Every marketing stack eventually needs glue — the layer that moves a lead from form to CRM to Slack, enriches it, scores it, and tells someone to act. When B2B teams go looking for that glue, three names dominate the shortlist: Zapier, Make and n8n. All three connect your apps. All three "automate workflows". And yet teams routinely pick the wrong one, then spend the next eighteen months paying for it — in overage invoices, silent failures, or a rebuild nobody budgeted.
The difference isn't feature checklists. It's the unit of billing, the error-handling model, and how much engineering capacity you have on tap. This comparison cuts through the marketing pages to what each platform actually costs and how it behaves in production.
New to the space generally? Start with what business automation actually covers — this article assumes you already know you need an integration layer and are choosing which one.
The One Difference That Explains Everything: What You're Billed For
Most pricing pain traces back to a single design decision each vendor made about its billing unit:
- Zapier bills per task — roughly, each successful action step in a Zap. A five-step workflow that runs 1,000 times consumes ~4,000–5,000 tasks (triggers are free; filters and formatters often are too). Complexity multiplies cost.
- Make bills per operation (credit) — each module that executes counts. Routers and filters are typically free, which softens multi-branch scenarios, but a 20-module scenario run at scale still burns credits fast.
- n8n bills per workflow execution (cloud) — one full run of the entire workflow, regardless of how many nodes it contains. A 5-step and a 50-step workflow cost the same. Self-hosted, there is no software limit at all.
This is why the same automation can cost wildly different amounts on each platform. A complex, high-volume workflow is cheap on n8n, moderate on Make, and expensive on Zapier. A simple, low-volume one is affordable everywhere — and there Zapier's polish wins.
Quick Comparison (2026 List Pricing)
| Zapier | Make | n8n | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Task (per action) | Operation/credit (per module) | Workflow execution (cloud) |
| Free tier | ~100 tasks/mo | 1,000 ops/mo, 2 active scenarios | Unlimited (self-hosted community edition) |
| Entry paid | ~$20–30/mo, ~750 tasks | ~$9–11/mo, 10,000 ops | ~$20/mo cloud (2.5k executions) or $5–20/mo VPS self-hosted |
| Mid tier | ~$69/mo Team, ~2k+ tasks | ~$16–29/mo Pro/Teams | ~$50/mo Pro, 10k executions |
| App ecosystem | Largest (~8,000–9,000 apps) | ~2,000 apps | ~500+ native nodes + HTTP/code for anything |
| Hosting | SaaS only | SaaS only | Cloud or self-hosted |
| Error handling | Simple retries + email alerts | Route-level error handlers, granular | Per-node error branches, retries, full code control |
| Best fit | Simple, reliability-first workflows | Marketing teams needing visual branching | Teams with dev capacity or data-privacy needs |
Indicative list prices, annual billing, as of mid-2026 — vendors change tiers often. Verify before budgeting.
Zapier — When Reliability Is Worth Paying For
Zapier's strengths are real: the deepest app directory in the category, the most predictable builder, and the least likely to surprise a non-technical user. Triggers don't count against your task limit, and most teams can build their first useful Zap in an afternoon.
The traps:
- Task math at scale. A multi-step Zap on a busy trigger (new form submissions, new CRM records) can quietly consume thousands of tasks a month. Teams discover this in month two, when the workflow is already load-bearing.
- Per-task pricing punishes complexity. Adding a filter step is free; adding enrichment, branching or formatting steps multiplies cost per run.
- Limited error recovery. Retries exist, but sophisticated failure paths — route to a queue, alert with context, degrade gracefully — are awkward.
Choose Zapier when workflows are simple, volumes are low-to-moderate, the team is non-technical, and reliability matters more than unit economics.
Make — The Price/Performance Sweet Spot for Marketing Teams
Make (formerly Integromat) is the platform we most often recommend for B2B marketing operations, and we use it ourselves — our connecting your stack: HubSpot, Make, and Slack walkthrough shows a realistic scenario end-to-end.
Why it wins for marketing:
- Visual branching that mirrors real funnels. Routers and filters are free operations, so "if lead score > 50, notify sales; else add to nurture" costs no extra credits for the branching itself.
- Genuine error handling. Dedicated error-handler routes let a failed module alert Slack with the payload, retry with backoff, or write to an exceptions sheet — the difference between a blip and a week of silently dropped leads.
- Credits go further. 10,000 operations for ~$9–11/month is substantially more headroom than Zapier's entry tier.
Watch out for: scenario sprawl (every team builds "just one more"), data-transfer limits on higher-volume scenarios, and debugging that can get fiddly in deeply nested setups.
Choose Make when a marketing/ops team owns the automation, scenarios have branching logic, and you want the best cost-to-capability ratio without writing code.
n8n — Maximum Control, If You Have the Capacity
n8n flips the model: open-source core, fair-code licence, self-host for free (plus a ~$5–20/month VPS), or pay per execution on their cloud. Because billing is per workflow run rather than per step, cost stays flat as workflows get more sophisticated — the exact inverse of Zapier.
What you get:
- Code anywhere. Any node can be a JavaScript or Python step when the visual builder runs out. The ~500 native integrations matter less when HTTP requests and custom logic cover the long tail.
- Serious error handling. Per-node error branches, configurable retries, and the ability to build transactional patterns (all-or-nothing across systems).
- Data privacy. Self-hosted means customer data never leaves infrastructure you control — increasingly a procurement requirement.
The honest cost: n8n assumes someone on the team thinks in code, version control and server maintenance. Upgrades, backups and monitoring are yours. Marketing teams without that capacity end up with an impressive tool nobody dares touch.
Choose n8n when you have developer capacity (or an agency that does), volumes are high, data residency matters, or workflows are too complex to be affordable per-action.
The Failure Mode Nobody Prices In: Silent Breaks
The automation that stops working and tells no one costs more than any subscription.
Whichever platform you pick, budget for the failure mode that costs more than any subscription: the automation that stops working and tells no one. A revoked OAuth token, a renamed CRM field, an API deprecation — and your "automatic" lead routing quietly does nothing for three weeks.
This is less about the vendor and more about design discipline. The mitigation is the same on all three: error routes that alert a human, test leads seeded weekly, and workflows simple enough to debug at 5pm on a Friday. That discipline is exactly what we cover in workflow design: from spaghetti to system — read it before you build your tenth scenario, not your fiftieth.
Decision Summary
- Simple + reliability-first + non-technical: Zapier.
- Marketing-owned, branching workflows, best value without code: Make.
- Dev capacity, high volume, data control, complex logic: n8n (self-hosted if you can).
- Mixing platforms? Legitimate — e.g. n8n for heavy data plumbing, Make for marketing scenarios. Just designate one platform as the orchestration layer so there's a single place to look when something breaks. Multiple "brains" is how stacks become spaghetti.