North America)”; I could not find an explicit residency commitment on the pricing page, so check the DPA if that matters to you.

n8n is not open source, whatever you have read. It ships under a Sustainable Use Licence — fair-code, not OSI open source. In practice, for a service firm: self-hosting it to run your own firm’s workflows is clearly permitted, as is building workflows for clients as a consultant. What is prohibited is hosting n8n and charging others for access to it, or white-labelling it as your own product. If you were planning to build a client portal on top of self-hosted n8n and sell it, read the licence first.

What I would actually do

If you are automating three or four workflows and want to stop thinking about it, Zapier is the least effort and the answer is fine. You are paying for not having to care.

If your automations are document-heavy and you are comfortable with a bit of configuration, Make at $12 is very hard to argue with — as long as you have modelled your loops.

If you are running many multi-step workflows and someone in the building enjoys this sort of thing, n8n is dramatically cheaper and the licence permits what a service firm needs.

And the honest fourth option: if you are automating one workflow, a scheduled script and thirty lines of code costs nothing and never changes its pricing. Not everything needs a platform.