The Honest Guide to Picking n8n, Make, or Zapier

We get this question on almost every discovery call. The short version: it depends on who is going to maintain the workflow after we leave.

Zapier

Best when the person owning the workflow is non-technical and the logic is mostly "when X happens in tool A, do Y in tool B." Pricing climbs fast once you start branching, but the integrations library is the deepest in the market. If your ops lead is going to edit the flow themselves, this is usually the right call.

Make

A good middle layer. Visual, forgiving, cheaper than Zapier at scale, and lets you do real data transformation without writing code. The catch: scenarios get genuinely hard to read once they exceed twenty modules. Excellent for ops teams that want power without engineering.

n8n

Self-hostable, much cheaper per execution at volume, and lets developers drop into JavaScript when needed. The price is real engineering ownership — someone has to keep the instance updated and the workflows tested. If you have a developer on staff, it's almost always the most cost-effective option long term.

How we actually decide

We ask: who is on call when this breaks at 11pm on a Sunday? Pick the tool that person is comfortable opening.