n8n, Power Automate, Make, or Zapier: Which tool fits?

The short answer

• Power Automate, if most of the work happens in Microsoft 365, meaning Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Excel. With the standard connectors, it’s already included in Microsoft 365 licenses.
• Zapier, if a department without its own IT wants to connect a few cloud services quickly, the number of runs stays manageable, and the data may be processed in the US.
• Make for branching workflows on a small budget, with the data in an EU data center if needed.
• n8n, if the data has to stay on the company’s own servers or in Frankfurt, custom code is involved, or there are many steps and runs.

All prices as of October 2026, billed annually, excluding VAT.

How all four work: a trigger, then actions

A trigger starts the workflow: a new email, a form submission, or a set time of day. Actions in other programs follow, such as creating a record, saving a file, or sending a message. Workflows are built visually, with no programming required. Depending on the vendor, the link to a program is called a connector, an app, or an integration, and the finished workflow is a flow (Power Automate), a Zap (Zapier), a scenario (Make), or a workflow (n8n).

Zapier leads with more than 10,000 ready-made integrations. Make lists more than 3,500, n8n more than 2,000. The count matters less than whether the company’s own programs are covered and which actions their integration supports.

If an integration is missing, a program’s API can also be called directly with an HTTP request. In Power Automate, though, the HTTP connector is a premium connector, and Zapier offers “Webhooks by Zapier” only on paid plans.

Costs: each vendor counts something different

This is where the four differ most. What a vendor counts decides how the bill grows with every step and every run.

Zapier charges a task for every step that does something. If a workflow creates a customer for each order, writes a row to a spreadsheet, and notifies the team, that’s three tasks. Anything that only waits, checks, or reformats is free: triggers and their polling for new data, filters, paths, and formatting steps. Failed actions don’t count either.

Make charges a credit per execution for almost every step, which Make calls a module. That includes the trigger, even when it checks and finds nothing new. Branches (routers), filters, and error handling are free. Lists get expensive: if the workflow passes on the 30 line items of an order one at a time, every module after that costs 30 credits. AI features that use Make’s own AI provider are billed by tokens and can use more.

n8n charges only for the run. An execution is the whole workflow, no matter how many steps it has or how much data it moves. A company that hosts n8n itself pays no license fee for the Community Edition, and nothing is counted.

Power Automate is paid per user or per flow, not per run. The limit is the number of actions per day: Microsoft states 6,000 per user with a Microsoft 365 license and 40,000 with Power Automate Premium.

Worked example: one workflow, four bills

A schematic example: a workflow starts with each new order and performs eight actions in other systems, at 1,000 orders a month.

Here, Zapier costs about fourteen times as much as Make.

Zapier and Make list their prices in US dollars. Zapier Professional is meant for one person; Team, for up to 25 people, costs $169 at 10,000 tasks. Make allows unlimited users on every plan. On n8n Cloud’s Starter plan, a single run may take no longer than five minutes.

The example shows the trend; an individual case needs its own calculation. With Zapier and Make, every extra step adds to the cost. With n8n and Power Automate, it doesn’t. If Make’s trigger checks for new orders every 15 minutes instead of the shop reporting each one itself by webhook, the polling alone uses up to 2,880 credits a month. Then the example no longer fits in the 10,000-credit tier.

A common first workflow is incoming invoices; what e-invoicing changes there is covered in the article E-invoicing from January 2027.

Power Automate: already paid for, until a premium connector comes in

Power Automate is part of Microsoft Power Platform and runs in the company’s own Microsoft 365 tenant, with the same accounts and permissions as Outlook and Teams. A Microsoft 365 license covers flows that start automatically, on a schedule, or at the push of a button, as long as they use only standard connectors. These include the Microsoft 365 services, but not SQL Server, Dynamics 365, the Azure services, or the generic HTTP connector. Those are premium connectors.

The biggest hurdle is the licensing logic. Each individual connector decides whether a flow gets by with Microsoft 365, and a single premium connector in the middle of the workflow changes the bill. The flow then needs Power Automate Premium at €13 per user per month or a Process license at €130 a month. The Process license is assigned to a single flow and applies regardless of who owns or triggers it. Without one, automated and scheduled flows run under their owner’s license, so anyone who builds a flow with a premium connector then needs Premium for themselves.

The HTTP connector is the typical case. It’s the obvious way out as soon as a standard connector lacks an action, and Microsoft itself names it as a hurdle when moving off old SharePoint workflows. For SharePoint alone, the “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint” action is enough, and it belongs to the standard connector.

For workflows that mainly connect programs outside Microsoft, one of the other three tools is usually the simpler route.

