n8n vs Make vs Zapier for a small business

By Mariam Raouf. Published 2026-07-30. 7 min read.

Every comparison of n8n vs Make vs Zapier for a small business opens with a feature grid. Connectors, branching, error handling, who has the nicer editor. Those grids are interchangeable now and none will tell you which tool to pick.

What decides it is how each platform counts your usage. Zapier charges per successful action. Make charges per credit, which is roughly per action. n8n charges per execution, meaning one whole run of your workflow no matter how many steps are inside it.

Those are different units, and the same automation can cost eight times more on one than another purely because of the unit. Below are the definitions in each vendor's own words, a worked example, the plan tables as of September 2026, and a straight answer at the end.

How each platform counts, in its own words

Zapier is explicit in its help documentation: "A task is any successful action that runs in Zapier. Only successful actions count toward your task usage."

Make puts it this way on its pricing page: "Each action your scenario performs consumes a certain number of credits, most actions consume 1 credit, while some advanced features leveraging Make's AI Provider may use more."

n8n describes something structurally different: "An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn't matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It's still a single execution."

Read those again. Two price the inside of your workflow. One prices the outside.

The worked example that settles it

Take an ordinary automation. A form comes in, the lead is checked against your CRM, created if new, tagged, assigned to an owner, a Slack alert fires, a confirmation email sends, and a row lands in a reporting sheet. That is eight actions, and say it runs 2,000 times a month.

Sources: Zapier task definition, Make pricing, n8n pricing. Checked September 2026.

Sixteen thousand tasks puts you well up Zapier's tier ladder. Two thousand executions sits inside n8n's €20 entry plan, and costs nothing in licence fees if you host it yourself.

Now flip it. Forty tiny two action automations firing fifty times a month come to 4,000 tasks on Zapier and 2,000 executions on n8n, and the gap almost disappears. Shape matters more than volume, so count the steps in your real processes before you believe anyone's recommendation, including mine. More on that in our post on how much AI automation costs.

What Zapier does not count, which most comparisons get wrong

This matters because it softens the per action model considerably. Zapier does not charge a task for:

• Any trigger step, including polling
• Filters, formatters, paths, delays and looping steps
• Sub Zap, Digest, Manager and Storage steps

It does charge for action steps, steps inside error handler paths, steps that run during a replay, and Sub Zap actions. Zapier's help centre lists all of this.

A Zap that watches a form, filters out anything without a phone number, reformats a date, splits down two paths and then performs three actions is not an eight task run. It is a three task run. Tables that count every box overstate Zapier's cost, sometimes by half. What bites is a workflow of genuine actions, one write after another across five systems.

Make now bills in credits, not operations

If you are reading a Make comparison written before this year, its units are wrong. Make used to describe usage in "operations", and most comparison articles online still do. Its current pricing page describes credits. Most actions consume one, but Make's own wording is that "some advanced features leveraging Make's AI Provider may use more".

Error handlers and routers consume zero credits, which helps. A module that processes fifty bundles runs fifty times, which does not. So budget Make with a margin on top of your action count, not at parity.

n8n vs Make vs Zapier plans, September 2026

Zapier

Source: Zapier pricing. Task volume sells in tiers from 100 a month up past 2 million, with "Save 33%" advertised on annual billing. One caveat: the price at each individual task tier renders in the browser rather than the page source, so the only Zapier figures I will publish are the "from" prices above.

Make

Source: Make pricing. Paid tiers scale through 20k, 40k, 80k, 150k, 300k, 500k, 750k and 1M credits and beyond.

n8n

Source: n8n pricing. Annual billing saves 17%. There is also a startup plan at 50% off Business for companies under 20 employees, worth asking about because it is not obvious on the page.

Self hosting n8n: free is not the same as free

The Community Edition of n8n has no licence fee under n8n's Sustainable Use License. You pay for the server and nothing else, and for long workflows at volume it is by far the cheapest option here.

Now the honest part. Self hosting means you own the uptime. If the container falls over at 2am on the night your busiest workflow runs, nobody gets paged except you. You own the upgrades, the backups, the secrets and the security patching, and an automation platform holds API keys to your CRM, your email and probably your payments.

That is a real job, not a checkbox. If somebody in the business enjoys running infrastructure, self hosted n8n is excellent value. If nobody does, the €20 cloud plan is cheaper than the first outage.

n8n vs Make vs Zapier: which to pick

Pick Zapier if the people building automations are not technical, your workflows are short, and you value the largest connector library. The per action model is fine when your actions are few and your filters and formatters are free.

Pick Make if you want visual branching and heavy data transformation at a lower entry price than Zapier. Watch credit consumption if you add AI steps.

Pick n8n if your workflows are long, you run them often, or you want the option of self hosting later. Per execution billing is the biggest structural cost advantage available to a small business running multi step automations, and unlimited steps means you never redesign a workflow to save money.

Pick none of them yet if you have not written the process down. These tools encode a process, and if it only lives in someone's head you will pay a platform to run your confusion faster. Start with the SOP templates.

The short version

There is no winner here, which is annoying but true. There is a unit of measurement, and the right tool is the one whose unit matches the shape of what you build. Long workflows favour n8n overwhelmingly. Short ones make the difference small enough that ease of use should decide it.

Whatever you pick, do the arithmetic first. Steps times monthly runs, against the vendor's unit. It beats any comparison article, this one included, because only you know how many steps your processes have. Our guide to what to automate first covers the question that comes before this one.

At Calpir we build on all three, and which we reach for depends on the workload. Our AI automation page explains how we work, and if you want a second opinion before committing to an annual plan, ask.

Frequently asked questions

Is n8n really cheaper than Zapier?

For long workflows, yes, and by a wide margin. An eight step workflow running 2,000 times a month is 16,000 Zapier tasks against 2,000 n8n executions, because n8n charges per whole run. For lots of very short workflows the difference shrinks. Count your steps and monthly runs first, because the answer depends on the shape of your automations.

Does Zapier charge for triggers and filters?

No. Zapier's help documentation confirms that trigger steps, polling, filters, formatters, paths, delays and looping steps do not count toward task usage. Only successful actions do. This is the most commonly misreported thing about Zapier pricing, and it means real bills are often lower than comparison tables predict.

What changed about Make's pricing?

Make now meters in credits rather than the "operations" that older comparison articles describe. Most actions still consume one credit, but Make states that features using its AI Provider may consume more. Any comparison written before this change uses the wrong unit, so check the date on what you read.

Is self hosted n8n free?

There is no licence fee for the Community Edition under n8n's Sustainable Use License, so the software costs nothing. You still pay for the server, and you take on uptime, upgrades, backups and security. Budget the time, not just the hosting bill. If nobody wants that job, the cloud Starter plan is cheaper in practice.

Which one should a business with two people pick?

Usually Zapier or Make, because the constraint at that size is time, not money. Move to n8n when your workflows get long enough that per action billing hurts, or when you want to self host. n8n also offers 50% off its Business plan for companies under 20 employees, which changes the maths at the top end.

Sources

• Zapier plans and pricing
• Zapier help centre: what counts as a task
• Make pricing
• n8n pricing