n8n vs Zapier vs Make: an honest comparison
Three tools that look interchangeable on a feature grid and behave nothing alike once your workflows get complicated. Where each one earns its place.
We build on all three depending on the client, so this is not a pitch for a favourite. Each one is genuinely the right answer for a particular situation, and each becomes expensive — in money or in patience — outside it.
Zapier: the fastest path to something working
Zapier has the largest integration catalogue and by far the gentlest learning curve. If your automation is a straight line — this happens, then that happens — someone non-technical can build it before lunch and it will keep running.
Where it stops being the right tool is branching and volume. Pricing is per task, and a task is counted generously, so a workflow that fans out across several steps multiplies faster than people expect. Teams routinely discover this at renewal.
- Best for: simple linear automations, non-technical owners, uncommon SaaS integrations
- Watch out for: per-task pricing at volume, limited branching, hard to version or review
Make: visual complexity, at a price
Make handles branching, iteration and error routing far more comfortably than Zapier, and its canvas makes a complicated flow genuinely readable. Operations-based pricing tends to work out cheaper than Zapier at mid volume.
The trade-off is that complex Make scenarios become their own skill. Debugging a large scenario means clicking through modules, and moving logic between environments is awkward. It is a powerful tool that quietly becomes a single point of knowledge in a team.
n8n: the one you can own
n8n is the one we reach for most, for one specific reason: you can self-host it. Your workflows, credentials and the data passing through them stay inside your own infrastructure. For anyone in healthcare, finance, legal or the public sector, that is not a preference — it is the whole decision.
It also has a code node, which matters more than it sounds. Every visual tool eventually meets a transformation its interface cannot express. In n8n you write six lines of JavaScript and move on; elsewhere you build a monument out of seventeen modules.
The cost is real, though: self-hosting means you own uptime, upgrades and backups. If nobody on your team wants that job, n8n Cloud exists — or one of the other two is a better fit.
How we actually decide
- Does sensitive data pass through the workflow? If yes, self-hosted n8n, and the conversation is largely over.
- Is the workflow genuinely linear and low volume? Zapier — do not over-engineer it.
- Is it branch-heavy but the team has no appetite for infrastructure? Make, or n8n Cloud.
- Will engineers maintain this long term? n8n, because workflows live in version control alongside everything else.
Pick the cheapest tool that will still be the right answer in eighteen months. Migrations cost more than licences.
One last point that matters more than any feature comparison: whichever you choose, keep the business logic documented outside the tool. The tool will change. The rules about how your company handles a late invoice should not have to be rediscovered when it does.