The short answer
If you are non-technical, your volumes are low, and the workflow is genuinely simple — Zapier. It costs more per task and you will not care, because you will never touch a queue or a retry policy.
If you have a visual thinker on the team and mid-complexity branching — Make. Better value than Zapier at volume, and the canvas genuinely helps people reason about branching logic.
If you need complex logic, self-hosting, data residency, or you run real volume — n8n. It is also the cheapest at scale, by a margin that stops being academic surprisingly quickly.
That is the honest ranking, and it is not the one that maximizes our revenue.
Where Zapier wins
As of August 2026, Zapier's paid plans start at $29.99 a month for Professional (750 tasks; $19.99 a month billed annually), with Team from $103.50 a month for 2,000 tasks — and every action in a multi-step Zap counts as a task, so a five-step workflow running fifty times a day consumes around 6,000 tasks a month. Prices checked 2026-08-06; Zapier reprices frequently, so verify them again before quoting these numbers.
The real argument for Zapier is not features. It is that the person who owns the workflow can maintain it without us. For a five-step process that runs forty times a month, paying more per task to avoid a dependency on an engineer is correct.
Where Make wins
Mid-complexity, moderate volume, and a team that thinks visually. The scenario canvas makes branching legible in a way Zapier's linear model does not.
Where n8n wins
Three situations, and they are the ones we see most:
Data residency. Self-hosted n8n means the data never leaves your infrastructure. For UK and EU buyers this is frequently the whole decision.
Complex logic. Once you need custom code inside a step, loops over arbitrary collections, or genuine error branching, the visual tools start fighting you.
Volume. Per-task pricing is fine until it isn't, and the crossover arrives earlier than most people expect: at 10,000 tasks a month Zapier's Professional tier bills roughly $223.50, Make's Core plan covers 10,000 operations for about $10, and self-hosted n8n costs only the $6–20 a month a small VPS costs, because the Community edition has no execution limits. Directionally, per-task pricing stops being the cheap option somewhere in the low thousands of tasks a month. Prices checked 2026-08-06 — worth re-checking before you budget against them.
What none of them solve
This is the part that matters, and it applies identically to all three.
None of them tell you when they are quietly wrong. A workflow that skips a malformed record does not raise an alert unless you built one. A rate limit that tightens does not announce itself. A field that gets deprecated fails silently until someone notices the numbers are off.
Error handling, retries, dead-letter paths, monitoring and alerting are not platform features. They are engineering decisions you make on top of whichever platform you chose — and they are roughly 40% of the work.
Choosing the right platform is the easy part. It is also the part most comparison articles stop at.
How we would choose for you
Four questions, in order:
- Does the data have residency constraints? If yes, self-hosted n8n, and the other two are out.
- Who maintains this in six months? If the answer is "someone non-technical", weight heavily toward Zapier or Make.
- What is the volume, honestly? Not today's volume — the volume when this works.
- What happens when it fails? If the answer is "we lose money quietly", the platform matters less than the monitoring.
We will recommend against our own preference when yours is right. We build on all three, so we have no reason not to.