n8n vs Zapier (vs Make) in 2026: The Per-Execution vs Per-Task Cost Math That Decides It
Zapier bills per task, Make bills per credit, n8n bills per execution. We work the cost table at 1k, 10k, and 100k tasks a month with real prices, sources, and a single pick per scenario.
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Decision Brief
What to do with this research
If you run more than a handful of multi-step workflows, n8n is the cheapest of the three by a wide margin because it charges per workflow run, not per step - Zapier and Make meter every action, so a 5-step automation costs roughly 4-5x more per run on them.
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If you run more than a handful of multi-step workflows, n8n is the cheapest of the three by a wide margin because it charges per workflow run, not per step - Zapier and Make meter every action, so a 5-step automation costs roughly 4-5x more per run on them.
- n8n bills per execution; Zapier per task; Make per credit - the gap compounds brutally at volume.
- At low volume with no self-hosting appetite, Zapier's polish can still be worth the premium.
- Model your real monthly task count at 1k / 10k / 100k before choosing.
Keep reading for the full analysis.
Where this decision goes next
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Best AI Low-Code, No-Code, and No-Code Machine Learning Platforms in 2026Read the next related article.Last verified: July 11, 2026. Every price below was pulled from vendor pricing pages or recent pricing guides on that date, and each claim carries its source. This is a documentation-and-pricing analysis, not a hands-on benchmark.
The verdict, up front
If you run more than a handful of multi-step workflows, n8n is the cheapest of the three by a wide margin — because it charges per workflow run, not per step. Zapier and Make both meter every action inside a workflow. A 5-step automation therefore costs roughly 4–5x more per run on those platforms than the same automation on n8n, and that gap compounds brutally at volume.
Single pick by scenario:
- You want zero maintenance and the widest app catalog, and you run under ~2,000 steps a month → Zapier Professional ($49/mo at the 2,000-task tier, annual billing).
- You want the best paid-plan price at low-to-mid volume and don't mind a steeper editor → Make Core ($9/mo for 10,000 credits, annual billing). Cheapest paid entry point in this comparison, full stop.
- You run complex, multi-step, or high-volume workflows → n8n Cloud (executions, not steps) — or self-hosted n8n at roughly the price of a $6 VPS, if anyone on your team can run Docker.
- Your automations live entirely inside project management (status changes, assignments, notifications) → you may not need an iPaaS at all. See the monday.com and ClickUp section below.
The rest of this page shows the math behind those calls.
Three platforms, three different meters
This comparison lives or dies on one thing: what unit each vendor actually bills.
| Platform | Billing unit | What consumes it | What's free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier | Task | Every action step; AI steps and code draw from the same pool | Triggers, Filter, Formatter, Paths, Delay, Looping, Digest, Tables/Forms (zapier.com/pricing, as of 2026-07-11) |
| Make | Credit (formerly "operations") | Each module action — reading, searching, creating, updating, iterating rows | Routers and error handlers (make.com/en/pricing, as of 2026-07-11) |
| n8n | Execution | One full workflow run — "It doesn't matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes — it's still a single execution" (n8n.io/pricing, as of 2026-07-11) | Everything inside the run; self-hosted Community Edition has no execution meter at all |
Read that last row again. On n8n, a 3-step workflow and a 43-step workflow cost exactly the same per run. On Zapier and Make, the 43-step version costs roughly 10–14x more per run than the 3-step one. That is the single most consequential fact in automation pricing, and neither Zapier's nor Make's marketing pages will put it in front of you.
