n8n vs Make vs Zapier: the pricing model matters more than the price
Pick n8n if your workflows have more than about five steps: it bills per execution, so a twenty-step workflow costs the same as a two-step one. Pick Make if you want a visual builder and moderate complexity at low cost. Pick Zapier only if you value its integration catalogue above your margin — task-based billing punishes every step you add.
The options, and the losing case for each
n8n — Execution-priced automation with a self-hostable open-source core. Best for: Anything with real branching. n8n bills per execution — one run of the entire workflow, with unlimited steps — so complexity is free. Cloud Starter is €20/mo billed annually for 2,500 executions with 5 concurrent runs; Pro is €50/mo for 10,000 executions with 20 concurrent. The Community Edition is open source and self-hostable on a small VPS, which for a technically capable operator is the cheapest serious automation in existence. Not for: Non-technical teams with no engineering support. n8n expects you to understand JSON, expressions and error handling, and the self-hosted path adds server maintenance, upgrades and backups to your job. It also has the smallest first-party integration catalogue of the three, which means more HTTP-request nodes and more reading of vendor API docs.
Make — Operation-priced visual automation with the best builder canvas of the three. Best for: Visual thinkers running moderately complex workflows on a small budget. Make bills per credit, where each module action — reading a row, sending a message, transforming data — counts as one. Core is $12/mo monthly or $10.20/mo billed annually; Pro is $21/$17.85 and Teams $38/$32.30, all at 10,000 credits a month at the base slider position. Router and error-handler modules do not consume credits, which materially softens the cost of branching. Not for: High-volume data processing. Because every module action costs a credit, a workflow that iterates over 500 rows and does four things to each burns 2,000 credits per run. Make's canvas encourages exactly that pattern, and the bill arrives a month later. Anything loop-heavy belongs on n8n.
Zapier — Task-priced automation with the largest integration catalogue by a wide margin. Best for: Two-step glue between long-tail SaaS tools that nothing else integrates with. That catalogue is a genuine moat and it is the only reason to choose Zapier in 2026. The Free plan covers 100 tasks a month on two-step Zaps; Professional starts at $19.99/mo for 750 tasks and scales to 2M; Team starts at $69/mo with 25 users. Zapier Agents has a free tier at 400 activities a month with Pro at $33.33/mo billed annually. Not for: Multi-step workflows at any volume. Zapier counts each successful action as a task. A six-action workflow run 500 times a month is 3,000 tasks, and the 750 tasks on the entry Professional tier evaporate. Triggers and filters do not consume tasks, which helps, but the fundamental shape is that Zapier charges you more for building a better workflow.
Published pricing and billing mechanics, read off each vendor's own pricing page on 23 August 2026.
Billing unit — n8n: Execution — one run of the whole workflow, unlimited steps; Make: Credit — one per module action; Zapier: Task — one per successful action
Free tier — n8n: Community Edition, self-hosted, open source; Make: $0/mo, up to 1,000 credits, no time limit; Zapier: $0/mo, 100 tasks, two-step Zaps only
Next tier — n8n: Pro €50/mo billed annually — 10,000 executions; Make: Pro $21/mo monthly, $17.85/mo annual — 10,000 credits; Zapier: Team from $69/mo — 25 users
Top published tier — n8n: Business €667/mo billed annually — 40,000 executions, self-host option; Make: Teams $38/mo monthly, $32.30/mo annual; Zapier: Enterprise — contact for pricing, annual task limits
Concurrency — n8n: 5 Starter · 20 Pro · 30 Business · 200+ Enterprise; Make: Not published as a plan limit; Zapier: Not published as a plan limit
Cost of adding a step — n8n: Zero; Make: One credit per run; Zapier: One task per run
Cost of branching — n8n: Zero; Make: Routers do not consume credits; Zapier: Filters do not consume tasks; the actions after them do
Self-hosting — n8n: Yes — Community Edition is open source; Business and Enterprise self-host with a licence key; Make: No; Zapier: No
Integration catalogue — n8n: Smallest of the three; strong HTTP node; Make: Large; Zapier: Largest by a wide margin
AI/agent pricing — n8n: Included in the execution model; Make: AI model calls consume credits like any module; Zapier: Zapier Agents: free 400 activities/mo, Pro $33.33/mo billed annually ($400/yr)
Footnotes on that table
n8n publishes cloud prices in euros and states them as billed annually. Its pricing page does not publish the monthly-billing figures; the toggle advertises 17% savings for annual, which implies but does not state the monthly price. We have not published a derived monthly number.
Make's tier prices are shown at the base slider position of 10,000 credits per month. Moving the slider moves the price on every tier; the differences between Core, Pro and Teams at the same credit volume are feature differences, not volume differences.
Zapier's Professional plan is a range, not a price. $19.99/mo buys 750 tasks; the same tier scales to 2M tasks at correspondingly higher prices. Quoting '$19.99' as Zapier's price without the task count is meaningless.
Why does execution pricing beat task pricing as workflows get complex?
