Make vs Zapier vs n8n: What 100+ Client Builds Taught Us

The Pricing Trap

Zapier's per-task pricing looks fine at 100 tasks/month. At 10,000 tasks — which happens fast once you add AI processing steps that trigger on every email, form submission, or CRM update — you're looking at £200–400/mo. The equivalent Make plan with operations bundled costs £25–45/mo.

At 100,000 tasks/month, Zapier's enterprise pricing is roughly 5–8x more expensive than Make for the same workflow volume. This isn't a theoretical concern — most AI automation workflows are high-frequency by design.

n8n self-hosted eliminates per-operation costs entirely. You pay for your hosting infrastructure (typically £20–60/mo on a VPS or cloud instance) regardless of how many operations you run. For high-volume workflows with a technical team to maintain the infrastructure, n8n's economics are unbeatable. The Make vs Zapier pricing difference becomes dramatic at scale.

The AI Capability Gap

Zapier bolted AI on as an add-on in 2024. It works for basic "send this text to ChatGPT and put the response here" workflows. But anything involving multi-step reasoning, custom prompting, response parsing, or chaining AI calls through conditional logic requires workarounds that get messy fast.

Make was rebuilt around AI workflows. The HTTP module lets you hit any API with full control over headers, authentication, and response parsing. The built-in AI nodes handle structured JSON responses cleanly. You can route different outputs to different branches without hacking together text parsers.

n8n gives you full code nodes — you're writing JavaScript or Python directly in the workflow. That means anything is possible, but you're effectively writing code, not configuring a visual tool. The power ceiling is the highest of the three; so is the skill requirement. Our detailed n8n vs Make deep-dive covers the technical differences most comparisons miss.

What We Actually Use

We're transparent about our stack: roughly 80% of client builds use Make, 15% use n8n, and 5% use Zapier. Make handles most AI workflow architectures well — lead processing, document generation, data enrichment, multi-step AI chains with conditional routing.

We use n8n when the client's technical team will own the maintenance, when the workflow involves custom data transformations that benefit from code, or when the volume justifies eliminating per-operation costs.

We use Zapier when the client's own team needs to build or maintain the workflow themselves. Zapier's UX is genuinely more accessible for non-technical users. If your operations team will be editing the workflow monthly, Zapier's learning curve advantage is real.

The Migration Reality

If you're already on Zapier and it works, don't switch for the sake of it. Migrating working workflows has real costs: rebuilding, testing, retraining the team, and a period where things break in ways you didn't anticipate.

Switch when you're hitting Zapier's pricing ceiling (consistently spending over £150/mo), or when you need AI capabilities that Zapier can't deliver without workarounds. Those are concrete reasons. "Make is better" is not a good enough reason to disrupt working infrastructure.