A RevOps lead sent me her tool list last quarter and asked me to find $30K to cut. The biggest single line item, after the CRM, was Zapier. $1,900 a month. I asked what it was doing. The answer was the part that got me: nothing fancy. Form fills into HubSpot, Slack alerts when deals moved, a few enrichment steps, a nightly sync to a reporting sheet. Maybe twenty workflows. The bill had crept up there one task at a time, because Zapier counts every step of every run, and her workflows had gotten longer as the team got more demanding.
That conversation happens a lot. Someone picked an automation tool in year one when they had three Zaps and a free plan, the company grew, the workflows grew, and now the pricing model that was invisible at small scale is eating a real chunk of the budget. By the time anyone looks closely, switching feels like surgery.
So let me save you the surgery. Here is how n8n, Zapier, and Make actually differ, where each one wins, and the hybrid setup I end up recommending for most B2B teams between Series A and Series C.
The three tools charge you in three different ways
This is the whole argument, so I want to put it first. The features overlap more than the vendors want you to think. The pricing model is where they split, and the pricing model is what decides your bill at scale.
Zapier charges per task. A task is one action. If a workflow triggers on a new lead, checks a condition, enriches the record, scores it, and updates two CRM fields, that is roughly five tasks every time it runs. Run it a thousand times and you have burned 5,000 tasks. Zapier's paid plans start around $20 a month for 750 tasks and climb fast once you are doing real volume.
Make charges per operation, which is close to per task but cheaper per unit, and the visual builder lets you see the whole flow on a canvas. At the same workload Make tends to land 60-70% below Zapier. It is the middle option on both price and complexity.
n8n charges per workflow execution on its cloud plan, and nothing per step at all if you self-host. One execution is one full run of the workflow, no matter how many nodes it passes through. That 5-step workflow above costs the same as a 50-step one. n8n Cloud starts at $20-24 a month. Self-hosted on a small server runs $5-15 a month for unlimited executions, with the catch that you own the server.
What the bill looks like at scale
Numbers make this concrete. Take a workflow that runs 10,000 times a month with 8 steps each. That is a normal lead-processing pipeline for a team doing decent inbound and outbound volume.
The gap is not a rounding error. At the threshold where most growing teams live, past 10,000 runs a month, Make comes in around 70% cheaper than Zapier and self-hosted n8n is 90% plus cheaper for the identical workload. That is the part nobody models when they pick a tool in month two and it is the part that bites in year two.
But cost is the easy half of the decision. The expensive half is who maintains the thing.
The real question is who owns it, not which tool wins
Here is where most comparison articles go wrong. They line up integration counts and pricing tiers and crown a winner. There is no winner. There is only a fit between the tool's billing model and the people who have to keep it running.
n8n's flat pricing is genuinely great, until the workflow breaks at 2am and the only person who understands the custom JavaScript node is a contractor who finished the project three months ago. Code nodes become a bottleneck the moment a RevOps manager who is not an engineer has to debug one. Zapier's per-task pricing looks expensive on a spreadsheet, until you remember that an SDR manager can build and fix a Zap herself without filing an engineering ticket, which has its own real cost you are not counting.
Pick the tool your team can maintain at 2am, not the one that scores best on a feature grid.
A cheap workflow nobody can fix is more expensive than a pricey one anyone can. Match the billing model to who owns the automation, then optimize cost.
So the question I ask a team is not "which is best." It is two other questions. Who is going to build and fix these? And what does the data inside them touch?
If your automation owner is a non-technical ops person and the workflows are short, Zapier earns its premium. The breadth of integrations and the zero-setup builder mean things get built and stay built without engineering time. For a team under maybe 5,000 tasks a month, the bill is small enough that optimizing it is a waste of your attention.
If you have a technical RevOps person or a GTM engineer, and you are running high-volume, multi-step workflows, n8n changes the math. Flat execution pricing plus custom code plus self-hosting means you can build deep automation that would be either impossible or absurdly expensive on per-task pricing. This is the world I usually operate in, and it is why our build work leans on n8n as the orchestration layer for clients with real volume.
Make sits in between and is the honest answer more often than people admit. Visual enough that a sharp ops person can own it, cheaper than Zapier, and capable of branching logic that Zapier handles clumsily. If you want one tool and your team is somewhere between "no engineers" and "we have a GTM engineer," Make is frequently the right single bet.
