Zapier vs. Make vs. n8n: The Honest Comparison

TL;DR

• Zapier: easiest to start, expensive to scale, biggest app library.
• Make: visual depth, real branching, mid-tier pricing.
• n8n: self-hostable, fully scriptable, owns your data.

The mistake we see weekly: a team picks Zapier because it was easiest in week 1 and ends up paying $1,200/month two years later for workflows that would have cost $40 in n8n hosting.

Where each one wins

Zapier wins at

• Fast prototyping for non-technical founders.
• Workflows that touch 5–10 different SaaS apps a few hundred times a month.
• Teams who’d rather pay for simplicity than maintain a server.

Make wins at

• Workflows with real branching logic (conditions, routers, error handlers).
• Image, PDF, and document processing, Make’s tooling is genuinely better.
• Mid-volume jobs where Zapier’s task-based pricing starts to hurt.

n8n wins at

• Sensitive data, healthcare, finance, internal HR, that you don’t want leaving your infrastructure.
• High-volume workflows that would be $10,000/month on Zapier.
• Teams with at least one engineer comfortable maintaining a small server.

What to pick if you’re starting today

If you’re under 1,000 tasks/month and not in a regulated industry: Zapier. You’ll outgrow it, but the lessons you learn will inform what you migrate to.

If you’re already at 10,000+ tasks/month, or your data is sensitive: n8n, self-hosted. The hosting setup pays for itself inside a quarter.

The migration path nobody talks about

It’s totally fine to use all three. Most of our clients run Zapier for quick-wins (“New lead Slack”), Make for complex internal workflows, and n8n for anything touching customer data. The right tool depends on the job, not the team.