These three tools do broadly the same thing: connect your apps together and move work between them without a human copying and pasting. But they are built for different people, priced on different models, and choosing the wrong one tends to reveal itself six months in, when you have built too much to move.
The short version
| Best for | Watch out for | |
|---|---|---|
| Zapier | Simple, linear automations. The widest app support by far. Anyone can maintain it. | Cost scales badly with volume. Gets awkward as soon as logic gets complex. |
| Make | Visual, branching workflows with real logic. Far better value per operation than Zapier. | Steeper learning curve. The visual canvas gets messy at scale. |
| n8n | Complex, high-volume or AI-heavy work. Can be self-hosted, so data stays where you want it. | Genuinely technical. Not a tool your office manager will maintain. |
Zapier
Zapier is the default, and for a lot of businesses that is the correct choice. It supports more apps than anything else, it is the easiest to understand, and if we build something in Zapier you have a fighting chance of adjusting it yourself without calling us.
The problem is pricing. Zapier charges per task, and a task is roughly every step in every run. Automations that felt cheap at ten runs a day become expensive at a thousand. If you are moving high volumes, Zapier will quietly become the most expensive line in your automation budget.
Make
Make (formerly Integromat) is the middle ground and, for most of the small businesses we work with, the sweet spot. It handles branching, filters, error handling and iteration properly, and its pricing per operation is dramatically better than Zapier's at volume.
The trade-off is that it expects you to think like a systems person. The visual builder is powerful and, on a complicated scenario, becomes a plate of spaghetti that only its author can read.
n8n
n8n is the one we reach for when the work is genuinely complex, high-volume, or heavy on AI. It handles branching and error handling like a real programming environment, its AI tooling is the best of the three, and it can be self-hosted.
That last point matters more than it sounds. If you are a clinic or a law firm and you are not comfortable with client data passing through a third-party automation platform, self-hosted n8n means the data never leaves infrastructure you control. For regulated sectors that is often the difference between being able to automate something and not.
The cost is complexity. n8n is a developer's tool. If we build you something in n8n, you are dependent on someone technical to change it. We are upfront about that trade-off rather than pretending it does not exist.
How we actually choose
- ●Will the client need to maintain this themselves? If yes, Zapier, almost regardless of the other factors.
- ●Is the volume high, or will it be? If yes, not Zapier.
- ●Does the workflow need real branching, loops or error handling? Make or n8n.
- ●Is there sensitive data that should not sit on a third-party platform? Self-hosted n8n.
- ●Is the automation heavily AI-driven? n8n, comfortably.
The mistake to avoid
The expensive mistake is not choosing the 'wrong' platform. It is choosing based on what your agency happens to like, rather than on who will own the thing in two years and how much it will be doing by then. Ask any agency why they picked the platform they picked. If the answer is not about your volume, your data and your team, be suspicious.