Make: same idea, different unit and a lower floor
Covered in full in the Zapier vs Make comparison, the short version: Make is a hosted, no-code automation platform like Zapier, but it bills by operation ("credit") instead of by task, and its free plan allows multi-step scenarios where Zapier's free plan doesn't. If your reason for looking at alternatives is "Zapier's free tier is too limited to evaluate properly," Make solves that specific problem directly.
The trade-off: Make's app catalog is smaller than Zapier's 9,000+, and some integrations are community-maintained rather than official, so less mainstream tools may connect less reliably.
n8n: the structural alternative
n8n is open-source and self-hostable, which is the real difference from either Zapier or Make. Run it on your own server and every workflow, every piece of data passing through it, stays on infrastructure you control, no vendor holding your automations hostage to a pricing change, no third party seeing your data in transit. The self-hosted Community Edition is free with unlimited workflows and executions, limited only by your own server's capacity.
n8n also offers a hosted cloud version if self-hosting isn't practical: a Starter plan around €20/month for 2,500 executions, scaling up from there. Either way, workflows are built visually similar to Make's canvas, with the option to drop into actual JavaScript for logic that the visual builder can't express, a ceiling neither Zapier nor Make offers without their own custom-code add-ons.
The trade-off: self-hosting means you're responsible for uptime, updates, and security patching. That's a real cost, measured in engineering time, not dollars, and it's the reason n8n fits technical teams better than non-technical ones.
Picking between the three
Sources
- Make pricing, make.com
- n8n pricing, n8n.io