The platform question gets answered badly because it is usually answered by whoever is most familiar with one option. The honest version depends on four things: your monthly operation volume, how much control you need over where data sits, who will maintain it after handover, and how weird your logic is.
The short version
| Situation | Choose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under 2,000 tasks a month, mainstream apps, non technical maintainer | Zapier | Fastest to live, largest app catalog, easiest handover |
| Complex branching, iterators, moderate volume | Make | Better logic primitives than Zapier at meaningfully lower cost per operation |
| Over 5,000 operations a month, or data residency matters | n8n self hosted | No per operation billing, data stays on your infrastructure, code nodes when you need them |
| Already committed to Microsoft 365 | Power Automate | Licensing is largely sunk, and the Teams and SharePoint integration is genuinely better |
| High volume, low latency, or logic a canvas cannot express | Custom code | Past a certain complexity a visual canvas becomes harder to maintain, not easier |
Where the cost crossover actually sits
Zapier prices per task, and a task is roughly one action. A workflow with six actions running two hundred times a month is twelve hundred tasks. That adds up faster than people model it, because the tempting thing is to count workflow runs rather than actions.
Self hosted n8n costs you a small server, around twenty dollars a month, plus the maintenance attention that a self hosted service requires. That is the real cost, and it is not zero. The crossover in pure subscription terms tends to arrive somewhere around three to five thousand operations a month. Below that, the hosted platforms are cheaper once you count your own time.
Self hosted is not free. It is a different bill, paid partly in attention rather than entirely in dollars.
The control question
If you are handling health data, financial records, or anything under a data residency requirement, a hosted automation platform means your data transits a third party's infrastructure. Sometimes that is contractually acceptable, sometimes it is not, and it is worth checking before you build rather than after.
Self hosted n8n keeps everything inside your boundary. That is often the deciding factor in regulated sectors regardless of what the cost model says.
The maintenance question, which is usually the real one
Who fixes this in eight months when it breaks? If the answer is an operations person who is comfortable with software but is not a developer, Zapier and Make are substantially better choices, because the error messages are readable and the debugging is visual.
If the answer is a development team, n8n or code wins, because they can use the tools they already know and the version control they already have.
If the answer is nobody, then choose the platform whose failures are loudest and buy a maintenance arrangement, because the platform choice is not your biggest problem.
When a canvas stops helping
Visual builders are excellent up to a point and then they invert. The inversion happens around the moment you have nested conditionals more than two deep, or you are iterating over an array inside another iteration, or you have started using code nodes for more than a quarter of the steps.
At that point the canvas is costing you clarity rather than providing it, and the workflow would be shorter, more testable, and easier to reason about as fifty lines of Python. We have rewritten a number of sprawling canvases into small services and the maintenance burden usually drops by more than half.
A useful signal: if you cannot explain what the workflow does by pointing at it, the canvas has stopped earning its place.
What we recommend most often
For small businesses with mainstream tools: Zapier for the first few workflows, then reassess at the point the bill becomes noticeable. For agencies and service businesses with client messaging at the core: GoHighLevel, because the CRM and the messaging being in one system removes an entire class of sync problem. For anyone with volume, a development team, or a compliance constraint: self hosted n8n, with code where the nodes run out.
Written from work we have actually delivered. If your situation looks like the one described here, the quote form takes about two minutes and there is no sales sequence attached to it.
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