n8n vs Zapier vs Make: Which Fits Your Business

For most Australian businesses the n8n vs Zapier decision comes down to who will build and maintain the automations. Zapier suits non-technical teams that want a working automation this afternoon, Make suits visual builders who need complex branching at a lower price, and n8n suits technical teams that want data control, high run volumes and AI agents they can shape themselves.

TL;DR: Pick Zapier for speed and the widest app coverage, Make for the lowest price on a visual, mid-volume workflow, and n8n when volume, data location or AI agent work matters most. Whichever you choose, build error alerts on day one, because the cheapest platform gets expensive the first time a workflow fails silently.

Zapier and Make prices below are in US dollars and n8n’s are in euros, because that is how each vendor bills. All were checked on the vendors’ own pricing pages on 30 September 2026 and are shown before GST, card fees or exchange-rate movement. These plans change often, so confirm before you commit.

How the three platforms charge, and why it matters

The headline price tells you little. The billing unit decides your bill.

Zapier charges per task: each action step it completes successfully. Triggers and failed steps are not counted. Its pricing page lists a free plan with 100 tasks a month (two-step Zaps only), and Professional starts at US$19.99 a month billed yearly or US$29.99 billed monthly, for 750 tasks. At 10,000 tasks, Professional is US$129 a month billed yearly or US$193.50 monthly.

Make charges per credit, which replaced “operations” as its billing unit. For standard apps, one module run costs one credit, per Make’s help centre. The detail people miss is that the trigger module is a module too: each time it runs, it uses an operation. Its pricing page now shows a single paid “Make Plan” priced by a credit slider, in place of the Core, Pro and Teams tiers many comparison sites still quote. It starts at US$9 a month billed annually (US$10.59 monthly) for 5,000 credits. Credits bought beyond your plan cost 25 percent more, according to Make’s pricing update.

n8n charges per workflow execution, and an execution is one run of the whole workflow however many steps it has. The n8n pricing page lists two cloud plans hosted by n8n: Starter at €20 a month billed annually (€24 monthly) for 2,500 executions, and Pro at €50 annually (€60 monthly) for 10,000. Its Business plan, €667 a month billed annually for 40,000 executions, is self-hosted only. All plans include unlimited users and workflows.

You can also self-host the free Community Edition under n8n’s Sustainable Use License. That licence lets you use n8n to run your own business. It does not let you host n8n as a service for clients to build their own workflows, or let external users build workflows through your product, according to the n8n licence FAQ.

Put side by side: a workflow with a trigger and ten actions uses ten tasks on Zapier, eleven credits on Make and one execution on n8n. The gap widens with every step you add and every run you schedule.

n8n vs Zapier on cost: 10,000 runs a month

This is an illustrative calculation, not a quote. The assumption: one workflow, 10,000 runs a month, and each run has one action after the trigger (a new web form submission creates a CRM record, say). Prices are the vendors’ list prices on 30 September 2026.

Now make the workflow more realistic: five actions per run instead of one. Zapier’s usage jumps to 50,000 tasks, which is US$289 a month billed yearly or US$433.50 monthly. Make’s jumps to 60,000 credits, and since the slider steps from 40,000 to 80,000, the 80,000-credit tier at US$91 annually (US$107.06 monthly) is the one that covers it without buying extra credits. n8n still counts 10,000 executions and stays on Pro at €50.

Make wins the simple case comfortably. As steps pile up, n8n’s per-run model pulls ahead, and Zapier’s per-task model is the one that gets expensive fastest.

Side-by-side comparison

AI agents: three different philosophies

Zapier treats agents as an extension of its app catalogue. Zapier Agents can use actions from its 9,000-plus apps as tools, and Copilot helps you build the Zaps themselves. Agents are billed as an add-on, separate from your task allowance. For a team with no coders, it is the gentlest way in.

