n8n, Zapier, or Make? Comparing Automation Tools for a Small Business

When a company decides on its first automation, the question of process quickly takes a back seat to the question of tool: n8n, Zapier, or Make? All three do roughly the same thing — connect apps and move data between them without manual work — but they differ in pricing model, technical entry barrier, and how much the company is willing to invest in maintaining the system. Below are concrete numbers, not just opinions.

Zapier: the simplest start, the fastest-growing costs

Zapier is the oldest and best-known player — the interface is very simple and there's a huge number of integrations. The free plan gives you 100 tasks a month, the Professional plan starts at 19.99 USD/month for 750 tasks, and the Team plan starts at 69 USD/month for 2,000 tasks with collaboration for up to 25 people. The problem shows up when scaling: a "task" is counted for every step of an automation, so a more elaborate workflow (several conditions, several apps) burns through the limit faster than it looks at first. For a company with one simple process (e.g. a new lead from a form → CRM), it's still a good choice. For several parallel automations, the cost can catch you off guard.

Make: more flexibility, pay per operation

Make (formerly Integromat) offers a more visual, elaborate scenario editor and a billing model based on credits rather than tasks — the free plan gives 1,000 credits a month, Core starts at 12 USD/month for 10,000 credits, and Pro (the plan Make itself recommends) starts at 21 USD/month for the same limit but with extra features. Make handles more complex logic (branching, loops, file processing) better than Zapier, but the learning curve is steeper — this isn't a "click and done" tool anymore.

n8n: open source, self-hosting, and full control

n8n stands out because it can be self-hosted — the Community Edition is free and open source (over 205,000 stars on GitHub), which means there are no fees for "tasks" as such — the only cost is your own server. It's the tool we build most implementations on at Obieg, for exactly this reason: the client pays once for the build and maintenance, not for every additional workflow run. n8n's cloud version (for companies that don't want to manage their own server) starts at 20 EUR/month for 2,500 workflow executions, through 50 EUR/month (10,000 executions), up to the Business plan at 667 EUR/month with full self-hosting and SSO. n8n is growing very fast — the company reported roughly 775% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025, reaching 100 million USD in ARR in April 2026, and its valuation rose from 2.5 billion USD (October 2025) to 5.2 billion USD after a funding round involving SAP in May 2026. The Community Edition reports 1.7 million active monthly workflow creators.

Quick comparison

Which tool to choose in practice

If a company has one simple process to automate and zero time to spend implementing it — Zapier will get you the fastest result. If there are several processes and you need somewhat more complex logic, but without your own server — Make is a reasonable middle ground. In most implementations we recommend n8n, and not out of sentiment for open source: once you have several parallel automations (which is the reality for most small businesses after their first year of using automation), the "per task" pricing in Zapier or "per credit" pricing in Make starts growing disproportionately to the value the automation delivers. Self-hosted n8n has a higher entry cost — it has to be set up and maintained, which we do for clients as part of the implementation — but the marginal cost of the next automation or the next execution is practically zero.

An additional argument for n8n in 2026: native integration with AI models and agent nodes means the same tool handles both rigid workflows and processes that require judgment or interpretation — without switching platforms as the process grows.