If you've started looking into automating your business, you've hit the same wall everyone hits: Make, Zapier, and n8n all say they do the same thing. The marketing copy is nearly identical. The pricing looks different but confusing. And every comparison article you find was written by someone getting affiliate commissions.
We've built automation systems for clients using all three. Here's the honest version.
The short answer
Zapier is the easiest to start with. Make gives you more power for the same price. n8n is what you use when you need full control, want to self-host, or have a developer on the team. Most small businesses should start with Make.
Zapier: fast setup, expensive at scale
Zapier is the most user-friendly of the three. If you can fill out a form, you can build a Zap. The template library is massive. Integrations number in the thousands. Support is fast.
The problem is price. Zapier charges per task - every action in an automation costs a task. A single automation that runs 1,000 times and does 5 things each time costs 5,000 tasks. The free plan gives you 100 tasks/month. The $20/month plan gives you 750. To run real business volume, you're looking at $50-200/month minimum - and that's before you have anything complex.
Zapier is the right choice if:
- You want something running in under an hour
- You're connecting two common tools (Gmail to Notion, Typeform to HubSpot)
- Volume is low and your time is expensive
- You don't have a technical person on your team
Make: the sweet spot for most businesses
Make (formerly Integromat) uses a visual canvas where you build flows by connecting modules. It looks more complex at first - and it is. But the payoff is significant.
Make charges per operation, but operations are much cheaper than Zapier tasks. The free plan includes 1,000 operations/month. The $9/month plan gives you 10,000. The $16/month plan gives you 40,000. For the same automations, Make typically costs 3-5x less than Zapier at volume.
More importantly, Make handles complex logic - conditionals, iterators, aggregators, error handling - in a way that feels native rather than hacked together. Building a multi-branch workflow with different actions per case is straightforward.
Make is the right choice if:
- You're automating real business processes (not just simple two-app connections)
- Volume matters and Zapier pricing is painful
- You want to build something you can expand later
- You can spend a few hours learning the interface
n8n: maximum power, maximum responsibility
n8n is open-source, self-hostable, and the most technically capable of the three. You can run it on your own server for near-zero cost. You can write JavaScript inside any node. You can build custom integrations for APIs that aren't natively supported.
The tradeoff is that it requires more technical knowledge to set up and maintain. The hosted cloud version starts at $20/month. Self-hosting is cheaper but you own the infrastructure. The interface is powerful but less polished than Make.
n8n is the right choice if:
- You have a developer on the team or you're technical yourself
- You want to self-host and control your data
- You need custom code in your automations
- You're building complex, high-volume systems where cloud tool costs would be significant
How we use all three
In practice, the tool choice follows the client. Client automations with standard integrations: usually Make. Enterprise clients with data compliance requirements: n8n self-hosted. Quick one-off connections for non-technical founders who need to set it up themselves: Zapier.
The more important question isn't which tool - it's whether what you're trying to automate is actually automation-ready. A process that's inconsistent, undocumented, or exception-heavy will break any tool you put under it. Clean the process first, then automate it.
We build automation systems for businesses using Make, n8n, and Zapier depending on what fits. If you want an honest assessment of what your specific process needs - book a free 30-minute call.
Free 30-min audit. We tell you what to automate first and what it would cost.