Make pitches Make AI Agents on transparency: every decision the agent makes shows up step by step in a reasoning panel on the same canvas where you build ordinary scenarios. That matters when a finance or operations lead has to sign off on what the agent did. The feature has been available to all users since 2025, although Make’s pricing page still labels it beta.

n8n gives you the most control. Its AI Agent node is built on LangChain and needs a chat model plus at least one connected tool. You pick both. That is powerful, and it is more rope to hang yourself with. If “agent” is still a fuzzy word inside your business, start with our plain-English explainer on AI agent orchestration, or see how a different framework approaches it in OpenClaw explained.

Data residency and the Privacy Act

None of the three publishes an Australian hosting option on its standard plans. Zapier states it is hosted on AWS in the United States. n8n says its cloud runs on Microsoft Azure in the European Union, and its pricing FAQ puts the servers in Frankfurt. Make lets each organisation choose a US or EU data centre when it is created, and that choice cannot be changed later.

For workflows that carry personal information, Australian Privacy Principle 8 applies. The OAIC’s APP 8 guidance says you must take reasonable steps to ensure an overseas recipient does not breach the APPs, and under section 16C you can remain accountable if it does. A contract and proper due diligence usually get you there, and our vendor data privacy checklist lists the questions to ask. Some clients in government, health and finance will still insist the data stays onshore.

That is the strongest case for self-hosting n8n. Run it in AWS’s Sydney region (ap-southeast-2) or with an Australian hosting provider, and workflow data stays in the country unless a step you build sends it elsewhere. Any AI model you call from that workflow is its own data-flow decision.

What self-hosting costs you: monitoring

Avatar Studios runs self-hosted n8n on its own server for internal content pipelines, so this part is first-hand. Automated pipelines and scheduled tasks can and do fail, and the ones nobody is watching are the ones that fail quietly. A workflow can show as “active” while every run stops at the same step.

The cause is rarely inside the workflow itself. Most pipelines chain several tools, and a change in any one of them breaks the steps downstream: a vendor retires an API version or an AI model, an API key expires or a billing limit is hit, someone renames a field in the CRM, a form gains a new required question. None of those changes is made in your automation platform, so none of them shows up there until a run fails. Treat every scheduled workflow as something that needs checks built in or a person who reviews it regularly to confirm it is still doing what it was designed to do. A useful habit is a short weekly look at the run history plus a simple output check, such as “did today’s report arrive” or “were new records created”, because a workflow can complete without errors and still produce nothing useful.

Self-hosting means you own that monitoring, and the same trap exists on Zapier and Make if nobody ever opens the notification settings. In n8n the fix is an Error Trigger workflow: one central error handler, assigned to your other workflows in their settings, that receives the failed run’s details and can post them to Slack, Teams or email. Build it before your second production workflow. Our business process automation guide covers the wider rules for automating without breaking things.

Not sure which platform fits your workflows? The AI Quick-Win Audit is a fixed A$2,950 paid audit that maps a workflow, identifies automation opportunities and shows a live working demonstration. It starts with a free 30-minute fit call, and the fee is credited toward any build of $10,000 or more commissioned within three months.

Which one should you pick?

Zapier, if your team is non-technical, you need results within days and your volume is modest. With 9,000-plus apps, the connector you need almost certainly exists. You pay a premium per task for that convenience, and for quick wins it is worth paying.

Make is our pick for the capable ops or marketing person who does not write code but is happy building routers, filters and data transformations on a canvas. On the single-action version of our worked example it had the cheapest paid plan by a wide margin, though n8n overtakes it once each run carries several steps.

n8n, if you have a technical owner, run high volumes or long workflows, need data kept in Australia, or want AI agents you control. Budget for the time to host, patch and monitor it, or have a partner do it. A self-hosted tool is cheap to license and not free to run.

There is a middle path too. Prove a workflow on Zapier or Make, then move the expensive, high-volume ones to n8n once the value is clear. If you are automating finance or sales work, see how these tools apply to invoice and AP automation and AI lead generation. Our AI and automation services, including process automation and systems integration, cover the build, and you can contact us directly.

The right answer to the n8n vs Zapier question is the tool your team can actually maintain, with alerts switched on from the first day.

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