For old Windows programs without an API, there are desktop flows that mimic mouse and keyboard (robotic process automation, or RPA). Power Automate Premium includes an attended bot for this, which runs on the signed-in person’s computer. For unattended runs, a Process license is assigned to a machine and runs one desktop flow there at a time.

Zapier: quick to build, expensive with many steps

A Zap is quick to build: pick a trigger, add actions, map the fields. The free plan allows 100 tasks a month and only Zaps with one trigger and one action. Professional starts at $19.99 a month for 750 tasks, Team, with up to 25 users, at $69 for 2,000 tasks. With many steps and runs, Zapier gets considerably more expensive than the other three.

When the quota runs low, Zaps keep running only if pay-per-task billing is turned on. Each extra task then costs 1.25 times the base rate with annual billing and 2.5 times with monthly billing, up to at most three times the quota. Without it, the Zaps pause until the next billing period.

For AI tasks, every plan includes Zapier Agents. They have their own activity quota and don’t use tasks.

Zapier can’t be self-hosted, and the data is stored in the US.

Make: inexpensive, as long as the credits last

Make, formerly Integromat, belongs to Celonis. Scenarios are built on a canvas by connecting modules. Branches (router), loops over lists (iterator), and combining results (aggregator) are modules of their own, which keeps even a branching workflow readable at a glance.

The free plan offers 1,000 credits a month, two active scenarios, and polling no more often than every 15 minutes. With 10,000 credits, the paid plans cost $9 (Core), $16 (Pro), or $29 (Teams) a month. They allow unlimited scenarios, polling as often as every minute, and up to 40 minutes of run time per run. Once the credits are used up, the scenarios stop until more are bought; incoming webhooks wait in a queue until then.

The catch is in how Make counts. Lists processed item by item and triggers that poll often use up credits faster than the low entry price suggests.

n8n: counts only runs, but takes more technical skill

n8n comes in two forms. The vendor runs n8n Cloud on servers in Frankfurt, starting at €20 a month for 2,500 executions (Pro: €50 for 10,000). Or the company runs n8n itself, in which case the Community Edition costs nothing and needs no license key. The Business plan, with single sign-on, version control through Git, and separate environments for testing and production, costs €667 a month for 40,000 executions and is available only for self-hosting. Companies with fewer than 20 employees get 50% off.

Self-hosting means taking responsibility for servers, updates, backups, and monitoring, either in-house or through a service provider. New versions come out almost every week. n8n recommends updating at least once a month, reading the release notes for breaking changes beforehand, and trying each update in a test environment first. A backup needs more than the database: it also needs the key n8n uses to encrypt stored credentials. Without that key, the backed-up credentials can no longer be read.

The editor also requires more technical understanding than Zapier, for example when working with data structures.

Where the ready-made nodes aren’t enough, the Code node takes JavaScript or Python. External libraries can be enabled only when self-hosting; the cloud version can’t load them. For AI tasks, a dedicated agent node connects a language model to tools.

The source code is public, but n8n isn’t open source in the strict sense. Its license (the Sustainable Use License) allows use for a company’s own internal business purposes and prohibits passing n8n on to others for money; some features fall under a separate enterprise license. For a company automating its own workflows, that usually makes no difference.

Data privacy: Zapier processes data in the US, the others can also process in the EU

A workflow platform often handles exactly the data that most needs protecting: invoices, job applications, customer data. On a cloud platform, the vendor processes that data on the company’s behalf. That requires a data processing agreement, and location matters.

Zapier provides its own agreement with standard contractual clauses and doesn’t sign other companies’ agreements. With Make, the region is worth checking at sign-up, because it can’t be changed later. For older Power Automate flows created outside solutions before November 2024, Microsoft provides a migration tool so that their pseudonymized identifiers also stay in the EU.

Combining works, switching is costly

The choice doesn’t have to be either-or. In a company with Microsoft 365, Power Automate can handle whatever stays inside the tenant, such as approvals in Teams or filing in SharePoint, while n8n or Make runs the workflows across the ERP, the online store, and specialized software.

Switching later takes real effort, though. Each platform stores workflows in its own format, and switching usually means rebuilding them. So I would start with a single, clearly defined workflow, such as the order from the beginning of this article, and only then decide what the next ones build on.

I would also give that first workflow a second owner from the start. Otherwise, in Power Automate, the flow and its connections depend entirely on the account of the person who built it. If that person leaves the company, Microsoft turns the flow off after 14 days unless someone takes it over.

For context: Katio Tech builds workflows with n8n and Power Automate. The Automation page shows what such a workflow looks like.