n8n vs Make vs Zapier in 2026: Real Cost Comparison
At roughly 10,000 runs a month, Make is the cheapest hosted option at about $18.82/month, n8n Cloud's Starter sits at 24 EUR/month, and Zapier's Professional tier is the most expensive by a wide margin. Self-hosted n8n on a $7-13 VPS beats all three on price and removes run limits entirely. The catch is that the three tools do not count the same thing — a Zapier 'task', a Make 'credit', and an n8n 'execution' are different units, so comparing headline prices without normalising them is meaningless.
Every comparison of these three tools I have read does the same lazy thing: it puts three headline prices in a table and declares a winner. That table is wrong before it is published, because the three products do not bill for the same unit. Zapier charges per task, Make charges per credit, and n8n charges per execution — and one n8n execution can contain fifty steps that Zapier would have billed as fifty tasks.
So this is a comparison that normalises the unit first. All prices below were pulled from the live vendor pricing pages on 6 September 2026, and I have flagged the places where the vendor's own page shows different numbers depending on which tier selector is active. I run the self-hosted option myself, so I have a bias — I have tried to make it an argued bias rather than a hidden one.
The headline numbers, normalised to ~10,000 runs/month
| Free tier | ~10k runs/month | Billing unit | Self-host? | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier | $0 — 100 tasks/mo | Professional, tier-priced (see below) | Task = one step | No |
| Make | $0 — 1,000 credits/mo | $18.82/mo ($16/mo annual) | Credit ≈ one operation | No |
| n8n Cloud | Free tier available | 24 EUR/mo (Starter) | Execution = one whole run | Yes |
| n8n self-hosted | — | ~$7-13/mo (the VPS) | Unlimited executions | Yes |
The single most important cell in that table is n8n's billing unit. A workflow that fetches a row, calls three APIs, transforms the data and writes to two places is one execution on n8n and six tasks on Zapier. That ratio is where the real cost difference lives, not in the headline price.
Zapier: per-task billing, and the pricing page moves
Zapier's live pricing page shows:
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | 100 tasks/month |
| Professional | from $19.99/month | Price scales with the task tier you select |
| Team | from $69/month | Shared workspace, SSO on higher tiers |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | — |
One honest caveat: Zapier's pricing page is an interactive task-tier selector, with tiers at 100, 2K, 10K, 100K, 1M and 2M tasks. The "from $19.99" headline is the lowest tier. When I loaded the page with a mid-range tier selected, the Professional card showed $39/month. Neither number is wrong — they are the same plan at different volumes. Any article that quotes you one flat Zapier price has not actually opened the page.
The task trap. Zapier counts every successful action step. Filters and the trigger itself are free, but each subsequent action is a task. A five-action Zap running 2,000 times a month is 10,000 tasks, not 2,000. Estimate your volume by multiplying runs × action steps, not by runs.
Make: they collapsed everything into one plan
This is the finding that surprised me most while checking. Make used to sell Core, Pro and Teams as separate tiers. As of the pricing page today, those are gone — there is Free, a single "Make Plan", and Enterprise. The Make Plan bundles what used to be paywalled across three tiers: unlimited active scenarios, teams and roles, API access, full-text execution log search, custom variables.
The pricing ladder embedded in the page:
| Credits/month | Monthly billing | Annual billing (per mo) |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 (Free) | $0 | — |
| 5,000 | $10.59 | $9 |
| 10,000 | $18.82 | $16 |
| 20,000 | $34.12 | $29 |
| 40,000 | $62.35 | $53 |
| 80,000 | $107.06 | $91 |
| 150,000 | $180.53 | $153.45 |
| 300,000 | $315.93 | $268.54 |
| 1,000,000 | $880.86 | $748.73 |
Annual billing saves roughly 15%. The free tier has a 15-minute minimum interval between runs, which quietly disqualifies it for anything near-real-time — that limit is the actual reason people upgrade, not the credit cap.
Make credits behave much like Zapier tasks: roughly one per operation, so a multi-step scenario burns several per run. Make is meaningfully cheaper than Zapier at the same volume, and the consolidation into one plan makes it the simplest hosted option to reason about in 2026.
n8n: per-execution billing, which changes the maths
n8n Cloud's pricing page, in euros:
| Plan | Price/month | Annual |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 EUR | — |
| Starter | 24 EUR | 240 EUR |
| Pro | 60 EUR | 600 EUR |
| Business | from 800 EUR | ladder up to ~52,450 EUR |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | — |
n8n bills executions, not steps. A workflow with forty nodes that runs once is one execution. This is the structural advantage: for complex workflows, n8n Cloud can be an order of magnitude cheaper than Zapier at identical real-world throughput, even though the headline Starter price looks comparable.
The repo is genuinely healthy, which matters if you are betting a business process on it. Latest stable release is n8n@2.37.10 (4 September 2026), and the repo was last pushed 6 September 2026 — active daily development. Worth checking yourself before you pin a version:
curl -sL "https://api.github.com/repos/n8n-io/n8n/releases/latest" \
| python -c "import json,sys;d=json.load(sys.stdin);print(d['tag_name'],d['published_at'][:10])"One trap: /releases/latest returns the newest stable release and silently skips prereleases. If you look only at the tag list you may pin an unstable build; if you look only at latest you will not understand why higher version numbers exist. Query both.
The self-hosted column nobody puts in the table
n8n's own pricing page states plainly that self-hosted n8n has unlimited executions. The software is free under the Sustainable Use License; only certain business/enterprise features need a licence key.
