Pick any small-business automation question in a forum and you'll get the same three names: Zapier, Make and n8n. They overlap so much that comparisons usually end with "it depends." It does depend - but mostly on two things you can check before you build anything: how each platform counts your usage, and where you want your data to live.
I checked every price below on the official pages on October 18, 2026. Prices change, so verify before you commit - but the structure behind the prices has been stable for years, and that's the part worth understanding.
The same automation bills three different ways
Imagine a workflow that watches for new customer emails, extracts the order number, looks it up, drafts a reply and logs it. Five steps, running 600 times a month.
On Zapier, each successful action counts as a task and the trigger is free: those 600 runs burn about 2,400 tasks. On Make, the trigger counts too, so each module action consumes about one credit: roughly 3,000 credits. On n8n, the whole run from start to finish counts as one execution, no matter how many steps it has: 600 executions.
That counting difference is what sets your bill. Zapier's Professional plan starts at $19.99/month, with the exact price set by the task tier you need, and 2,400 tasks a month pushes you above the entry tier or into pay-per-task overage. Make's Core plan (around $9/month billed annually) includes 10,000 credits, so the same work fits with room to spare. n8n's Cloud Starter (20 euro/month billed annually) includes about 2,500 executions - our 600 barely registers.
None of this makes one platform "cheaper" in general. It means your bill depends on the shape of your automation: many short, single-action runs can favor Zapier's free polling and simple billing, while long multi-step workflows are much cheaper on n8n's execution model.
The learning curve is real, but it's not what people say
Zapier is the easiest to start: pick a trigger, pick an action, done. Its free plan (100 tasks a month, two-step Zaps) is useful for trying the idea, not just a demo.
Make sits in the middle: a visual canvas where you watch data move between modules. It rewards an hour of learning with much more control over branching, error handling and data reshaping than Zapier's linear editor gives you.
n8n asks the most of you: expressions, some JavaScript when you need it, and concepts like queue mode if you scale. In return you get the most developer-like tool of the three, with code steps, Git-based version control on the Business plan, and an AI agent node that connects to models directly.
Where your data lives
Zapier and Make are cloud-only. Your credentials and your customer data flow through their servers, under their retention rules. For many small businesses that's fine. For some - health, finance, anything under a strict client contract - it isn't.
n8n is the only one of the three you can run on your own server, free, as the Community Edition. One caveat: n8n calls its license "fair-code" (the Sustainable Use License), not open source. Self-hosting for internal business use is allowed; reselling n8n as a hosted service is not. For a small business automating its own work, that restriction rarely matters - and the price is hard to argue with: the software costs nothing, you pay only for the server it runs on.
So which one
Pick Zapier if you want the shortest path from idea to working automation, your workflows are simple, and the bill stays small at your volumes.
Pick Make if you want visual power without code, you reshape data between apps often, and you want the lowest cloud bill for multi-step work. Its free plan gives you 1,000 credits a month with no time limit, which is enough to build the test workflow from the last section for real.
Pick n8n if you're comfortable with a technical tool, you want AI agents wired into your workflows, your execution counts are high, or you need the self-host option for data reasons.
And if you genuinely can't decide: build the same small workflow on the free tier of all three, in one afternoon. The one whose editor you don't fight is your answer.
Questions & answers
Is n8n really free? The Community Edition is free to self-host for internal business use under the Sustainable Use License. n8n Cloud, the hosted version, starts at 20 euro per month billed annually.
Can I migrate between them later? Not automatically. Scenarios, Zaps and n8n workflows don't convert. Keep your workflows small and documented and a rebuild is an afternoon, not a project.
Which is best for AI agents? n8n has the most built-in agent tooling (an AI Agent node, MCP support, evaluations). Zapier and Make both connect to AI models as steps inside a workflow, which covers most small-business use cases.