Four threads in the same fortnight, across r/AiAutomations, r/ClaudeAI and r/n8n, all asking a version of the same question. n8n vs Zapier, which is better? All three, who wins? Which is cheapest and easiest? And the grown-up variant: which survives an enterprise review? The replies are always the same shape. Someone says n8n because it is cheaper, someone says Zapier because it has more integrations, someone says Make because the canvas is nicer. None of those answers survives contact with an invoice.

What decides it is not a feature. n8n, Zapier and Make meter the same work in three different units: n8n bills per workflow run, Zapier bills per successful action, and Make bills per module run per item. The same automation can consume 30 units on one platform and 24,000 on another with no change to its logic. So the question that predicts your answer is not “which is best” but how many billable steps each trigger event sets off. Call it the fan-out ratio. Work it out for your top three workflows and the comparison stops being an opinion. Every figure below comes from the three vendors’ own pricing and documentation pages, checked 12 September 2026; where a number sits behind a slider rather than a published table, I say so instead of guessing.

The three billing units, in each vendor’s own words

n8n bills per execution: “A single run of your entire workflow. It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It’s still a single execution.” Three documented details matter more than that sentence. Only production executions count, meaning those “started automatically by triggers, schedules, or polling.” Manual runs from the editor do not. And when a workflow calls another with the Execute Sub-workflow node, “only the parent (top-level) execution counts.” Tiers, all quoted billed annually: Starter €20/month for 2,500 executions and 5 concurrent, Pro €50/month for 10,000 and 20, Business €667/month for 40,000 and 30, Enterprise on request at 200+. Users, workflows and integrations are unlimited on every tier, and there is no free tier on the published Cloud table.

Zapier bills per task: “Tasks are used when a Zap successfully moves data or completes an action for you automatically.” Its help centre is blunter: a task is any successful action that runs in Zapier. The list of things that do not consume one is Zapier’s most underrated feature: triggers, polling and checking for new data, Filter, Formatter, Paths, Delay, Looping, Sub-Zap, Digest, Zapier Manager, Storage, Tables and Forms. Free is $0 and 100 tasks. Professional starts at a published $19.99/month, tied on the page to a 750-task tier, with annual billing advertised at 33% less. Team starts at $69/month on a shared pool.

Make bills per operation, now renamed a credit. An operation is “a single module run to process data or check for new data.” Credits “replaced operations as the term for make’s billing unit,” and “by default, 1 operation equals 1 credit,” though some modules “consume 2 or 10 credits per operation.” The multiplier is what people miss: “modules process each bundle separately, meaning each bundle triggers its own module run.” A trigger returning 10 bundles makes every downstream module run 10 times. Triggers are the exception and “only run once to check for or retrieve data, regardless of the number of bundles returned.” Router and the error handlers consume nothing. Entry prices: Free $0 with 1,000 credits and 2 active scenarios, Core $12/month, Pro $21/month, Teams $38/month, each of those three quoted for 10,000 credits.

One trap before the maths: n8n’s headline prices are billed annually while Zapier’s and Make’s are monthly with a separate annual discount, so the printed numbers are not like for like.

Two workflows where the unit count does not predict the bill

Shape A, low fan-out, runs constantly. A webhook fires on each form submission. Three acting steps: enrich over HTTP, upsert into the CRM, post to Slack. One item per run, 8,000 runs a month.

Shape B, high fan-out, runs rarely. A daily schedule pulls 200 records and does four steps per record, three of them real app actions and one a data transform. 30 runs a month.

In Shape A, Make consumes the most units and may well produce the smallest bill, because the entry rates are not comparable per unit. Core is $12 per 10,000 credits, or $0.0012 a credit; Zapier’s Professional entry is $19.99 for 750 tasks, or $0.0267 a task, roughly 22 times more. n8n’s number is the only one knowable exactly: 8,000 executions fit inside Pro’s 10,000, so €50/month. Consuming more units is not the same as paying more money. What Zapier charges at 24,000 tasks or Make at 32,000 credits, nobody can say without opening the calculator, because both publish only a starting price and a slider. Extrapolating an entry rate ten-fold is the error this article is about, so treat those per-unit rates as a floor, not a forecast.

Shape B is where no rate difference saves you. Thirty executions a month sit inside n8n’s €20 Starter tier, while Zapier’s 18,000 tasks and Make’s 24,030 credits are 600 and 800 times that count. No volume discount closes a gap that size. If your work loops over records, per-run billing wins by an order of magnitude or two.

