Make vs Zapier vs n8n
We Will Not Tell You Which Is Best. That Is the Answer.
Every comparison of these three you can find is written by somebody with an affiliate link, and all of them arrive at a winner. We are not going to, because the tool is the least consequential decision in an automation project — and it is the one people spend longest on, for the simple reason that it is the only part you can research at midnight without talking to anybody.
The tool question vs The real question
What people research · What decides the project
- Which has more integrations?
Answerable, changes monthly, and almost never the constraint.Which systems do YOU actually need - Which is cheapest?
Depends entirely on your volume and shape. All three publish plans that change.What it costs to MAINTAIN for two years - Which is most powerful?
All three will build what most businesses need.Can the person left holding it use it - Self-hosted or not?
A genuine difference, and it matters only if you have a reason.Does your data have to stay put - Which is easiest to learn?
Whichever the person maintaining it already knows.Who is that person, and do they exist - What if we pick wrong?
Rebuilding a workflow is days, not months.The exceptions are what you would rebuild
Read the right-hand column twice. Not one of those questions is about the tool, and every one of them decides whether the project is still running in a year. The comparison people arrive wanting is genuinely answerable and genuinely not the thing that matters, which is an uncomfortable combination and the reason this page exists.
The tool is a rounding error. The exceptions are the project.
Any of these three will build the version of your process where everything arrives in the right shape. That version takes about a day and it is not the version you have. What takes the other three weeks is the duplicate submitted twice, the required field left empty, the customer who replies to an automated message, and the run that failed halfway through having done some things and not others. None of that work changes materially depending on which of the three you picked.
What does change is who can maintain it. If somebody in your business already uses one of them, that is a real reason and probably a sufficient one. If nobody does, the question becomes whether you are hiring for it, keeping an agency, or hoping — and the honest answer to that decides the tool far more than any feature comparison will.
There is one difference that is genuinely a difference rather than a preference: self-hosting. n8n can run somewhere you control, and where your data must not leave your environment that narrows the field to one. That is a real constraint with a real answer, and it is the only part of this comparison where we would say a specific thing without knowing your business.
What we will not do is publish a feature table or a price comparison. All three change their plans and limits regularly, we cannot verify any of it from here, and a stale comparison table is worse than no comparison table because somebody makes a decision on it. If you want that, get it from the vendors, on the day you are deciding.
Every comparison of these three arrives at a winner, and every one of them was written by somebody with an affiliate link.
What we actually ask before choosing one
Six questions, and not one of them is about a feature.
Does anyone here already use one?
If yes, that is usually the answer and it is a good one. Familiarity in the person who maintains it beats any feature difference between the three.
Must the data stay in your environment?
This is the one genuine constraint that narrows the field. Self-hosting is a real difference rather than a preference, and it decides the tool by itself.
Who holds this in two years?
You, an agency, or nobody. The third answer is common and it should change what gets built, not just what it is built on.
What is the actual volume?
All three price on usage in different shapes, so the cheapest depends on your numbers. Worth checking on the day, against your real volume, from the vendor.
Which systems have to connect?
Check your specific list rather than the headline integration count. Occasionally one of them is missing the one that matters, and that settles it in a minute.
What happens when it breaks?
How you find out, and who fixes it. This is a process question rather than a product one, and it is the most common reason automations quietly stop being used.
What people ask about this choice
So which one do you recommend?
None of them, in the abstract, and we would rather say that than pretend. The tool is the least consequential decision in an automation project — what decides whether it still runs in a year is how the exceptions were handled and who can maintain it. We will recommend one for your specific build, once we know those two answers.
Is n8n better because it is self-hosted?
It is better if you have a reason to self-host, and that reason is almost always that data must not leave your environment. Where that is not a constraint, self-hosting adds a server somebody has to look after — which is a cost, not a feature.
Why is there no feature or price table here?
Because all three change their plans and limits regularly and we cannot verify any of it from here. A stale comparison table is worse than none, because somebody makes a real decision on it. Get that from the vendors on the day you are deciding, against your own volume.
What if we choose wrong?
Rebuilding a workflow is days rather than months, so the cost of being wrong is lower than the research suggests. What is expensive to redo is the exception handling — and that work transfers between tools far better than people expect, because it is mostly decisions rather than configuration.
Does the choice affect what AI you can use?
Barely. All three can call a model, and the interesting decisions — what it may do, what happens when it is unsure, how you check it was right — sit outside the tool entirely. That is true of every platform in this category and it is why the tool question gets more attention than it earns.
Will you build on whichever we already have?
Yes, and it is usually the right call. An existing tool your team knows, with an account you already pay for, beats a marginally better one nobody can operate. We will say so if we think the existing choice genuinely cannot do the job.