Current list prices (verified July 11, 2026)
Zapier (pricing page, 2026-07-11; tier figures via No Code MBA, updated 2026-06-09, and TinyCommand, June 2026):
- Free: 100 tasks/month, two-step Zaps only
- Professional: from $19.99/mo (annual) / $29.99 (monthly) at 750 tasks
- Professional, 2,000-task tier: $49/mo annual, $73.50 monthly
- Tiers scale on a slider up to 2M tasks at $5,999/mo (Lindy, updated 2026-05-04)
- Overage: pay-as-you-go at 1.25x your plan's effective per-task rate; Zaps pause at 3x your included volume (No Code MBA, 2026-06-09)
- Team plan: from $69/mo annual ($103.50 monthly), 25 users
Make (pricing page, 2026-07-11):
- Free: 1,000 credits/month, 2 active scenarios, 15-minute minimum interval
- Core: $9/mo · Pro: $16/mo · Teams: $29/mo — all at the 10,000-credit base tier, annual billing (annual saves "15% or more")
- Higher credit tiers (20k → 8M+) are priced via the on-site slider; those slider prices aren't published as static text
- Extra credits: purchasable in 1,000/10,000 bundles; since November 6, 2025 extra credits cost 25% more per credit than plan-included credits (help.make.com)
n8n (pricing page, 2026-07-11):
- Starter: €20/mo (annual) — 2,500 executions, 5 concurrent
- Pro: €50/mo (annual) — 10,000 executions, 20 concurrent
- Business: €667/mo (annual) — 40,000 executions; overage sold in 300,000-execution buckets at €4,000
- Self-hosted Community Edition: free, source-available on GitHub — you pay only for your server
The worked cost table: 1k / 10k / 100k tasks a month
Assumptions (stated so you can re-run the math): your average workflow is 5 steps — 1 trigger plus 4 billable action steps. That's a realistic mid-size automation (form submission → enrich → create CRM record → post to Slack → append to sheet). Under that shape:
- 1 run ≈ 4 Zapier tasks (trigger and built-in utilities are free)
- 1 run ≈ 5 Make credits (the trigger module counts)
- 1 run = 1 n8n execution (always)
"Tasks/month" below uses Zapier's unit as the yardstick.
| Monthly volume | Runs | Zapier (annual billing) | Make (annual billing) | n8n Cloud | n8n self-hosted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 tasks | 250 | $49 — 2,000-task tier (750-task tier is too small) | $9 — Core; 1,250 credits used of 10,000 | €20 — Starter (250 of 2,500 executions) | ~$6 — a basic cloud VPS; $0 license |
| 10,000 tasks | 2,500 | ~$130–$250 (est.) — exact 10k-tier price is calculator-only; see method note | ~$12 — Core + 2,500 extra credits at the documented 25% premium (~$2.81) | €20–€50 — Starter sits exactly at its 2,500-execution cap; Pro (€50) buys headroom | ~$6 — same VPS |
| 100,000 tasks | 25,000 | ~$600–$900 (est.) — calculator-only tier; see method note | ≤ ~$138 documented ceiling — Core base + 115,000 extra credits at the 25% premium; the slider tier for 125k credits will be cheaper | €667 — Business (Pro caps at 10k executions) | ~$6–$24 — small-to-mid VPS depending on workflow weight |
Method note on the Zapier estimates: Zapier publishes its intermediate tier prices only inside the live pricing slider, not as static text — none of the 2026 pricing guides we checked could quote the 10k or 100k tiers directly. The estimates above are bounded by two documented anchor points: $49 for 2,000 tasks ($0.0245/task) and $5,999 for 2M tasks ($0.0030/task), plus Zapier's own statement that "cost per task decreases as you go higher" (No Code MBA, 2026-06-09). Treat them as directional and confirm on zapier.com/pricing before you commit. Every other figure in the table is a published list price or arithmetic on published rules.
Method note on Make at 100k: we show the worst-case documented cost — staying on Core and buying every extra credit at the 25% premium ($9 + 115,000 × $0.001125 ≈ $138). Nobody would actually do this; the slider tier for ~125k credits will undercut it. It's in the table because it's the only fully sourced ceiling, and even the ceiling beats Zapier's estimate by 4–6x.
VPS pricing source: DigitalOcean basic Droplets start at $4–6/mo for 1 vCPU / 1GB (digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets, as of July 2026); Hetzner runs materially cheaper per unit of compute (Better Stack comparison, 2026). How far a small box goes depends on your workflow weight — heavy code nodes and large payloads need more headroom — so treat the $6 figure as the floor, not a promise.
What the table actually tells you
1. The step-count multiplier is the whole story. At 100,000 tasks a month, Zapier's estimated cost lands somewhere near $600–$900, while n8n Cloud counts the same workload as just 25,000 executions. Make sits in between — cheap credits, but every module still burns one. If your workflows average 10+ steps instead of 5, double the Zapier and Make columns and leave the n8n column alone. That asymmetry is why agencies and ops teams with gnarly multi-branch workflows tend to migrate off per-step billing first.
2. Make is the low-volume price killer. $9/month for 10,000 credits is the best paid-tier deal on this page, and the documented 25%-premium overage math stays gentle. Its weakness isn't price. It's that the visual editor has a steeper learning curve, and the scenario-based model handles very high volume less gracefully than n8n's flat executions.
