The billing unit decides the bill, not the sticker price. Zapier charges one task per successful action step, Make charges one credit per module including the trigger, and n8n charges one execution per whole workflow run no matter how many steps it contains. Run the same four-action workflow 2,000 times a month and that is 8,000 billable units on Zapier, 10,000 on Make and 2,000 on n8n. Cheapest for most people is n8n at 20EUR/mo; Zapier’s equivalent tier is $129/mo. Add one AI step on Zapier’s default Premium tier and Zapier goes to $289/mo. Make cannot be priced at all — it publishes no list price on any readable page.
The three billing units are not comparable quantities
Every comparison of these platforms lines up the monthly prices and declares a winner. That is the wrong arithmetic, because the number each price is attached to measures something different.
| Platform | Billing unit | One unit = | Trigger counts? | Logic steps count? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier | Task | One successful action step | No | No |
| Make | Credit | One module action | Yes | Yes |
| n8n | Execution | One entire workflow run | No | No |
n8n says it outright on its pricing page: “An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It’s still a single execution.” Make says the opposite just as plainly in its credits documentation: “By default, 1 operation equals 1 credit,” and every module that reads, searches, creates, updates, deletes, transforms, aggregates or iterates consumes one.
Zapier sits in between, and its position is the one people misjudge.
What Zapier does not charge for is the biggest hidden lever
Most cost estimates for Zapier count every box on the canvas. That overstates the bill, often badly, because Zapier’s task documentation exempts a long list of steps:
- Triggers, always. Polling is free — Zapier notes that a two-minute interval is “over 20 thousand polls per month” and it does not charge for those events.
- Filter and Paths steps. The branching logic itself is free.
- Every step that errors or does not run. A task is counted only “whenever Zapier successfully completes a unit of work for you.”
- Testing in the editor, even though testing an action step really performs the action.
- Built-in apps: Formatter, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage, Zapier Manager, Tables and Forms.
The practical consequence is that Zapier’s meter punishes app calls and subsidises logic, while Make’s meter punishes both. A workflow built heavily out of Formatter steps, filters and paths is close to free on Zapier and fully billable on Make. A workflow that is a straight line of six app actions is 6 tasks on Zapier, 7 credits on Make, and 1 execution on n8n.
Three Zapier step types run the other way and cost more than one task: Zapier MCP at 2 tasks per successful tool call, Lead Router at 5 tasks per lead routed, and AI by Zapier, which is its own section below. Zapier Agents escape the task meter entirely — they bill against a separate “activities” quota of 400/month on Free and 1,500/month on Pro.
The same workflow, priced three ways
Take a workflow with a trigger, a filter, a formatter step, a path, and four app actions — a realistic shape for lead routing or order processing — running 2,000 times a month. On Zapier the filter, formatter and path are free, so it is 5 tasks per run. On Make every module bills, including the trigger, so it is 6 credits per run. On n8n it is 1 execution.
| Units per run | Units per month | Plan reached | Monthly price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| n8n Cloud Starter | 1 execution | 2,000 | Starter (2,500 incl.) | 20EUR |
| Zapier Professional | 5 tasks | 10,000 | 10,000-task tier | $129.00 |
| Make Core/Pro | 6 credits | 12,000 | unknown | not published |
Prices verified 29 October 2026 against Zapier, n8n and Make. Zapier figures are the discounted annual-equivalent monthly rate; the monthly-billed price is 50% higher at $193.50, because Zapier’s annual discount is 33% off. n8n figures are annual-billing euros — the monthly-billed prices are rendered client-side and n8n does not serve them in HTML.
Now vary the shape of the workflow and keep the run count fixed at 2,000. Zapier’s bill moves and n8n’s does not:
| Workflow shape | Zapier tasks/mo | Zapier plan | n8n executions/mo | n8n plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trigger + 2 actions | 4,000 | $89.00 | 2,000 | 20EUR |
| Trigger + 4 actions | 8,000 | $129.00 | 2,000 | 20EUR |
| Trigger + filter + formatter + path + 4 actions | 10,000 | $129.00 | 2,000 | 20EUR |
| Trigger + 2 actions + 1 Premium AI step (2 tool calls) | 34,000 | $289.00 | 2,000 | 20EUR |
The n8n column never moves, because n8n is not metering the thing that changed. That is the whole decision in one table: on Zapier and Make you are buying workflow complexity, on n8n you are buying workflow frequency. If your workflows are elaborate but infrequent, n8n is dramatically cheaper. If they are one-step and run constantly — 50,000 single-action runs a month — the spread collapses: that is 50,000 tasks ($289) against 50,000 executions, which on n8n needs a plan above Pro’s 10,000 and lands you in the same conversation.
