n8n, Make or Zapier for a small business?

The short version

• All three do the same job: watch for an event, then run steps in your other tools. They differ on price shape, control and how much you have to run yourself.
• Zapier is the fastest to start and the easiest to hand to a non-technical person. It costs the most per unit of work.
• Make is priced per operation rather than per task, and handles branching, loops and data reshaping more comfortably.
• n8n can be self-hosted, which means your data stays on your server and heavy AI workflows are not metered step by step.
• Pick on where your volume is going, not where it is today. Migrating between them is a manual rebuild.

What actually separates them

Pricing shape. Zapier and Make both charge for units of work, tasks and operations respectively, so a workflow that runs more often costs more. An operation is a smaller unit than a task, which is why the same workflow tends to land differently on the two. Self-hosted n8n charges nothing per execution; you pay for the server it runs on. For a workflow that fires a handful of times a day the difference is noise. For an AI agent that fires many steps per conversation it is the whole decision.

Where your data sits. With Zapier and Make, customer messages, order details and whatever else passes through your workflows are processed on the vendor's infrastructure. With self-hosted n8n they stay on a machine you control. Whether that matters depends on what your workflows carry and what you have told customers about it.

Control. Zapier is deliberately simple and gets awkward the moment you need a loop, a conditional branch, or to reshape a list of items. Make gives you those with a visual canvas. n8n gives you those plus a code step, which is the escape hatch that stops a build stalling on something the platform did not anticipate.

Who can maintain it. This one gets underweighted. Zapier can be handed to almost anyone in your business. Make needs someone patient. Self-hosted n8n needs someone who is comfortable that a server exists and occasionally needs attention.

Side by side

The connector count is worth less than the marketing suggests. Every one of these can call an arbitrary HTTP API, so the practical question is whether the tool you need has an API at all, not whether there is a pre-built tile for it.

What it costs

Our build price is one-time and covers the workflow itself: the logic, the connections to your tools, the testing and the handover. It is the same price whichever platform the build lands on, because the work is the work.

Platform subscriptions and server costs are yours and billed to you directly by the vendor. We do not resell them and we do not take a margin on them. That also means we have no reason to push you onto the plan that pays best, which is worth knowing when any agency recommends a platform.

We will not quote you plan prices for Zapier, Make or n8n here. They change, they differ by region, and a stale number in an article is worse than no number. Check the vendor's own pricing page on the day you decide.

Before any build there is a free audit: whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name your business for buying-intent questions, whether they describe you correctly, and which businesses get named instead of you, by name. Plus a WhatsApp response-speed test, we message your number during business hours, in the evening and on a Sunday, and log time to first reply. About three days, no cost, no pitch.

When none of these is the answer

Do not buy an automation platform to connect two things you touch once a week. The setup, the subscription and the mental overhead of a system that can break exceed the minutes you save. Do it by hand until it annoys you.

Do not self-host n8n if nobody in your business wants to own a server. The saving is real and so is the maintenance, and an automation that silently stopped three weeks ago is worse than one you never built. Take the hosted plan and pay for the peace.

Do not pick a platform before you have written down the workflow on paper. Nearly every stalled automation project we see stalled on the process, not the tool. If two people in your business would describe the steps differently, no platform fixes that.

Do not switch platforms to save on a subscription unless the saving is large and durable. Every workflow is rebuilt by hand, and the rebuild costs more attention than most businesses expect going in.