Feature lists make Zapier, Make, and n8n look like three flavors of the same thing. The pricing models underneath them are genuinely different in shape, and that difference matters more than most comparison articles let on.
Three different units of billing
- Zapier bills per step. Every action in a multi-step Zap counts, so a 10-step workflow costs proportionally more to run than a 2-step one, independent of how much data moves through it.
- Make bills per module (operation). Similar idea to Zapier’s steps, with its own scenario/operation accounting.
- n8n bills per workflow execution on n8n Cloud — or not at all, per run, if you self-host or use managed hosting, where you’re paying for the server the instance lives on, not for each time a workflow fires.
That last distinction is the one that actually changes the math for anyone running frequent or high-volume automations.
Why this matters more as you scale
Take a workflow with 10 steps that runs 10,000 times a month. Under a per-step or per-module model, that’s roughly 100,000 billable units — a number that climbs directly with both workflow complexity and run frequency. Under a flat-server model, the same workflow costs exactly the same as a 2-step workflow running once a day: the price is set by the server, not the traffic.
This is the core reason cost comparisons between n8n and Zapier/Make tend to favor n8n more heavily the more you actually use the tool — the opposite of what most SaaS pricing feels like.
Where each platform actually wins
- Zapier has the largest app catalogue and the lowest technical bar — genuinely the right call for a non-technical founder running a handful of low-volume automations who never wants to think about infrastructure.
- Make sits in the middle: a visual, less code-heavy builder than n8n, with its own AI agent tooling, aimed at ops/marketing teams who want more power than Zapier without becoming developers.
- n8n has the most technical, node-based interface of the three, native code steps, and (as of its 2.0 release) deep LangChain integration with around 70 AI-focused nodes — the right fit once you need self-hosting, data-residency control, or genuinely custom logic that a no-code builder can’t express.
The practical decision
If you’re comparing these three primarily on price, the honest framing is: Zapier and Make charge for usage; a self-hosted or managed n8n instance charges for capacity. Light, occasional automation favors usage-based pricing because you’re rarely near the ceiling. Frequent, business-critical automation favors capacity-based pricing because the ceiling stops being a limit at all.
For agencies specifically — running the same category of workflow across many clients — the capacity model tends to win outright, since ten clients on a per-execution platform means ten times the metered cost, while ten clients on a flat-server model can share (or cleanly separate into) instances priced by resource, not by run count. See how that plays out specifically for agencies, or the full n8n Cloud vs. self-hosted vs. managed hosting comparison if you’re weighing this for a single account rather than a portfolio of clients.