Because it is the only one of the three models where the price does not move when the workflow gets better. Consider a genuinely useful workflow: a form submission arrives, you look up the submitter in your CRM, branch on whether they are an existing customer, enrich the record from a third-party API, write a row to a database, post a message to Slack, send a templated email, and update a status field. That is eight actions. Run it 500 times a month. On Zapier, each successful action is a task, so that is 4,000 tasks — five and a half times the 750 tasks on the entry Professional tier, requiring a substantially higher-priced tier of the same plan. On Make, each module action is a credit, so 4,000 credits against the 10,000 included at the Core price. On n8n, it is 500 executions, because an execution is one run of the whole workflow no matter how many steps are in it — a fifth of the 2,500 included on Starter. Now improve the workflow. Add error handling, a retry, a second enrichment source and a data-quality check: twelve actions instead of eight. Zapier's bill rises by 50%. Make's rises by 50%. n8n's does not move at all, because you still ran it 500 times. That is the whole argument. Task and operation pricing tax the thing you want your team to do, which is to make the automation more robust. Execution pricing taxes only volume. If you are running an automation practice — for yourself or for clients — that difference compounds into your margin every single month, and it is why agencies that price automation as a service overwhelmingly build on execution-priced or self-hosted platforms.
What does the same workload actually cost on each platform?
Take the eight-action workflow above at three volumes, using the published entry tiers. At 100 runs a month — 800 actions — everything is cheap. Zapier's free plan does not cover it because free is limited to 100 tasks and two-step Zaps, so you need Professional at $19.99/mo for 750 tasks, and 800 tasks already exceeds it. Make's free plan covers 800 credits inside its 1,000-credit allowance, at $0. n8n Starter covers 100 executions inside 2,500, at €20/mo billed annually — or $0 self-hosted. Make wins the smallest case outright. At 500 runs a month — 4,000 actions — Make Core at $12/mo monthly or $10.20 annual covers it inside 10,000 credits. n8n Starter covers it inside 2,500 executions at €20/mo annual. Zapier needs a Professional tier sized for 4,000+ tasks, which is several steps up the $19.99 ladder. Make is cheapest; n8n is close and has 2,000 executions of headroom. At 3,000 runs a month — 24,000 actions — Make Core's 10,000 credits are exhausted more than twice over and you are buying a much larger credit tier. n8n Pro at €50/mo billed annually covers 10,000 executions with 7,000 to spare. Zapier is well into four figures a year. n8n wins decisively, and the gap keeps widening. Self-hosting changes the picture again. n8n's Community Edition is open source, and a DigitalOcean Basic Droplet with 2 GiB of RAM is published at $12/mo — enough to run a modest n8n instance. At that point the marginal cost of an execution is zero and your only cost is the server plus your own time maintaining it. Whether that trade is good depends entirely on what your time is worth and whether you enjoy patching servers.
Is Zapier's integration catalogue still worth the premium?
Sometimes, and it is the only remaining reason to pick it. Zapier's catalogue is genuinely the largest and it is the difference between a workflow existing and not existing when one leg of it touches a niche vertical SaaS product that Make and n8n have never heard of. The honest way to evaluate this is to list the systems your workflow actually touches and check each of them against all three catalogues before you decide anything else. If every system on your list has a first-party node on n8n or a first-party module on Make, Zapier's catalogue is worth nothing to you and you are paying task-based pricing for an advantage you are not using. If one system on your list is Zapier-only, the next question is whether that leg can be a webhook or an HTTP request. n8n's HTTP node will talk to any REST API, and most vertical SaaS products have one. That is an hour of work against a permanent structural pricing disadvantage, and the hour usually wins. Where Zapier is unambiguously correct is the two-step glue it was designed for: form to spreadsheet, payment to Slack, calendar to CRM. On those, task pricing is barely relevant, the free tier covers a lot, and the setup takes four minutes. Do not let a pricing-model argument talk you out of the right tool for a trivial job.
What are the hidden costs on each platform?
On Zapier, it is the tier ladder inside the Professional plan. The advertised $19.99 is the bottom rung of a range that runs to 2M tasks, and every additional multi-step workflow moves you up it. Teams also frequently discover that Zapier Agents and Zapier Chatbots are separate products with separate prices — Agents Pro at $33.33/mo billed annually, Chatbots Pro at $13.33/mo — rather than features of the plan they already bought. On Make, it is loops. The canvas makes iterating over a collection feel free, and it is not: every module action inside the loop is a credit, multiplied by the number of items. A monthly report that processes 800 rows through three modules is 2,400 credits for one run. Aggregators and array handling can cut that dramatically, but only if someone knows to use them. On n8n cloud, it is concurrency, which is the limit nobody models. Starter allows 5 concurrent executions and Pro allows 20. A workflow triggered by a webhook that fires in bursts will queue, and a workflow that calls a slow API and holds an execution open for ninety seconds will hold a concurrency slot for ninety seconds. On self-hosted n8n, the hidden cost is simply operations: upgrades, backups, credential rotation and the 2am outage that is now yours.