Effective cost per unit, which nobody publishes
| Zapier Pro tier | Price/mo | Per task | n8n plan | Price/mo | Per execution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 750 tasks | $19.99 | $0.0267 | Starter 2,500 | 20EUR | 0.0080EUR |
| 2,000 tasks | $49.00 | $0.0245 | Pro 10,000 | 50EUR | 0.0050EUR |
| 10,000 tasks | $129.00 | $0.0129 | Business 40,000 | 667EUR | 0.0167EUR |
| 50,000 tasks | $289.00 | $0.0058 | |||
| 200,000 tasks | $769.00 | $0.0038 | |||
| 500,000 tasks | $1,499.00 | $0.0030 | |||
| 2,000,000 tasks | $3,389.00 | $0.0017 |
Zapier’s curve behaves: the effective rate falls 16x from the entry tier to the top. n8n’s does not. Business at 667EUR for 40,000 executions is 0.0167EUR each — more than three times Pro’s rate and more than double Starter’s. Business is a features purchase (self-hosting, Git version control, SSO, environments, external secrets, log streaming), not a volume purchase, and buying it for throughput alone is a mistake. The volume answer on n8n is the free self-hosted Community edition, for which n8n publishes no execution limit at all.
The AI step is where Zapier’s meter runs hot
This is the single most expensive default on any of the three platforms. Zapier’s AI model tier pricing, updated 28 October 2026, gives the formula as:
Tasks used per run = (1 × model rate) + (number of tool calls × model rate)
| Tier | Multiplier | Tools? |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 1x | No |
| Advanced | 3x | Yes |
| Premium | 5x | Yes |
| Your own AI account | 1x | Advanced/Premium models only |
Premium is the default for new steps on paid plans — Zapier states it twice, including the warning that new steps “default to the Premium (5x) tier, so expect higher task usage unless you choose a lower tier.” A Premium step with two tool calls is (1 × 5) + (2 × 5) = 15 tasks. The same step on your own API key is 3.
Priced out on a workflow with a trigger, two app actions and one AI step running 2,000 times a month:
| AI tier | Tasks per run | Tasks/mo | Zapier plan | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premium (default) | 17 | 34,000 | $289.00/mo | $3,468 |
| Own AI account (1x) | 5 | 10,000 | $129.00/mo | $1,548 |
$1,920 a year, for one dropdown. You still pay your model provider for tokens on the own-account route, but on the rates in our API cost calculator a Claude Haiku-class model handling 2,000 short agent turns a month costs single-digit dollars — nowhere near the $160/month Zapier charges to meter it for you. There is also a per-run safety valve worth knowing about: AI steps are capped at 75 tasks per run by default, raisable to 500, and Zapier pauses the step for approval if a run hits it.
Make meters AI differently again. Third-party AI apps you connect yourself (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini) cost 1 credit per operation and you pay the provider for tokens. Make’s own AI Provider charges credits “based on tokens and operations” — the published conversion is unusually revealing, at 452 input tokens per credit for Claude Sonnet 5, 180 for Opus 5, and 18,080 for GPT-5 nano. Since Make does not publish what a credit costs, those ratios cannot be turned into money.
Make publishes no price, and that is the finding
A buyer guide is supposed to end with a number. For Make there is not one to report. Fetched on 29 October 2026:
- make.com/en/pricing — HTTP 200, and the served HTML contains no dollar or euro figure anywhere. The plan grid is client-side; where it belongs, the document carries three empty CMS field headings (“Date”, ”·”, “Duration”) from what looks like a reused event-card component.
- help.make.com/pricing-and-plans — HTTP 404.
- make.com/en/help/credits/make-credits — HTTP 301 to the help-centre homepage, not to the surviving credits article.
Plan names surface only incidentally inside FAQ prose: Core, Pro and Teams are named as the plans eligible to auto-purchase extra credits, and a Business tier is implied by a start-up discount offering “50% off Business.” The one allowance published in plain text is the Free plan’s 1,000 credits per month, and it appears as an aside in an answer about data storage. Extra credits sell “in bundles of 1,000 or 10,000” at “the fixed price defined in your subscription” — a per-credit price that exists only inside your own billing settings.
This matters beyond inconvenience. A reader without JavaScript, a search crawler, an accessibility tool or an AI assistant reading the raw document gets a Make pricing page with no prices on it. Make also renamed operations to credits — “Credits replaced operations as the term for Make’s billing unit” — while stating that “your existing plan and pricing, including the cost of credits, remain unchanged.” Anything you read about Make’s pricing that quotes a figure is quoting a number Make no longer publishes, and our own Make review carried exactly that problem until this check.
What to buy
| If you… | Buy | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Build complex workflows that run a few thousand times a month | n8n Cloud Starter, 20EUR | Step count is free; you only pay for runs |
| Need high volume and can run a server | n8n Community, free | Self-hosted, no published execution limit |
| Need breadth of integrations above all | Zapier Professional | Keep logic in Filter/Paths/Formatter — those are free tasks |
| Are adding an AI step to a Zap | Zapier + your own API key | Drops 5x to 1x; worth ~$1,920/yr on a 2,000-run workflow |
| Want a price before you commit | Not Make | No list price is published on any readable page |
| Run one-step workflows very frequently | Compare directly | This is the one shape where the unit gap closes |
The two-way version of this decision, with the non-price axes that actually settle it — seats, run duration, concurrency, overage and EU hosting — is in Zapier vs n8n.