Two modifiers flip the ordering back. First, Zapier’s free step types: a Zap with a Filter, a three-branch Path and two Formatter steps ahead of one app action consumes one task per run, where identical logic on Make costs four credits because only the Router is free. On utility-heavy single-action workflows Zapier has the lowest unit count of the three. Second, the price floor. A webhook workflow with two actions running 60 times a month is 180 credits on Make, inside the free tier at $0; the same thing needs Zapier Professional at $19.99, because multi-step Zaps are not on Free, and n8n Starter at €20.

Polling versus webhooks is a billing decision

Zapier does not charge for polling; checking for new data is explicitly on the non-task list. You pay in latency instead, set by plan: Free checks every 15 minutes, Professional every 2, Team and Enterprise every 1.

Make charges for the check. Read its definition again: a module run “to process data or check for new data.” A scenario on Make’s 1-minute minimum, available from Core up, makes 43,200 checks a month, which is 43,200 credits before it does anything useful. The 10,000-credit allowance at $12 does not cover one scenario polling every minute. Free caps scheduling at 15 minutes, still 2,880 checks against a 1,000-credit allowance. On Make, a webhook trigger is a cost control, not a performance optimisation.

n8n’s docs confirm polling-started runs count as production executions but do not say whether an empty poll creates an execution at all. Worth ten minutes on a trial: set a polling trigger at your intended frequency, point it at a source with no new data, leave it a day, read the execution count. Do that before signing, because on a per-run meter the answer moves your bill by a factor of thousands.

Self-hosting swaps the meter for an obligation

Self-hosted n8n has no per-execution charge, which is why the high fan-out case so often ends on a server. It is not free, and the honest accounting is not about the server. You take on a Node application, Postgres, and Redis if you run queue mode, plus an upgrade path against a project shipping releases most working days, backups you have tested by restoring one, certificate renewal, and monitoring for the platform itself, because a workflow engine that is quietly down is the most silent failure mode you can own. You are the one paged.

The bigger cost is the feature list. n8n’s docs state the Community edition excludes custom variables, environments, external secrets, external binary storage, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO via SAML and LDAP, sharing of workflows and credentials, and version control using Git. Registering the free edition adds folders, debug in editor and custom execution data, nothing more. So the real comparison is not €0 against €50; it is a server plus a recurring slice of someone’s attention, with no environments and no Git, against a Cloud tier that has both. For one person, self-hosting is an easy yes. For six people deploying to one instance, it is how you get forty workflows with no change history.

Failures, retries and what you can see the next morning

Make documents this most thoroughly. Incomplete executions are “a safety feature” but are “disabled by default” and must be enabled per scenario. Once on, Make retries incomplete executions from rate limit, connection and module timeout errors on exponential backoff: one minute after the original run, then ten minutes later, then ten more, then 30-minute intervals extending to three hours, capped at three retries in parallel per scenario. The Retry error handler defaults to three attempts at a 15-minute delay. Error handler modules consume no credits, so recovery is free.

n8n’s model is the error workflow. “For each workflow, you can set an error workflow in Workflow Settings. It runs if an execution fails,” and it must start with the Error Trigger node, which receives execution details, workflow information, error messages and stack traces. The Stop And Error node lets you fail deliberately down the same path. Retry-on-fail is a per-node setting whose defaults that page does not publish, so read the node panel rather than a blog. The billing consequence is awkward: n8n’s unit is a run, not a successful run, so a failure and its replay both count. Zapier bills only successful actions, so a Zap dying at step two charged you for step one. Its recovery feature is Autoreplay, on Professional and above; the retry count and window are not stated on any page I could reach, so I will not invent them. Free-plan users get no automatic replay at all.

Observability tracks tier more than product. n8n retains execution insights for 1 day on Starter, 7 on Pro, 30 on Business and 365 on Enterprise, and its docs cap Cloud execution data harder still: Starter saves at most 2,500 executions with 7-day log retention. Log streaming is Enterprise only. Make puts full-text execution log search on Pro and above; Zapier lists observability as Enterprise.

9,000 apps, 3,608 apps, 2,174 apps

Today’s published counts: Zapier says “9,000+ apps,” Make’s directory reports 3,608 results against a page claiming “over 3,000,” and n8n states 2,174. Real numbers, nearly useless as a decision input. A connector existing does not mean the action you need exists; plenty ship a trigger and two actions, and the field you want to write is not among them. The only test that means anything is opening your app’s connector on each platform and looking for your operation. Ten minutes, three tabs.

All three have a generic escape hatch, so real coverage for any documented API is effectively everything. n8n has the HTTP Request node and lets any node be swapped for JavaScript or Python. Make says plainly: “You can connect to any app that offers an API by using our HTTP app.” Zapier has Webhooks. The asymmetry is cost and gating: n8n’s HTTP Request is free inside an execution you already paid for, Make’s HTTP module is a billable credit per bundle, and Zapier’s Webhooks are absent from the Free plan. Counts also say nothing about who fixes a connector when the upstream API changes. Vendor-built, somebody else. Hand-rolled HTTP, you.

