Zapier Alternatives in 2026: Real Pricing for Make, n8n, Pipedream, and Relay.app

This is a buying brief for teams that already know Zapier is either too expensive at their task volume or too limited for what they're building next - not a "22 best automation tools" listicle. We live-checked official pricing for five direct alternatives on 2026-07-12: Make, n8n, Pipedream, Workato, and Relay.app. Every number below came from the vendor's own pricing page on that date, with two exceptions flagged explicitly where the official page wouldn't render or two trackers disagreed - we say so instead of guessing.

Quick decision guide

The question worth asking isn't "which tool has the most integrations." It's "which billing unit and deployment model actually matches how my team works."

• You need the widest app library and zero technical setup - stay on Zapier. Its free tier caps at 100 tasks/month; Professional starts at $19.99/month (annual) once you need multi-step Zaps.
• You're hitting Zapier's task ceiling and the workflows are genuinely complex - move to Make. Core is $9/month for 10,000 credits, and the visual canvas handles branching logic Zapier's linear Zap builder struggles with.
• You want to own the infrastructure, keep data in-house, or avoid a recurring SaaS bill entirely - self-host n8n. The Community Edition is free software; n8n Cloud starts at 20 EUR/month if you'd rather not run the server yourself.
• Your team writes code and wants real npm packages, not a drag-and-drop canvas - Pipedream is built for that. Free tier is capped at an unpublished daily credit limit (third-party trackers report 25-100 credits/day); Basic is $29/month.
• You're an enterprise team where IT already owns integration governance - Workato is the category's enterprise-sales option. There's no public price; expect a demo call before a number.
• You want an AI-native, chat-first workflow builder for a small team - Relay.app starts free (200 steps/month) and Professional is $19/month (annual) for 750 steps plus AI credits.
• Still not sure which limit you're actually hitting - stay on Zapier Free and count your real monthly tasks for two weeks before paying for anything. Most teams overestimate their volume.

Official pricing at a glance

Here's what each vendor's own pricing page said on 2026-07-12, cheapest tier to most expensive, with the billing unit each one actually meters.

Zapier, Make, and Relay.app all default to showing the annual-billed rate on their pricing pages; each also has a higher month-to-month rate if your team can't commit to a yearly contract. n8n's Cloud pricing is quoted in EUR on the vendor's own page - confirm the live USD conversion before budgeting rather than assuming the number above translates directly.

What each tool is actually built for

Price alone won't tell you which tool fits. Here's what each vendor's own pricing page emphasizes as the reason to upgrade - which tells you what kind of team it's actually built for.

Zapier sells breadth and reliability over raw power. Free unlocks two-step Zaps and Zapier Copilot (its AI workflow-builder assistant, still in beta); Professional adds multi-step Zaps, unlimited Premium app connections, webhooks, and conditional form logic. Team ($69/month, 25 seats included) adds shared workflows and SAML SSO. The tradeoff is task-based pricing: a five-step Zap running on every new lead burns five tasks per run, and that adds up faster than most teams expect before they track it. If you're piping leads into whichever project-management tool your team already uses - see our Asana alternatives roundup if you haven't settled on one - Zapier is usually the fastest way to wire that up without touching code.

Make (formerly Integromat) trades Zapier's linear "trigger then action" model for a visual canvas where you can branch, loop, and transform data mid-scenario. Free covers 1,000 credits/month across 2 active scenarios; Core ($9/month) removes the scenario cap and adds scheduling down to the minute; Pro ($16/month) adds priority execution and custom variables; Teams ($29/month) adds role-based permissions and shared scenario templates - all three paid tiers start at the same 10,000-credit/month allowance and scale up from there on a usage slider. The real learning curve is real: Make's canvas is more powerful per dollar than Zapier's Zap builder, but it asks more of whoever builds the first scenario. Our Zapier vs. Make head-to-head goes deeper on the setup-time tradeoff if you're choosing between just these two.

n8n is the only tool on this list with a genuinely free, unlimited self-hosted option - the Community Edition is open-source software you run on your own infrastructure, with no per-task or per-operation fee at all. n8n Cloud (the hosted version) starts at Starter, 20 EUR/month billed annually for 2,500 executions/month, 5 concurrent executions, and 7-day execution history; Pro (50 EUR/month) raises that to 10,000 executions/month and 30-day history; Enterprise adds SSO, SAML, LDAP, version control via Git, and 365-day history at custom pricing. The tradeoff for the free path is operational: someone on your team owns updates, backups, and uptime, which is a real cost even at $0 in license fees.