Three cost levers are worth more than switching platforms: move logic into Zapier’s free step types, drop AI steps off the Premium default, and check whether your workflow count or your step count is what is actually growing. For the wider tool landscape these sit inside, see the productivity tools guide and the AI agents guide; for narrower AI-first automation, Gumloop and Lindy bill differently again. Readers choosing a first automation platform for a small team will find the surrounding stack in our small-business picks.
What changed
- 30 Oct 2026: Zapier and n8n plan figures re-verified unchanged. Added Zapier vs n8n for the two-way decision. Two facts this page did not carry: n8n’s cloud ladder stops at Pro’s 10,000 executions because Business is self-hosted-only, and n8n bills every schedule-trigger fire regardless of outcome, which inverts the cost comparison for high-frequency, low-yield workflows. Zapier’s app count also fell from 10,000+ to “9,000+”.
- 29 Oct 2026: First published. Zapier’s full published tier table, free-step list and AI multipliers verified against zapier.com/pricing and help article 46425475442829 (updated 28 Oct 2026); n8n plans and the execution definition against n8n.io/pricing; Make’s absence of a list price confirmed across four URLs. Zapier’s own canonical rate card at zapier.com/pricing/rates returns 404, so per-tier AI rates come from the help centre instead.
Frequently asked questions
Is Zapier or n8n cheaper?
n8n, usually by a lot, and the gap comes from the billing unit rather than the rate. Zapier counts one task per successful action step, so a workflow's cost scales with how many steps it has. n8n counts one execution per workflow run — its pricing page states that 'an execution is a single run of your entire workflow' and that 'it doesn't matter how many steps are in the workflow.' A four-action workflow run 2,000 times a month is 8,000 Zapier tasks (the 10,000-task tier, $129/mo on annual billing) against 2,000 n8n executions (Starter, 20EUR/mo). That is 6.5x before a single feature is compared. The gap narrows for one-action workflows and widens for every step you add. Prices verified 29 October 2026.
What counts as a task in Zapier?
Only successful action steps. Zapier's help documentation is unusually generous here and most cost estimates get it wrong by counting every box on the canvas. Triggers never count — Zapier notes that a two-minute polling interval is 'over 20 thousand polls per month' and it does not charge for them. Also free: Filter and Paths steps, every step that errors or does not run, editor testing, and the built-in apps Formatter, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage, Sub-Zap, Zapier Manager, Tables and Forms. What does cost more than one task: AI by Zapier steps (1x, 3x or 5x per step and per tool call), Zapier MCP at 2 tasks per successful tool call, and Lead Router at 5 tasks per lead.
How much does Make.com cost?
Make does not say. As of 29 October 2026 the plan grid on make.com/en/pricing is rendered client-side and the served HTML contains no dollar or euro figure anywhere — no price for Core, Pro, Teams or Business. The help-centre page that used to carry plans, help.make.com/pricing-and-plans, returns a hard 404, and the old /en/help/credits/make-credits deep link now 301s to the help-centre homepage rather than to the surviving credits article. The only allowance Make publishes in plain text is the Free plan's 1,000 credits per month, mentioned in passing inside an FAQ answer about data storage. Extra credits are sold 'in bundles of 1,000 or 10,000' at 'the fixed price defined in your subscription' — a price you can only learn after subscribing.
Does one credit equal one operation in Make?
By default yes, and Make states it plainly: 'By default, 1 operation equals 1 credit.' Every module that performs an action consumes one — reading, searching, creating, updating, deleting, transforming with built-in tools, aggregating and iterating all count, and so does the trigger module. Only two things are free: the Router module and the error-handler modules (Rollback, Break, Resume, Commit, Ignore). That makes Make the most inclusive meter of the three: it charges for the trigger that Zapier gives away and for the data-transformation steps Zapier also gives away. Some modules break the one-to-one rule upward — certain AI Content Extractor modules are tagged at 2 or 10 credits per operation.
Why did my Zapier bill jump after adding an AI step?
Almost certainly the default tier. Zapier's AI by Zapier pricing is '(1 x model rate) + (number of tool calls x model rate)', and new steps default to the Premium tier at 5x. One Premium AI step that makes two tool calls therefore costs (1 x 5) + (2 x 5) = 15 tasks, not one. On a workflow running 2,000 times a month that single step adds 30,000 tasks and moves a Pro subscription from the 10,000-task tier at $129/mo to the 50,000-task tier at $289/mo. Connecting your own AI account drops the rate to 1x, turning those 15 tasks into 3 and the bill back to $129/mo — $1,920 a year for one dropdown.
Is n8n's most expensive plan the best value?
No — n8n's ladder inverts at the top. Starter is 20EUR/mo for 2,500 executions (0.008EUR each), Pro is 50EUR/mo for 10,000 (0.005EUR each), but Business is 667EUR/mo for 40,000 (0.0167EUR each). Per execution, Business costs more than three times Pro and more than twice Starter. You buy Business for what it unlocks — self-hosting with Git version control, SSO, environments, external secrets and log streaming — not for throughput. If volume is the only reason to upgrade, the self-hosted Community edition is free and n8n publishes no execution limit for it.