What are the hidden costs on each platform? — specifics
Zapier: check whether the AI features you want are in your plan or are a separate product.
Make: audit any workflow with a loop in it before you commit to a credit tier.
n8n cloud: model your peak concurrency, not just your monthly volume.
n8n self-hosted: budget real hours per month for maintenance, not zero.
Which one should an agency or consultant standardise on?
n8n, in almost all cases, and the reason is margin rather than capability. If you are charging a client a fixed monthly fee to run automations for them, every step you add to make those automations more reliable comes directly out of your margin on a task- or operation-priced platform. On an execution-priced platform it does not. Over a portfolio of twenty clients, that is the difference between a business and a hobby. The secondary reason is portability. n8n's Community Edition being open source means a client engagement can end without the client losing the automation, and it means you can hand over a self-hosted instance rather than a subscription you control. That is a genuinely better ethical position to be in, and it removes the most common objection to agency-built automation, which is lock-in. The counter-argument is real: n8n demands more technical skill from whoever maintains it, and if your delivery team is not comfortable with JSON and API docs then Make's canvas will produce working automations faster and your clients will not care what the billing unit is. Pick the platform your team can actually operate, then optimise.
Figures we deliberately did not publish
n8n's monthly-billing prices. The pricing page publishes only annual-billing figures and a '17% saving' label; it does not state the monthly price, so we did not compute one.
Make's per-tier operation allowances above the base slider position. The published tier prices correspond to a selectable credit volume, so a single 'Make costs X for Y operations' claim is not something the page supports.
Zapier Enterprise pricing, which is quoted rather than published.
Price log — what was read, and where
Zapier: Free $0/mo, 100 tasks, two-step Zaps · Professional from $19.99/mo (750 tasks, scaling to 2M) · Team from $69/mo, 25 users · Enterprise quoted. Each successful action is a task; triggers and filters are not. Zapier Agents free 400 activities/mo, Pro $33.33/mo ($400 billed annually). Chatbots Pro $13.33/mo ($160/yr), Advanced $66.67/mo ($800/yr) — read from https://zapier.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. TIER RENAMED. The entry paid tier is 'Professional', not 'Starter'. $19.99 is the bottom of a range, not a plan price.
Make: Free $0 (1,000 credits) · Core $12/mo monthly, $10.20/mo annual · Pro $21/$17.85 · Teams $38/$32.30, all at 10,000 credits/mo · Enterprise custom. One credit per module action; router and error-handler modules are free — read from https://www.make.com/en/pricing on 2026-08-23. UNIT RENAMED. Make now says 'credits' where it used to say 'operations'. The commonly quoted '$10.59' entry price is superseded; the current annual rate is $10.20.
n8n: Starter €20/mo billed annually (2,500 executions, 5 concurrent) · Pro €50/mo (10,000 executions, 20 concurrent) · Business €667/mo (40,000 executions, 30 concurrent, self-host option) · Enterprise custom. An execution is one run of the whole workflow regardless of step count. Community Edition is open source — read from https://n8n.io/pricing/ on 2026-08-23. CURRENCY AND PRICE CHANGED. n8n cloud is now published in euros and billed annually. The commonly quoted '$24/mo' figure is superseded.
DigitalOcean: Basic Droplet: $4/mo for 512 MiB, $6/mo for 1 GiB, $12/mo for 2 GiB, all 1 vCPU — read from https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets on 2026-08-23. Used as the reference cost for self-hosting n8n's Community Edition.
Activepieces: Free $0 · Plus $16/mo billed yearly · Team $166/mo billed yearly (25 users, $25/user after) · Ultimate custom. Overage $0.007 per credit. Community Edition MIT-licensed and self-hostable — read from https://www.activepieces.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. Included as the open-source alternative reference point.
Is n8n really cheaper than Zapier?
For multi-step workflows, dramatically. A six-action workflow run 500 times a month is 3,000 Zapier tasks but 500 n8n executions, because n8n bills one execution per workflow run regardless of step count. For genuine two-step glue the difference is small and Zapier's larger integration catalogue may be worth more than the saving.
How much does Zapier cost in 2026?
The Free plan is $0/mo for 100 tasks on two-step Zaps. Professional starts at $19.99/mo for 750 tasks and scales up the same tier to 2M tasks at higher prices. Team starts at $69/mo with 25 users. Enterprise is quoted. Zapier Agents and Zapier Chatbots are separate products with their own prices.
What is the difference between a task, an operation and an execution?
A Zapier task is one successful action. A Make credit is one module action. An n8n execution is one run of an entire workflow, with unlimited steps. That is why the same workflow can be 4,000 billable units on Zapier and 500 on n8n — they are counting different things, and only one of them is indifferent to how well the workflow is built.
Can I self-host any of these?
n8n, yes — the Community Edition is open source and runs on a small VPS; DigitalOcean publishes a 2 GiB Basic Droplet at $12/mo. Activepieces also offers a self-hostable MIT-licensed Community Edition with a $16/mo billed-yearly Plus tier on cloud. Make and Zapier are cloud-only with no self-hosted option.