Should I use Zapier, Make, or n8n?

Question

VX-N · Accepted Answer

Zapier is the fastest to start and the most expensive at volume. Make handles branching logic more cheaply. n8n is self-hostable and the cheapest to run at scale, and it costs you engineering attention instead. For most SMBs the honest answer is that the platform matters far less than whether anyone has mapped the process. The trap is per-task pricing. A workflow that looks cheap in a pilot becomes a real monthly line item once it runs on every lead, and teams discover the cost after they have built on it. Switching between them later is usually not catastrophic — the logic transfers even when the connectors do not. Picking wrong is recoverable; never writing the process down is not.