Make vs n8n vs Zapier: which automation tool to pick

Three tools do most of the workflow automation in small businesses: Zapier, Make (the one that used to be Integromat) and n8n. We’ve built on all three. We mostly build on Make. Here’s why, and why that might be the wrong answer for you.

A caveat before the comparison: all three change their pricing and plans often enough that any numbers we quoted would be stale by Christmas. Check their sites for the current figures. The shape of the differences doesn’t change much.

What they have in common

All three do the same fundamental thing. Something happens in one app (a form is submitted, an email arrives, a row is added to a sheet), the tool notices, and runs a sequence of steps across other apps (look this up, create that, send the other). All three now have a step that calls an AI model, so you can put “read this and extract the customer’s name, the product and the problem” in the middle of a workflow. All three connect to the apps a UK small business actually uses: Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Shopify, Stripe, Slack, Teams.

The differences are in how much they let you do, how much they charge for doing it, and what happens when it goes wrong.

Zapier: the easy one

Zapier is the one your office manager has probably already used. It has the most app connections, the gentlest learning curve, and the best documentation. A simple “when this, do that” automation can be built by someone with no technical background in twenty minutes.

Its limitation is that it’s priced per task, and it counts generously. A workflow with eight steps that runs on every email uses eight tasks per email. Once you’re doing anything in volume, or anything with branches and loops, the bill climbs faster than the value. And the moment you want logic that’s more than linear, you start fighting it.

Pick Zapier if: you want to automate a handful of simple things yourself, you don’t expect high volume, and you’d rather pay a bit more than learn a bit more.

Make: the capable one

Make is built around a visual canvas where you can see the whole workflow: branches, loops, error handlers, the lot. It’s priced per operation too, but its operations tend to go further, and the pricing has historically been kinder to anyone doing real volume.

It’s where we build most client work, because it hits the balance: powerful enough to do a genuinely complex job (we’ve built a three-workflow content engine on it), visual enough that a client can look at the canvas and understand what their automation does, and hosted, so there’s nothing to maintain.

The cost of that power is a steeper learning curve than Zapier. The error messages assume you know what JSON is. And it’s at its best when someone who does this for a living sets it up and the client then owns and runs it.

Pick Make if: you want proper automations with logic and error handling, you’re happy to have someone build them, and you want to own them in your own account afterwards.

n8n: the one you can own outright

n8n is open source. You can pay to use their hosted version, or you can run it on your own server for the cost of the server. Self-hosted, there’s no per-operation pricing at all; you pay for the box it runs on and that’s that.

That makes it the cheapest by a mile at volume, and the only one of the three where your data never has to leave infrastructure you control, which matters to some businesses more than others (anyone in care, legal, health or finance should at least think about it). It’s also the most developer-friendly: you can drop in code when the visual builder runs out.

The catch is in the word “self-hosted”. Somebody has to keep the server patched, backed up and running. If it falls over at 2am on a Saturday, there’s no Make support desk. For a business with no technical staff, that’s a hidden cost that can exceed the saving.

Pick n8n if: you have real volume, data you’d rather keep in-house, and either someone technical or a supplier who’ll host and look after it for you.

The five-minute decision

1. Will you build it yourself? Zapier. Stop reading.
2. Does the data need to stay on your own infrastructure? n8n, hosted by someone who’ll look after it.
3. Are you processing thousands of items a day? n8n, same reason.
4. Everything else: Make, built by someone who knows it, in your account.

The question that matters more than the tool

Whichever you pick, insist on two things.

It lives in your account. You pay the subscription. You hold the login. The person who built it has access because you granted it, and you can revoke it. We’ve seen too many businesses discover their automations belonged to an agency they’d stopped speaking to.

Someone owns it after launch. Apps change their APIs. Logins expire. Tokens get rotated. Every automation will break eventually, and the question is whether anyone notices before the customer does. Build in alerts, and decide up front who gets them.

The tool is maybe 20% of whether an automation project works. The other 80% is picking the right job, designing it so a person stays where the consequences are, and having someone accountable for it when it breaks. We’ve written about what that costs and where AI agents genuinely earn their keep.

If you’re weighing this up for a business in Yorkshire and want a second opinion on which tool fits, ask us. We’ll tell you even if the answer is “Zapier, do it yourself”.