The short answer
Stay on Zapier if
The app you need exists only in its 9,000+ catalogue. Nothing else on this page closes that gap.
Move to Make if
You want the same hosted model for less. Free plan: 1,000 multi-step operations a month; Core: $9/mo annual for 10,000.
Move to n8n if
The data cannot leave your infrastructure. Self-hosted Community Edition, free, with unlimited executions.
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 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. Worth being precise about the license, though: n8n's source is available under its own Sustainable Use License, a "fair-code" license, not an OSI-approved open-source one. You can self-host and modify it freely for internal use, but you can't resell it as a competing hosted service. The self-hosted Community Edition is free either way, 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, billed annually: a Starter plan at €20/month for 2,500 executions, a Pro plan at €50/month for 10,000 executions, and a Business plan at €667/month for 40,000 executions, all with unlimited workflows and users. 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
Figures checked against zapier.com/pricing, make.com/en/pricing, and n8n.io/pricing as of August 2026.
What running n8n yourself actually costs
n8n is the only one of the three you can take off somebody else's servers. Twelve months, against Zapier's entry paid tier.
| Zapier Professional | n8n Community, self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | $240/yr ($19.99/mo annual) | $0 (Community Edition) |
| Server | — included — | ~$60–84/yr (small VPS) |
| Your time | none | ~2 h setup + ~12 h/yr |
| Run ceiling | 750 tasks/mo | unlimited executions |
| Year one | $240 | ~$72 + 14 hours |
Assumptions, so you can argue with them: a small VPS (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM) at the usual providers runs about $5–7 a month; setup takes roughly two hours; keeping it alive — updates, backup checks, the occasional broken migration — runs about an hour a month. Your own hourly rate is the number that decides this, and only you know it. The ceiling is the real difference: Zapier meters runs, a box you own does not.
