Make vs n8n vs Zapier Pricing: What Automations Really Cost 2026

Short answer: for simple workflows, Make is the cheapest of the three. A solo setup that costs $12 a month on Make, at US prices, costs $39 on Zapier and €20 on n8n.

n8n wins on long workflows and loops, because it bills one execution per run, however many steps it has. Zapier costs the most at every size we priced, but it’s the easiest to set up.

The catch is what each platform counts, plus one thing most comparisons miss: Make charges different prices in different countries.

The real question: what does each platform count?

Each tool bills a different unit, and that unit decides your bill more than the headline price does. Zapier counts tasks, Make counts credits and n8n counts executions.

Take one workflow: a form submission comes in, then four actions run. Create a CRM contact, add a Google Sheets row, post to Slack, send a welcome email. Here’s how each meter reads one run of it.

	Zapier	Make	n8n
Billing unit	Task: each successful action step	Credit: each module action, trigger included	Execution: one full run of the workflow
Our 5-step run costs	4 tasks (the trigger is free)	5 credits	1 execution
Free inside the meter	Triggers, polling, Filter, Formatter, Paths, Delay, Looping	Routers and error-handler modules	Manual test runs, sub-workflows, error workflows, failed runs
Allowance resets	Monthly, even on annual billing	Monthly (Core); a yearly pool on annual Pro and Teams	Each calendar month

So the same run is four units on Zapier, five on Make and one on n8n. That doesn’t make n8n four times cheaper, because a unit costs a different amount on each. The workloads below put a price on it.

How we did the maths (and what we didn’t)

We priced every scenario on 24 October 2026 from the public pricing pages of all three tools, in US dollars for Zapier and Make and euros for n8n, which bills in euros. Prices are per month on annual billing unless a column says otherwise.

Make shows each visitor prices for their country, so our workload tables use its US prices. A section further down shows what the same workloads cost elsewhere, including India.

This is a pricing analysis, not a hands-on test: we didn’t buy a paid plan on any of the three for this post. Our hands-on notes live in the n8n review and the Make vs n8n comparison.

Make and n8n links on this page are affiliate links: if you buy through one, DroidCrunch may earn a commission. It doesn’t change a single number here.

Workload 1: a solo founder with 300 leads a month

At 10 leads a day, Make costs $12 a month, n8n €20 and Zapier $39. Make wins this one comfortably.

	Units used	Plan you need	Annual billing	Monthly billing
Make	1,500 credits	Core, 10,000 credits	$12/mo	$16/mo
n8n	300 executions	Starter, 2,500 executions	€20/mo	€24/mo
Zapier	1,200 tasks	Pro, 1,500 tasks	$39/mo	$58.50/mo

Notice the headroom. Make’s Core plan leaves 8,500 credits unused, so you could add four more workflows like this one before paying a cent more. Zapier’s 1,500-task tier leaves 300.

Why not a free plan? Make Free gives 1,000 credits, and this workflow needs 1,500. Zapier Free covers 100 tasks and only two-step Zaps, so a five-step workflow is out.

Our take: If you’re one person automating lead capture, start on Make‘s cheapest paid tier. It costs the least of the three here and leaves the most room to grow.

Workload 2: an agency handling 3,000 leads a month

At 3,000 runs, Make costs $21 a month, n8n jumps to €50 and Zapier lands at $189. This is where n8n’s plan steps bite.

	Units used	Plan you need	Annual billing	Monthly billing
Make	15,000 credits	Core, 20,000 credits	$21/mo	$28/mo
n8n	3,000 executions	Pro, 10,000 executions	€50/mo	€60/mo
Zapier	12,000 tasks	Pro, 20,000 tasks	$189/mo	$283.50/mo

n8n’s Starter plan stops at 2,500 executions, and there’s nothing between it and Pro. Go 500 runs over, and your bill goes from €20 to €50 a month.

Zapier has a cheaper route here. With pay-per-task turned on, you can stay on the 10,000-task tier at $129 and pay for the overflow. On annual plans, extra tasks cost 1.25 times your base per-task rate.

If that base rate is the tier price divided by its tasks (Zapier shows the exact rate in billing settings), 2,000 extra tasks cost about $32. That’s roughly $161 a month instead of $189. On monthly billing the multiplier is 2.5, and the trick stops paying.

Workload 3: an ops team running 30,000 runs a month

At 30,000 runs, Make costs $129 a month, n8n about €121 and Zapier $769. Make and n8n are now close enough that the euro exchange rate decides it.

	Units used	Plan you need	Annual billing	Monthly billing
Make	150,000 credits	Core, 150,000 credits	$129/mo	$175/mo
n8n	30,000 executions	Pro, 50,000 executions	€1,450/yr (about €121/mo)	€145/mo
Zapier	120,000 tasks	Pro, 200,000 tasks	$769/mo	$1,149/mo

The same pay-per-task logic helps Zapier here. The 100,000-task tier is $489, and 20,000 extra tasks at the annual overage rate add about $122, for roughly $611. It’s still almost five times Make.

n8n’s Pro plan tops out at 50,000 executions. Past that, the next step is Business at €667 a month, which is self-hosted only. Make’s Core plan, by contrast, keeps scaling to 300,000 credits at $237 a month.

Make charges different prices in different countries

Make’s pricing page loads a price list for your country. On 24 October 2026 we pulled the lists it serves to the US, the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Brazil, India and Australia, and found three.