Two more things that should weigh more than they do
Data residency and compliance
If you are a European company, or you sell into regulated buyers, where your automation data physically lives is not a footnote. Zapier and Make are US-hosted SaaS. Your lead data, your CRM records, the enriched personal data from a Clay or Apollo call, all of it passes through their infrastructure. For a lot of teams that is fine. For some it is a GDPR problem or a deal-blocker in security review.
Self-hosted n8n is the only one of the three that lets you keep everything on your own infrastructure, in your own region. I have had this be the single deciding factor for clients whose enterprise prospects ran a vendor security questionnaire and balked at where the SDR data was flowing. If that is your buyer, n8n self-hosted is not the cheap option, it is the only option.
AI workflows
This used to be a tie. It is not anymore. n8n shipped a large set of AI nodes with LangChain support, agent memory, and native hooks for self-hosted models. If you are building AI-driven GTM automation, an agent that reads a transcript and drafts a follow-up, an enrichment step that uses an LLM to classify accounts, n8n has become the most practical place to build it without gluing five services together. Zapier and Make both have AI steps, but they are billed per call on top of your task or operation cost, which gets expensive fast on the exact high-volume use cases where AI is interesting.
The hybrid stack I actually recommend
Here is the part the "vs" framing hides. You do not have to pick one. The best-run RevOps stacks I see use two of these tools on purpose, each for the job it is good at.
The split works because it maps to how teams actually operate. The non-technical owner keeps the autonomy to build small things fast on Zapier or Make. The expensive, high-volume work that justifies engineering attention lives on n8n where the flat pricing and the custom logic pay off. Nobody is forced to debug a JavaScript node to change a Slack message, and nobody is paying per-task rates to enrich 10,000 leads.
The mistake I see is teams treating this as a religious choice. They standardize on Zapier because it is what they know and then act surprised when the bill quadruples, or they go all-in on self-hosted n8n and discover that the marketing ops person cannot touch anything without a developer. The tools are not teams to root for. They are line items with different cost curves and different maintenance owners. Use the cheap-at-scale one for the heavy stuff and the easy-to-own one for the light stuff.
If you want a broader picture of where automation fits alongside the rest of your systems, I wrote a full breakdown of the minimal RevOps tech stack that actually works, and a deeper guide to the n8n workflows worth building for revenue teams.
Not sure where the line should sit?
Book a free 30-minute audit. We will map your current automations, find the ones bleeding money on per-task pricing, and show you what to move to n8n first.
Book an audit →Frequently asked questions
Is n8n actually cheaper than Zapier?
At low volume, no, the difference is trivial and Zapier's ease of use wins. At scale it is dramatic. For a workflow running 10,000 times a month with several steps each, self-hosted n8n can cost under $15 in server fees against $250 plus on Zapier, because n8n charges per workflow execution and Zapier charges per step of every run. The crossover point is usually somewhere past 5,000 tasks a month.
Do I need a developer to use n8n?
For n8n Cloud and standard workflows, no. The node editor is usable by a technical ops person. You start needing developer comfort when you add custom JavaScript nodes, self-host the server, or build complex error handling. Make is the easier option if you want power without code, and Zapier is the easiest of the three for a fully non-technical owner.
What is the difference between a task, an operation, and an execution?
A Zapier task is one action step. A Make operation is similar, roughly one module run. An n8n execution is one complete run of an entire workflow regardless of how many nodes it contains. This single difference is why a long multi-step workflow is cheap on n8n and expensive on Zapier at the same run count.
Which tool is best for GDPR and data residency?
Self-hosted n8n, by a wide margin. It is the only one of the three that lets you keep all automation data on your own infrastructure in your own region. Zapier and Make are US-hosted SaaS, so your lead and CRM data passes through their systems. For European teams or anyone selling into security-conscious enterprise buyers, this often decides the choice on its own.
Can I use more than one of these tools at once?
Yes, and most well-run teams should. Run Zapier or Make for the short, low-volume automations a non-technical person owns, and n8n for the high-volume, data-sensitive, multi-step pipelines. Draw a line around 5,000 runs a month or any workflow touching personal data, and migrate across it as workflows grow. The split keeps both cost and maintenance sane.
If your automation bill has crept past what it should be, or you are about to pick a platform and want to get it right the first time, talk to us. We build and own this layer for B2B teams every day.