Search for this comparison and you will get about forty articles, most of them written by someone with an affiliate link. They all have the same table: triggers, actions, integrations, price per month. The table is not wrong, it is just answering a question nobody actually has.
The real question, if you are the person who will be maintaining this, is narrower: what happens when an automation breaks at 2am and it is your phone that rings? Everything else follows from that.
Here is the comparison written from that angle, after watching a lot of teams pick one, and a fair number pick again eighteen months later.
The pricing models differ in kind, not degree
This is the part that surprises people, so it goes first.
Zapier charges per task. One task is roughly one action that touches your data. A five-step Zap that runs a thousand times a month is five thousand tasks, not a thousand.
Make charges per operation, and an operation is finer-grained than a task. Iterators and routers spend operations too. The upside is that operations are much cheaper individually; the downside is that a poorly built scenario can burn through them at a rate that is genuinely hard to predict from the editor.
n8n charges per execution on cloud, where one execution is one full workflow run regardless of how many steps it has. Self-hosted, it charges nothing, because you are paying in server bills and attention instead.
The practical consequence: a workflow with many small steps gets expensive fast on Zapier and stays cheap on n8n. A workflow that runs constantly but does very little gets expensive on n8n cloud and stays cheap on Make. Model your actual busiest workflow against all three before you look at anything else. Ten minutes in a spreadsheet has changed more of these decisions than any feature list.
Zapier: when your time is worth more than the subscription
Zapier is the one that works on the first try. The integrations are deeper and better maintained than anyone else's, the error messages are comprehensible, and when something breaks there is a support team whose job it is to care.
Pick it when the people building automations are not engineers, when the automations are genuinely simple, and when the monthly bill is smaller than the salary cost of the hours it saves. For a marketing team wiring a form to a CRM to a Slack channel, this is not a close call.
Stop picking it when you find yourself writing Code steps to work around the model, or when the bill crosses the point where a part-time contractor could rebuild the whole thing elsewhere. Both are signals, and most teams ignore the first one for about a year.
Make: the middle, with sharp edges
Make gives you far more control than Zapier for meaningfully less money, and the visual editor genuinely helps when a workflow branches. Error handling is a first-class thing you can design rather than a checkbox.
The sharp edge is that complexity arrives quietly. A scenario with three routers, two iterators and an aggregator is legible on the canvas and almost impossible to explain to the person who inherits it. There is no diff, no meaningful version history you would want to rely on, and no way to review a change before it goes live.
Pick it when your automations have real branching logic, your budget is real but not generous, and the same one or two people will own them for the foreseeable future.
n8n: code when you want it, and a service you now run
n8n is the one that stops feeling like a toy first. Any step can be JavaScript. Workflows are JSON, so they go in Git, get reviewed, and get diffed. Self-hosting means your customer data never leaves your infrastructure, which turns a long procurement conversation into a short one.
The cost is honest and often understated: self-hosting means you are running a service. Upgrades, backups, memory limits, a database that grows without asking. If that sentence made you tired, n8n Cloud exists and removes almost all of it for a predictable fee.
Pick it when you have someone technical who will own it, when data residency matters, or when your workflow count is high enough that per-task pricing has become the largest line item on a tool you do not control.
The switching cost nobody puts in the table
None of this is portable. There is no export from Zapier that imports into Make. Rebuilding twenty scenarios is not twenty small jobs, it is a quarter of someone's quarter, and the credentials, the edge cases and the undocumented business logic all have to be rediscovered.
Two things follow:
- Do the pricing model exercise before you build anything. Switching later costs more than picking slightly wrong now.
- Keep the logic out of the tool where you can. An automation that calls your own API endpoint is easy to move. An automation with the business rules encoded across nine visual steps is not.
The short version
- You are not technical, and the automations are simple — Zapier, and do not feel bad about it.
- You need real branching, and the budget is tight — Make.
- You have someone technical, or data cannot leave your servers — n8n, self-hosted if you have the appetite, cloud if you do not.
- You are choosing for a team of one, forever — whichever one you will still understand in six months. That is usually the one you already know.
There is no wrong answer here, only answers that get expensive at different points. The mistake is not picking the wrong platform; it is picking without modelling your own busiest workflow first.
Where to go next
We list the tools that sit around all three of these — the monitoring, the hosting, the nodes and the glue. Browse Automation for the platforms themselves, n8n for everything in that ecosystem, and AI Tools for the model gateways and agent frameworks people are wiring into all three.
Built something that belongs in that list? Submit it — every listing is read by a person before it goes live.