Pipedream is built for teams that think in code, not drag-and-drop blocks - every step can run arbitrary Node.js, Python, Go, or Bash, and it ships with npm package access baked in. Pipedream's own docs confirm the Free tier is limited by execution credits but do not publish the exact daily number; third-party trackers report figures ranging from roughly 25 to 100 credits/day (about 3,000/month at the higher end), 3 active workflows, and 3 connected accounts, so treat the daily cap as unconfirmed until you check your own dashboard. Basic is $29/month for roughly 2,000 credits/day. We could not independently confirm Pipedream's Advanced tier price either - the vendor's own pricing page is a JS-rendered app that returned no readable pricing text on our check, and two third-party trackers we cross-referenced disagree ($49/month vs. $79/month for roughly 10,000 credits/day). Confirm both numbers directly on pipedream.com/pricing before you budget for it. One credit equals 30 seconds of compute time at 256MB of memory - confirmed on Pipedream's own docs page - so a workflow with a slow external API call can burn several credits in a single run.

Workato doesn't compete on price transparency at all. Its pricing page shows no dollar figures, no plan tiers, and no usage limits - just a "schedule a demo" call to action. That's consistent with its positioning: Workato is an enterprise integration platform sold to IT and ops teams who are already comparing it against Boomi, MuleSoft, or a custom iPaaS build, not against Zapier's self-serve signup flow. If a quote-only sales process is a dealbreaker for your team's buying process, cross Workato off the list now rather than after a discovery call.

Relay.app is the newest and smallest of the five, built around a chat-first, AI-native workflow interface with built-in human-in-the-loop approval steps; Relay's own feature comparison table shows this available on Free as well as the paid tiers, though we'd recommend confirming that row directly on the pricing page before you build a workflow around it. Free covers 200 steps/month and 500 AI credits/month with 2 custom MCP servers; Professional ($19/month, annual) raises that to 750 steps and 2,000 AI credits/month with unlimited MCP servers; Team ($59/month, annual) bundles 10 users and 1,500 steps/month with shared workflows and connections. It's the only tool here that bundles an AI-credit allowance separately from its workflow step count on every tier, which matters if your automations lean on AI-generated content or decisions rather than pure data routing.

Real cost at typical usage

Unlike project-management tools, none of these platforms bill primarily by seat - they bill by units of work, and bundle a flat seat allowance into their team-level tiers instead. That makes the entry paid tier, not a per-seat multiplier, the number worth comparing first.

Make's Core tier is the cheapest entry point in raw dollars: its 10,000 credits/month is roughly 100x Zapier's 100-task free-tier ceiling, for less than half of Zapier Professional's $19.99/month entry price. That's not a knock on Zapier - its Professional tier includes unlimited Premium app connections that Make doesn't offer at any tier, and Make gates its own AI Content Extractor and AI Web Search features behind the Pro plan and up - but if the deciding factor is "lowest cost to get past a hobby-tier task limit," Make wins that specific comparison.

n8n and Workato are left off the chart above on purpose: n8n's entry Cloud price is denominated in EUR (20 EUR/month, not directly comparable to a dollar figure without a live FX check), and Workato publishes no price at all. Don't let their absence from a bar chart read as "cheaper" or "missing data" - it's a currency and disclosure difference, not a pricing advantage.

At the team tier, the seat-bundling difference gets clearer: Zapier Team ($69/month) includes 25 seats, Relay.app Team ($59/month) includes 10 seats, and Make Teams ($29/month) doesn't advertise a seat cap at all - its constraint is still operations volume. If your team is larger than 10 people and cost-sensitive, Zapier's bundled-seat math at Team tier is worth pricing against Make's per-credit math before assuming the lower sticker price wins.

Task vs. credit vs. execution vs. step: why the numbers aren't comparable

This is the part most comparison posts skip, and it's the part that actually determines your bill. Five tools, four billing-unit names - and two of them ("credit") mean completely different things:

• Zapier task - one completed action step within a Zap. A 4-step Zap that runs successfully consumes 4 tasks.
• Make credit - one completed module step within a scenario, functionally similar to a Zapier task but priced differently per unit.
• n8n execution - one full workflow run, regardless of how many nodes it contains. A 12-node workflow that runs once still counts as a single execution against your monthly cap.
• Pipedream credit - a unit of compute time, 30 seconds at 256MB of memory. Despite the shared name, this has nothing to do with Make's credit - a workflow step that calls a slow external API and waits 90 seconds can burn 3 Pipedream credits in a single execution.
• Relay.app step - one workflow action, separate from its AI-credit allowance, which meters AI-generated content and decisions independently.