Workload	US	UK, Europe, Canada, Brazil	India and Australia
Solo, 1,500 credits	$12/mo (Core)	$9/mo (Core)	$9/mo (Make Plan, 5,000 credits)
Agency, 15,000 credits	$21/mo (Core)	$16/mo (Core)	$29/mo (Make Plan, 20,000 credits)
Ops, 150,000 credits	$129/mo (Core)	$99/mo (Core)	$153.45/mo (Make Plan)

All prices are annual billing, in US dollars. US buyers pay about 30% more than most of Europe for the same Core plan.

India and Australia don’t see Core, Pro and Teams at all. They get one Make Plan, which bundles Pro and Teams features such as priority execution and team roles, and starts at a smaller 5,000-credit tier. That makes it the cheapest Make option for a solo user and the dearest one at agency size.

For Indian readers, that changes workload 2. At $29 a month, Make still beats n8n’s €50 Pro plan, but the gap is far smaller than the US table suggests.

Where long workflows and loops flip the ranking

Make’s credits multiply with steps and with items; n8n’s executions don’t. Once a workflow has many steps or loops through rows, n8n gets cheaper fast.

Take a nightly sync: read 500 rows from a sheet, then update the CRM and an email list for each row. That’s 1,001 units a night on Zapier and Make, and one execution on n8n.

Nightly sync, 30 nights	Units a month	Cheapest plan that fits	Annual billing
n8n	30 executions	Starter	€20/mo
Make	About 30,000 credits	Core, 40,000 credits	$38/mo
Zapier	About 30,000 tasks	Pro, 50,000 tasks	$289/mo

Now make it 5,000 rows a night. Make climbs to about 300,000 credits, the top of Core at $237 a month, and Zapier needs its $1,069 tier. n8n still counts 30 executions.

There’s one trade-off. n8n’s Starter plan stops any execution after 5 minutes, and a 5,000-row loop can run longer than that. Pro allows 40 minutes, so budget for €50 rather than €20.

For workflows without loops, the crossover is about four steps at 10,000 runs a month. Three steps on Make is 30,000 credits, which fits the $38 tier. Five steps is 50,000 credits, which needs the $72 tier, against €50 for n8n Pro at any step count.

Rule of thumb: Multiply runs by steps by items per run. Under about 40,000 a month, Make is cheaper. Above about 80,000, with fewer than 10,000 runs, n8n Pro wins. Our guide to building a first AI agent in n8n shows how much fits in one execution.

The polling tax: why Make’s cheap credits can vanish

On Make, a polling trigger that checks an app for new data costs one credit per check, even when it finds nothing. Zapier doesn’t charge for polling at all, and n8n only counts a poll that finds new data.

The numbers add up quietly. A Make trigger that checks every 15 minutes uses 2,880 credits a month before it does any work. Set it to every minute, and it’s 43,200 credits, more than Make’s 40,000-credit tier on its own.

The fix is to use instant triggers. A webhook only fires when something happens, so you pay for events instead of empty checks. Our explainer on how webhooks work in n8n, Make and Zapier covers setting one up on each.

n8n has its own version of this. A Schedule Trigger counts an execution every time it fires, whether there’s work or not. A schedule every 5 minutes is about 8,600 to 8,900 executions a month, which is over Starter on its own.

What happens when you hit your limit?

Each platform fails in a different way, and one of them can lose work. Know which before you pick a tier with no headroom.

• Zapier keeps running if pay-per-task is on, at 1.25 times the base rate on annual plans or 2.5 times on monthly ones. It pauses once usage hits three times your plan. With pay-per-task off, Zaps stop until the next cycle.
• Make stops running scenarios until you add credits. Webhooks queue in the meantime, up to 667 items per 10,000 credits, and polling triggers pick up where they left off. Extra credits cost 25% more than the ones in your plan.
• n8n Cloud fails every new execution straight away with an “Execution limit reached” error. Nothing queues and nothing re-runs later, so a webhook that fires in that window is lost.

That last one matters most for agencies. If a client’s form leads arrive through n8n Starter and you cross 2,500 on the 28th, the last few days of leads never reach the CRM. Size n8n with a buffer, or watch the Insights dashboard.

Self-hosting n8n: free software, not a free bill

n8n’s Community Edition is free to self-host with no execution limit, which beats every plan above on paper. You pay in server costs and your own time instead.

In our Make vs n8n test, a client’s n8n ran on a $12-a-month server. That’s less than Make’s 20,000-credit tier, and the server bill doesn’t rise with every extra run.

What you take on: updates, backups, security patches and uptime. If nobody on your team is comfortable with a Linux server, a few hours of fixing a broken update costs more than a year of n8n Cloud. Business features such as SSO and Git version control also need the paid licence.

Our take: self-host if a developer already runs servers for you. Otherwise start on n8n Cloud and move later, since workflows export as JSON.

Make vs n8n vs Zapier pricing: which costs least for you?

Pick by the shape of your workflows, not the price on the plan card.

• Pick Make if you run many short workflows with instant triggers. It was the cheapest in our two smaller workloads, at $12 and $21 a month, and level with n8n at 30,000 runs.
• Pick n8n if your workflows are long, loop through rows or call AI tools several times per run, because each run is one execution. It’s also the only one you can self-host.
• Pick Zapier if setup time costs you more than the subscription. Free triggers, filters and polling keep its meter honest, and it connects to more than 9,000 apps. In our workloads it cost three to nine times as much as Make.

Still choosing on features rather than price? Our Zapier vs n8n comparison and the best workflow automation tools roundup cover what each one is like to build in.

Count your runs, multiply by steps and items, and the cheapest platform picks itself. Try Make for short, frequent workflows, or n8n if your runs are long.