3. Zapier's price buys convenience, not capacity. The largest app directory, the most polished editor, the least maintenance. For a 3-person team running a dozen light Zaps, $49/month is honestly fine, and the migration cost of leaving would exceed years of savings. The trap is growth: teams that picked the $19.99 tier "usually discover within two weeks that they bought the wrong meter" (TinyCommand, June 2026), and overage bills at 1.25x sneak up fast.
4. n8n Cloud has an awkward middle. The jump from €50 Pro to €667 Business is steep — there's no published tier between 10,000 and 40,000 executions. If you outgrow Pro, the economically rational move is usually self-hosting, not Business. That's no accident; n8n's business model leans on enterprise features, not execution margins.
5. Self-hosting is free like a puppy is free. The n8n Community Edition license costs nothing, but you own updates, backups, security patches, and 2 a.m. restarts. Price that at even one hour of engineer time a month and the "free" column costs more than Make Core. Self-hosting only wins when volume gets high enough that SaaS metering hurts more than ops labor — which, per the table, happens somewhere between 10k and 100k tasks.
When a work OS replaces your iPaaS
An honest caveat before you buy any of the three: if every automation you're planning starts and ends inside project management — task created → assign owner, status changed → notify channel, due date passed → escalate — a dedicated automation platform is the wrong purchase. Work management suites ship this natively.
monday.com includes automation actions in its plans: 250 actions/month on Standard ($12/seat/mo) and 25,000 actions/month on Pro ($19/seat/mo) (monday.com/pricing, verified 2026-07-11; see also monday.com support). The Standard allotment is genuinely small — 250 actions evaporate in days on a busy board — so treat Pro as the real automation tier.
ClickUp lists 5,000 automation executions/month on Business ($12/user/mo annual) and 250,000/month on Enterprise on its live pricing page (clickup.com/pricing, verified 2026-07-11); Unlimited runs $7/user/mo. Per-plan automation allotments for Free and Unlimited aren't published on the pricing page, and ClickUp's help-center limits article was unreachable at verification time — treat any specific Free/Unlimited automation counts you see elsewhere as UNVERIFIED. For a team already paying for Business, 5,000 bundled runs may still cover much of what you were about to buy Zapier for.
The boundary: the moment your automation needs to touch systems outside the suite — payment webhooks, database writes, custom APIs, AI steps — you're back in iPaaS territory, and the table above applies again. Many teams sensibly run both: the work OS handles internal choreography at no marginal cost, and a small n8n or Make plan handles the cross-system plumbing.
Migration considerations (the part pricing pages skip)
Switching platforms is a rebuild, not an import. Budget for these before the savings math convinces you:
- No workflow portability. None of the three imports another's workflow format. Every Zap gets rebuilt by hand (or by an LLM assistant, which helps but still needs verification). Inventory your workflows first — teams often discover half their Zaps are dead weight, which shrinks the migration, and sometimes shrinks the bill enough to remove the reason to migrate.
- Webhook URLs change. Every external system that pushes into your automations (Stripe, Typeform, GitHub, custom apps) must be repointed. Plan a window where old and new endpoints both run, or you'll drop events during cutover.
- Re-authentication of every connection. OAuth grants don't transfer. On a 40-workflow estate, expect the credential re-connection pass to take longer than rebuilding the logic.
- Error-handling paradigms differ. Zapier's autoreplay and simple paths translate to Make's router/error-handler model or n8n's error-workflow pattern only conceptually. Your failure behavior will change. Test the unhappy paths, not just the demo run.
- App coverage asymmetry. Zapier's directory is the largest of the three by a wide margin. n8n covers fewer apps natively but compensates with HTTP-request and code nodes that can hit any API — which is either a liberation or a liability, depending on whether anyone on your team writes JSON for fun.
- Self-hosting adds an ops checklist. Postgres backing store, HTTPS, backups, version upgrades (n8n releases frequently), and queue-mode scaling if you go past a single instance. If none of those words made sense, buy n8n Cloud or stay on Make.
A sane migration sequence: rebuild the top 5 highest-volume workflows first (they carry the savings), run them in parallel for two weeks, compare execution logs, then move the long tail in batches.