The practical consequence: Make's 10,000 credits/month on Core is not automatically "worse" or "better" than n8n's 2,500 executions/month on Starter - a single n8n execution can do the work of ten Make credits if the workflow is long, or the work of one if it's short. Don't shortlist a tool on its raw number without mapping your actual workflow's step count onto that specific unit first, and don't assume "credit" means the same thing from one vendor to the next.

Which tool fits your team

Solo founder or 2-person team, low automation volume

Stay on whichever free tier already covers your task count - Zapier Free (100 tasks/month) or Make Free (1,000 credits/month) both genuinely cover early-stage usage. Don't pay for anything until you've hit the free ceiling for two consecutive months, not one spike week.

Small ops team drowning in Zapier task overages

Move to Make. Core at $9/month for 10,000 credits is the cheapest way to buy meaningfully more headroom, and the visual canvas handles conditional branching that Zapier's linear Zap builder makes awkward past two or three decision points. If your team already runs its operations calendar through monday.com or a similar tool, Make's branching logic tends to map more naturally onto multi-step approval workflows than Zapier's Zap chains do.

Technical team that wants to own the infrastructure

n8n, self-hosted. Zero license fee, full data control, and no vendor-imposed task cap - the only real cost is the server and whoever maintains it. If nobody on the team wants that job, n8n Cloud Starter (20 EUR/month) gets the same workflow engine without the ops burden.

Developer-heavy team building complex data pipelines

Pipedream. Native code steps in Node.js, Python, Go, or Bash with npm access mean you're not fighting a drag-and-drop UI to do something a competent engineer could write in ten lines. Budget conservatively on the Advanced tier until you've confirmed its live price - our fetch turned up disagreement between trackers on that specific number.

Enterprise team where IT owns integration governance

Workato. Budget a procurement cycle and a demo call, not a self-serve signup - this is the one tool here explicitly built and sold for that buying process.

Small team that wants AI-native, chat-first workflow building

Relay.app. Free covers 200 steps and 500 AI credits/month, which is enough to validate whether an AI-generated-content workflow is worth paying for before committing $19/month to Professional.

Red flags before you commit

• You're comparing raw task/credit/execution/step counts across tools without mapping your actual workflow onto each unit. A cheap number on one platform can be an expensive number in practice once you count real steps.
• The tool's pricing page shows an annual-only rate with no visible monthly option. Zapier, Make, and Relay.app all default to annual pricing on their public pages - confirm the true month-to-month rate at checkout before assuming you're locked into a yearly contract.
• You're budgeting Pipedream's Advanced tier or Workato's pricing from a comparison post (including this one) instead of the live vendor page. Both had incomplete or disputed public pricing data as of this check - re-verify before signing anything.
• You haven't tested the export or migration path. Before moving a live workflow off Zapier, rebuild one real, painful Zap in your top candidate and confirm the trigger, all conditional branches, and error handling survive the move - not just the happy path.

Migration and renewal checklist

Before committing to any of these five platforms, run the same discipline you'd apply to a project-management tool: name an owner for the automation account, decide who approves new workflows or connected accounts, and set a concrete metric (tasks saved, hours reclaimed, incidents avoided) that proves the tool earned its line item. Automation tools are unusually easy to let sprawl - a workflow built by someone who left the company six months ago is a common, quiet source of both wasted spend and silent failures.

Set a specific re-evaluation trigger before you sign: a task-volume threshold that would justify moving tiers, a data-residency requirement that would force a self-hosted option, or a specific workflow complexity Zapier's linear model can't express. Teams that skip this step tend to keep paying for whichever tool they migrated to out of switching fatigue, not because it's still the best fit for the volume they've grown into.

The bottom line

There isn't one universal "best Zapier alternative" - there's the platform that matches the billing unit and deployment model your team actually needs. Cost-sensitive teams outgrowing Zapier's task cap should default to Make and confirm the credit-slider price at their real volume before committing. Technical teams should default to n8n and decide up front whether self-hosting or Cloud is the better tradeoff for who's available to maintain it. Developer-heavy teams should treat Pipedream's code-first model as the deciding factor over price, and reverify its Advanced tier cost directly before budgeting it. Enterprise teams already in a procurement process should expect to negotiate Workato's price rather than find it published. Everyone evaluating an AI-native, chat-first builder should start with Relay.app's free tier before paying for Professional.

Prices verified directly against each vendor's official pricing page on 2026-07-12: Zapier, Make, n8n, Pipedream (partially - see notes above), Workato, and Relay.app.