n8n, Make or Zapier: which one a small business should pick

The three side by side

Why the way they count decides the bill

Take one ordinary workflow. A new order arrives and five things happen: the customer gets a message, a row goes into a spreadsheet, stock is updated, the courier is booked and the team is told in chat. It runs 500 times a month.

What happens as workflows grow

Add five more steps, which is normal once you add error handling or an AI step, and Zapier and Make roughly double. n8n stays at 500. That is the whole case for n8n at volume.

It cuts the other way too. For a two-step workflow that runs a few hundred times a month, all three are cheap, and Zapier's simplicity is worth more than n8n's pricing.

The n8n licence, in plain words

n8n is free to self-host, but it is not open source in the usual sense. Its Sustainable Use License allows use for your own internal business purposes, which n8n's documentation explains as any use except selling a product or service whose value comes entirely or substantially from n8n itself.

Building workflows for clients is explicitly allowed: n8n lists consulting, including building workflows, as permitted. What needs a paid licence is selling n8n itself, such as white-labelling it or hosting it as a paid service. n8n's help centre adds that an agency hosting clients' workflows and credentials on its own instance needs an Enterprise licence.

The clean arrangement for most businesses is that n8n runs in your own n8n Cloud account or on your own server, and whoever builds for you works there. You own the workflows, and the licence question never comes up.

Self-hosting is free until something stops quietly

Self-hosted n8n has no licence fee and no limit on runs. You pay for a server, and you take on the work n8n Cloud would otherwise do: updates, backups, security for a system that holds the keys to every tool it connects, and noticing when something stops.

That last one is where it bites. We run n8n on our own server. In late April 2026, after an update, workflows that relied on n8n's Execute Command node stopped activating. n8n 2.0 switches that node off by default for security, a documented change we had not caught. There was no error and no alert, just zero runs, and it was five days before anyone noticed. We moved that job to a scheduled script on the same server.

The lesson travels: read the breaking changes before every major update, and alert on runs that should have happened and did not, not only on runs that failed.

A workflow that fails loudly costs you an afternoon. One that stops quietly costs you whatever it was doing, for as long as nobody looks.

Which one to pick

• Zapier: a handful of short workflows between popular apps, built and maintained by the people who use them.
• Make: branching, visual workflows at moderate volume on a small budget, with no server to run.
• n8n Cloud: long workflows or AI steps, billed per run, without owning a server.
• n8n self-hosted: high volume, or data that must stay on your own infrastructure, with a named person responsible for updates, backups and monitoring.
• None of them yet: if the process changes every week, or you cannot name what automating it saves. Fix the process first.

Switching from Zapier or Make to n8n

Workflows do not import between these tools. They are rebuilt. The safe way is to run the new workflow alongside the old one until the outputs match, then switch the old one off.

Move the longest and most frequent workflows first, because that is where per-run billing saves most. Short, occasional ones may never be worth moving.