n8n vs Make.com vs Zapier: I Tried All Three So You Don't Have To

I got obsessed with automation platforms in early 2025. Not in a "this is cool" way, but in a "I'm going to migrate all my repetitive workflows and never look back" way. I tried Zapier, Make.com, and n8n extensively. Here's where I landed.

Zapier: the gateway drug

Zapier is how most people discover automation. It's polished, has integrations with basically everything, and you can get something working in 5 minutes. I used it for a few weeks and it was... fine.

Then I looked at the bill. Zapier charges by task, and once you start automating anything non-trivial, you blow through the free tier in days. My workflows were running a few hundred tasks per day and suddenly I was looking at $50-70/month for what felt like glorified cron jobs. Not ideal.

The other issue is flexibility. If your workflow is "when X happens, do Y," Zapier is great. If your workflow is "when X happens, transform the data, check a condition, branch into three paths, aggregate results, and then do Y," you start fighting the tool.

Make.com: the middle ground

Make.com is what I wanted Zapier to be. The visual builder is genuinely good - you can see the data flowing between nodes in real time, and complex branching logic that felt clunky in Zapier becomes intuitive here.

It handles arrays and JSON manipulation way better than Zapier. I built some fairly complex workflows involving webhook ingestion, LLM calls, and multi-step data transformation, and Make handled it without drama.

The pricing is also much saner - based on operations rather than individual tasks, so the same workflows that cost me $60/month on Zapier were around $15 on Make.

The downsides? Make has its own expression syntax (their map(), get() functions) that feels like learning a mini-language. And when something fails deep in a complex workflow, debugging can be frustrating. The error messages are sometimes more decorative than informative.

n8n: the one I actually kept

n8n won me over for one reason: I can self-host it. No execution limits, no monthly bill that scales with usage, complete control over my data. For a software engineer, this is the obvious choice.

But beyond self-hosting, n8n is just built for developers. There's a Code node where I can write actual JavaScript/TypeScript when the visual builder isn't enough. The community nodes ecosystem is solid. And the workflow builder, while not as pretty as Make's, is functional and fast.

The tradeoff is that n8n requires more setup. You need to host it, maintain it, deal with updates. If you're not comfortable with Docker and a VPS, this isn't for you. But if you are (and I wrote a whole post about my setup), it's by far the most powerful and cost-effective option.

The verdict

If you're a non-technical person who needs automations working yesterday, use Make.com. Zapier's pricing makes it hard to recommend to anyone at this point.

If you're an engineer, use n8n. Self-host it, customize it, and never think about execution limits again. That's what I did, and I haven't looked back.