FAQ
What exactly is the difference between a Zapier task, a Make credit, and an n8n execution? A Zapier task is one action step successfully executed inside a Zap (triggers and built-in utilities like Filter and Formatter are free). A Make credit is one module action — including the trigger module — in a scenario run. An n8n execution is one complete run of a workflow, regardless of how many steps it contains. Same automation, three different meters: a 5-step workflow run once costs ~4 tasks on Zapier, ~5 credits on Make, and exactly 1 execution on n8n. (Sources: zapier.com/pricing, make.com/en/pricing, n8n.io/pricing, all as of 2026-07-11.)
Is self-hosted n8n really free? The Community Edition license is free and there is no execution cap. What you pay for is infrastructure (from roughly $4–6/month for a small VPS, per DigitalOcean's pricing, July 2026) and your own maintenance time. Some advanced features (SSO, environments, insights) are reserved for paid tiers. For most solo builders and small teams, the honest total cost is one cheap server plus an hour of attention a month.
Can I automatically migrate my Zaps to n8n or Make? No. There is no supported import path between any of these platforms as of July 2026. Rebuilding is manual, though pasting a Zap's step list into an AI assistant and asking for the equivalent n8n workflow JSON gets you a usable first draft — one that still needs credential setup and testing.
Which is cheapest if I'm just starting out? All three have free tiers: Zapier gives 100 tasks/month (two-step Zaps only), Make gives 1,000 credits/month with 2 active scenarios, and self-hosted n8n is unmetered if you already have somewhere to run it. Among paid plans, Make Core at $9/month for 10,000 credits is the lowest-priced entry in this comparison (as of 2026-07-11).
Do monday.com or ClickUp automations replace a dedicated automation tool? Only if your automations stay inside the suite. monday.com Pro includes 25,000 automation actions/month and ClickUp Business includes 5,000 automation executions/month — plenty for internal task choreography. Cross-system integrations (custom APIs, webhooks, databases, AI pipelines) still need an iPaaS. Many teams run both and shrink their iPaaS bill in the process.
What happens when I blow past my plan limit? Zapier flips to pay-as-you-go at 1.25x your effective per-task rate and pauses Zaps entirely at 3x your included volume. Make lets you buy extra credit bundles at a 25% per-credit premium (or auto-purchase 10k blocks). n8n Cloud's published overage applies to Business (300k-execution buckets at €4,000); on lower tiers you upgrade. Self-hosted n8n has no meter to blow.
Methodology and sources
This page is a pricing-documentation analysis performed on July 11, 2026, with an independent verification pass the same day. We did not run load benchmarks; capacity remarks are qualified and workflow-shape assumptions are stated inline. Prices marked (est.) are derived from documented anchor points because the vendor exposes those tiers only in an interactive calculator — the derivation is shown in the method notes. EUR prices are listed as-is; your billed USD amount will track the current exchange rate.
- Zapier pricing page — https://zapier.com/pricing (accessed 2026-07-11)
- Zapier blog, "Zapier pricing" — https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-pricing/ (updated June 2026)
- No Code MBA, "Zapier Pricing 2026" — https://www.nocode.mba/articles/zapier-pricing-2026 (updated 2026-06-09)
- TinyCommand, "Zapier Pricing Explained" — https://tinycommand.com/blogs/zapier-pricing-explained (June 2026)
- Lindy, "Zapier Pricing" — https://www.lindy.ai/blog/zapier-pricing (updated 2026-05-04)
- Make pricing page — https://www.make.com/en/pricing (accessed 2026-07-11)
- Make Help Center, "Adjustments to plans and pricing" — https://help.make.com/adjustments-to-plans-and-pricing (extra-credit premium effective 2025-11-06)
- Zapier blog, "Make.com pricing" — https://zapier.com/blog/make-com-pricing/ (updated May 2026)
- n8n pricing page — https://n8n.io/pricing/ (accessed 2026-07-11)
- monday.com pricing — https://monday.com/pricing (accessed 2026-07-11; automation action counts verified here); monday.com Support, "Automations and integrations pricing" — https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002826680 (unreachable at verification time)
- ClickUp pricing page — https://clickup.com/pricing (accessed 2026-07-11; automation counts verified here); ClickUp Help, "Automations feature availability and limits" — https://help.clickup.com/hc/en-us/articles/23477062949911 (unreachable at verification time)
- DigitalOcean Droplet pricing — https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets (accessed July 2026)
- Better Stack, "DigitalOcean vs. Hetzner Cloud 2026" — https://betterstack.com/community/guides/web-servers/digitalocean-vs-hetzner/
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