What all three tools do

Zapier, Make, and n8n are all automation platforms — they connect apps that don’t naturally talk to each other, so an action in one (say, a contact form submission) can automatically trigger actions in others (creating a CRM record, sending an email, notifying your team). The underlying concept is identical across all three. The differences are in how you build automations, how much they cost, and where your data goes.

Zapier: easiest to start, most expensive to scale

Zapier has the largest app library of the three — over 6,000 integrations — and the gentlest learning curve. If you need a simple automation and want to be running in an afternoon without reading documentation, Zapier is the right starting point. The interface is a linear step-by-step builder that most non-technical users find intuitive.

The catch is pricing. Zapier charges per “task” — each individual action that runs counts as one task, and that number adds up quickly once you’re running multiple automations with any real volume. On the Professional plan (the tier most small businesses end up needing), costs in Australia include GST on top of the USD subscription price. What looks like a $49/month plan can land at $80+ AUD once you account for exchange rates and tax.

Make: more power, better value, steeper curve

Make (formerly Integromat) uses a visual flowchart builder that shows your automation as a diagram of connected modules. That makes it significantly better for complex branching logic — “if this, do A; otherwise do B, then C” — which Zapier’s linear format handles awkwardly.

Make prices around “operations” rather than tasks, and for equivalent workloads it’s typically cheaper than Zapier at any meaningful scale. The Core plan starts lower, and the visual builder means you can pack more logic into fewer modules than you can in Zapier’s step-by-step format. Like Zapier, Australian subscribers pay GST on top of the subscription price.

The trade-off is the learning curve. Make’s visual builder rewards spending time with it, and the first few hours feel slower than Zapier. If you’re handing automation maintenance to a non-technical team member, factor that in.

n8n: self-hosted, open-source, and data stays with you

n8n is a different category of tool. It’s open-source, and you can self-host it on your own server — which means your data never touches a third-party platform. For businesses handling sensitive information (medical records, legal documents, financial data), that distinction matters a great deal.

Self-hosting n8n is free. You pay for the server infrastructure to run it on, which is typically $10–$50/month on a basic cloud VPS. There’s also a cloud-hosted version of n8n if you don’t want to manage infrastructure yourself, though that costs more than self-hosting.

The requirement: you or someone you work with needs to be comfortable with basic server setup. It’s not a code-heavy lift, but it’s not a no-code tool either. If nobody in your business has touched a command line, factor in the cost of technical setup help.

A worked example: enquiry-to-CRM automation

In Zapier, a form-to-CRM automation is a straight line: a trigger step (“new form submission”), then one action step (“create CRM contact”), then a second action step (“send Slack notification”). Three steps, built top to bottom, no branching — this is exactly the shape Zapier is built for, and it’s usually working within twenty minutes.

The same automation in Make looks like three connected modules on a canvas instead of a vertical list, which feels like more setup for an identical result. Where Make earns that extra step is the moment you need a condition — say, routing enquiries under $5,000 to one Slack channel and everything else to another. That’s a native branching module in Make; in Zapier it means either a paid “Paths” add-on or a second, separate Zap. In n8n, the same branch is a free “IF” node — the flexibility is there from the start, you just pay for it in setup time instead of subscription cost.

What happens when something breaks

All three tools log every run and can alert you when a step fails, but the default behaviour differs. Zapier pauses the specific Zap and emails you about the failed task, and by default keeps retrying it on a backoff schedule before giving up — good for a transient issue like an app being briefly unreachable, less good if the failure is caused by bad data that will fail identically every retry.

Make gives you more direct control over this: you can build explicit error-handling routes into the scenario itself — do this if the step fails, notify this person, retry with different data — rather than relying on the platform’s default retry behaviour. n8n goes further still, since you own the infrastructure — you can log failures to your own database, retry with custom logic, or trigger a fallback workflow, but you’re also the one who has to notice if the server itself goes down.

Real pricing comparison (AUD approximate)

Plan Cost (AUD/month) Limit
Zapier Free $0 100 tasks, single-step only
Zapier Professional ~$80–120 (incl. GST) 2,000 tasks, multi-step
Make Core ~$15–25 (incl. GST) 10,000 operations
Make Pro ~$35–55 (incl. GST) 10,000 operations, advanced features
n8n self-hosted $15–50 (server cost only) Unlimited, self-managed
n8n cloud $50 ($30 USD) Managed hosting

See the official Zapier pricing, Make pricing, and n8n pricing pages for current tiers, since these shift over time and AUD conversion moves with the exchange rate.

Decision matrix

  • Pick Zapier if: you want the simplest setup, have simple single-path automations, and cost at low volume isn’t a concern.
  • Pick Make if: you need branching logic or complex multi-step workflows, want better value at scale, and are willing to spend a few hours learning the visual builder.
  • Pick n8n if: you handle sensitive client data (medical, legal, financial) and need it to stay on your own infrastructure, or you want to eliminate ongoing software subscription costs and have (or can hire) basic technical capability to set it up.

Not sure which fits your business?

Get in touch and we’ll recommend the right one for your specific workflow and give you a fixed price to build it.