So the real comparison at 10k runs/month:
| Option | Monthly cost | Run limit |
|---|---|---|
| Zapier Professional | $19.99-39+ | Task-capped |
| Make Plan | $18.82 | 10,000 credits |
| n8n Cloud Starter | 24 EUR (~$26) | Execution-capped |
| n8n self-hosted | $7-13 (VPS only) | None |
And the VPS is not doing only n8n. Mine also runs a Postgres instance, a couple of small services and a local model for cheap classification tasks. Amortised across everything on the box, the marginal cost of n8n is close to zero — that is the argument, not the $7.
Hidden costs, all three
Zapier and Make: the cost is failed runs and retries. A flaky upstream API that fails and retries three times burns tasks or credits each time. Neither vendor refunds them.
n8n Cloud: the execution model is generous until you build a workflow with a loop over 500 items — depending on how you structure it, that can become 500 executions rather than one. Sub-workflow calls count.
n8n self-hosted: the real cost is your time. Budget an evening for initial setup and maybe an hour a month for updates, TLS renewal and disk checks. Postgres over the default SQLite is not optional at any real volume — SQLite corrupts under concurrent executions. That is one extra container and removes an entire class of 3am problem.
All three: migration is not free. Rebuilding twenty Zaps in n8n is a real week of work, and there is no reliable importer. Factor that in before you switch to save $20/month.
Where each one actually wins
Zapier wins on app coverage and on hand-off. If your operations person who does not write code has to maintain the automations, Zapier's editor is still the least frightening. That is worth paying for. Its app directory remains the largest by a distance, and the obscure SaaS tool you need is more likely to be there.
Make wins on price-per-operation among hosted tools, and on visual complexity. The scenario canvas handles branching and iteration more legibly than Zapier's linear model. Now that everything is one plan, it is also the easiest to buy.
n8n wins on cost at scale, on code escape hatches, and on data control. You can drop into JavaScript or Python in any node. Self-hosting means customer data never leaves your infrastructure, which for me — running an agency handling client data — is the deciding factor, not the price.
When self-hosting n8n is the wrong choice
I would rather you not waste a weekend:
- You run 1-3 simple workflows. Make's free tier or the $9-16 plan is
fine. Your time is worth more than the difference.
- You do not want to think about Linux. Updates, backups, TLS, disk space.
It is not much work, but it is never zero.
- Someone non-technical must maintain it. Self-hosted n8n means when it
breaks at 2am, it is your problem, not a vendor's.
- You need SOC2, SSO or an SLA on paper. That is what the Cloud tiers sell.
Self-hosting starts making sense at roughly 5+ active workflows, or when data residency genuinely matters, or when you want the box for other services anyway.
What I would actually pick
If you are automating for yourself or a small team and you are comfortable with a terminal: self-hosted n8n on a small VPS. 4GB is the practical minimum for n8n plus Postgres; 8GB if you want headroom for anything else. That is $7-13/month for unlimited executions, and the same box happily runs the rest of your stack.
If you want zero maintenance and your workflows are simple: Make, at $16-18/month for 10k credits. Cheapest genuinely hosted option, and the single-plan structure means no upgrade surprises.
If a non-technical colleague owns the automations: Zapier, and accept that you are paying a premium for the friendliest editor in the category.
Affiliate note: I link to the VPS host I actually run this on. I pay for it; the link earns me a commission at no extra cost to you.
FAQ
Is n8n cheaper than Zapier?
Yes, substantially, and the gap widens with workflow complexity. n8n bills per execution while Zapier bills per task (per step), so a ten-step workflow costs 1 unit on n8n and 10 on Zapier for the same run. Self-hosted n8n removes execution limits entirely for the price of a $7-13/month VPS.
What is the cheapest Zapier alternative in 2026?
Self-hosted n8n, at the cost of a VPS — roughly $7-13/month with no run cap. Among fully hosted tools, Make is cheapest: $18.82/month for 10,000 credits on monthly billing, or $16/month billed annually.
Does Make still have Core, Pro and Teams plans?
No. As of the current pricing page, Make has consolidated to Free, a single "Make Plan", and Enterprise. Features that were previously split across Core, Pro and Teams — unlimited active scenarios, teams and roles, API access, full-text log search — are now all included in the one paid plan, which is priced purely by credit volume.
Is self-hosted n8n really unlimited?
Executions, yes — n8n's own pricing page states self-hosted has unlimited executions, and the software is free under the Sustainable Use License. Your practical limit is server capacity. Some business and enterprise features (advanced SSO, log streaming) require a licence key.
How many Zapier tasks do I actually need?
Multiply your monthly runs by the number of action steps per Zap, not by the number of Zaps. Triggers and filters do not count as tasks; every subsequent action does. Five actions running 2,000 times a month is 10,000 tasks. Add headroom for retries on failed runs — those are billed too.
Can I migrate my Zaps to n8n automatically?
No. There is no reliable importer between the platforms; the trigger and data models are too different. Rebuilding is manual. Budget roughly an hour per non-trivial workflow and migrate the highest-volume ones first, since those are where the cost saving actually lands.
Which one should I use if I handle client data?
Self-hosted n8n, on infrastructure you control. With Zapier and Make, client data transits a third party's servers, which affects what you can put in a DPA and what you can promise clients. That constraint, not price, is usually the real decider for agencies.
The VPS I actually run this on
I run n8n self-hosted on a KVM 2 VPS — the whole box costs less than one month of Zapier Professional, and it runs my CRM sync, lead enrichment and a dozen other workflows on top.
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