The enterprise question is who can maintain it

Every “n8n vs Zapier for enterprise” thread becomes a features argument when the real question is governance: who can change a live workflow, how you know what changed, and whether you can prove it to an auditor. Where each vendor puts those, from its own pages:

That table inverts the cheap-tool story. Make puts RBAC with custom roles and audit logs on Teams at a published $38/month, the cheapest governance floor of the three by a distance. n8n is the only one offering Git as a source of truth, separate dev and production environments and workflow diffing at all, but puts them on Business, and the step from Pro at €50 to Business at €667 is where growing teams get stuck: they need environments long before they need 40,000 executions. Zapier’s admin controls sit entirely on Enterprise, and are therefore unpriced.

Residency splits them too. n8n’s security page states Cloud runs on Microsoft Azure and that the hardware and stored data “is currently hosted in the European Union,” with more locations in preparation. Ideal for an EU buyer; for a US or APAC buyer with a residency requirement, n8n Cloud is the wrong answer today and self-hosting is the only n8n route. n8n says it aligns to SOC 2 with annual independent audits and publishes a SOC 3 report. Make’s pricing page lists AWS hosting in EU and North America, and its enterprise page claims GDPR, SOC 3 and SOC 2 Type II compliance plus an on-premises agent for reaching a private network. Zapier’s residency position I could not verify from any reachable page today, so get it from their sales team in writing rather than from a comparison article, this one included.

On lock-in: n8n is the only one you can run yourself, and workflows export as JSON, so your exit is a tarball and a server. Neither Zapier nor Make offers a self-hosted engine, and Make’s on-premises agent is a network bridge, not a deployment. None publishes a converter to another, so migration means rebuilding by hand and re-authorising every credential. The nastier part is economic: a Zap leaning on free Filter, Formatter and Paths steps becomes billable modules on Make, and a Make scenario looping over bundles becomes billable tasks on Zapier.

Twenty minutes, your three workflows

• List your three highest-volume workflows. Not all of them. The top three decide the bill. (2 min)
• Write the trigger type and frequency. Webhook, or polling at what interval, and how many times a month it actually fires. (3 min)
• Write items per run and steps per item. One item or 200? Three steps or twelve? Mark which steps are real app actions and which are filters, routers or formatters. (5 min)
• Compute three numbers. n8n equals runs per month. Zapier equals runs × items × app actions, excluding its free step types and polling. Make equals runs × (trigger checks + items × modules), counting your transform modules. (5 min)
• Open all three pricing sliders at those volumes and read the price. The step everyone skips, and the only one that yields a real number. (5 min)

The rule that falls out: a fan-out ratio under about three at modest volume means the price floor and free tiers decide, so Make’s free plan or Zapier Professional usually win. Over about ten means n8n or a self-hosted engine, by a margin large enough that nothing else on your sheet matters. Governance on a small budget means Make Teams. Six niche SaaS products in one workflow means Zapier, because coverage beats unit price when the alternative is building the connector yourself.

And plainly, where each is wrong. n8n is the wrong choice if nobody will own a server and an upgrade cadence, if you need non-EU residency on managed cloud, if you need audit logs without an Enterprise budget, or if your governance needs arrive while your volume is still tiny, because the Pro-to-Business gap will hurt. Zapier is the wrong choice for anything that fans out; its unit is the most expensive of the three at published entry rates and it charges per item per action, so loops are punishing. Make is the wrong choice if you poll frequently, since every check is a credit, or if you need Git-style change control and environments, which it does not list at any tier. Any thread that names a winner without asking about your fan-out ratio is guessing.

If you would rather not run this arithmetic across forty existing workflows, that audit is a service AB7 Solutions does: counting real unit consumption, modelling it against all three meters plus self-hosting, and rebuilding the few workflows whose shape is fighting their platform. We also take the part teams dread, owning a self-hosted instance afterwards with monitoring and an upgrade path. Call +1 321 341 7733, or email ab@ab7solutions.com or director@ab7solutions.com, and there is more on our automation work at ab7solutions.com.

Sources, checked 12 September 2026: n8n pricing; n8n docs: understand executions; n8n docs: community edition features; n8n docs: manage your data; n8n docs: handle errors gracefully; n8n enterprise; n8n security; n8n integrations; Zapier pricing; Zapier apps directory; Make pricing; Make help: operations; Make help: credits; Make help: automatic retry of incomplete executions; Make help: incomplete executions; Make apps directory; Make enterprise.