n8n vs Zapier: Which Costs Less, and Who Has to Run It

n8n vs Zapier comes down to who will maintain the workflow and how many billable steps it runs. If the owner does not write code and the volume is a few thousand actions a month, choose Zapier (or weigh make vs zapier if the workflow branches). If someone on the team reads JSON comfortably and the workflow has many steps or runs thousands of times, choose n8n, Cloud first and self-hosted only when you have a person for the server. If nobody can name the owner of the process yet, choose neither and fix that first. All prices below come from the vendors' pricing pages, read on 2026-10-07.

Integration counts as each vendor states them: Zapier 9,000+ apps on its pricing page and 10,215+ in its app directory; n8n's integrations directory lists 2,307. The INITE Atlas keeps a card for each, Zapier and n8n, with the pricing and the date it was read.

What does each one actually charge for?

The unit is the whole comparison, so it is worth being exact.

Zapier bills tasks. Its pricing page says a task is used "when a Zap successfully moves data or completes an action," and "each successful action in a Zap counts as a separate task." Triggers do not count, failed actions do not count, and polling for new data does not count. A list of built-in tools also uses no tasks: Filter, Formatter, Paths, Delay, Looping, Sub-Zap, Digest, Storage, Tables and Forms. Some steps cost more than one: an AI by Zapier step uses tasks according to the model tier you select, Code by Zapier uses more tasks when it runs longer than the standard runtime, and a Zapier MCP tool call uses two. When you hit your tier's limit, Zapier switches you to pay-per-task billing at a higher per-task rate, unless you have turned that off, in which case the Zaps pause until the next period.

n8n bills executions. 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." A workflow with 2 nodes and one with 40 nodes cost the same per run. What n8n meters instead is concurrency (5 simultaneous executions on Starter, 20 or 50 on Pro), execution length (5 minutes maximum on Starter, 40 on Pro) and how much execution history it keeps.

One term we could not settle from the pricing page: whether a workflow that calls a sub-workflow counts as one execution or two against the monthly quota. n8n's docs exclude sub-workflow executions from concurrency limits but do not say how the quota treats them. If your design splits work into sub-workflows, ask n8n before you size the plan.

What does the same workflow cost on each?

Take one workflow: a website form posts a lead (trigger), the phone number is cleaned up (formatting step), the CRM is searched for the contact, the contact is created or updated, a deal is created, and the sales channel gets a message. That is six steps.

On Zapier, the trigger is free and a Formatter step is free, so four steps bill: search, create or update, create deal, message.

• 4 tasks × 3,000 runs = 12,000 tasks a month.
• The 10,000-task tier is too small, so the next tier is 20,000 tasks.
• Professional at 20,000 tasks: $189 a month billed annually ($2,268 ÷ 12), or $283.50 billed monthly. Staying on the 10,000 tier and letting the extra 2,000 tasks run on pay-per-task comes to about $161 annual-billed, since the plan data on Zapier's page puts the overage at 1.62 cents a task on that tier, but then every month runs on overage.

If the cleanup step were an AI by Zapier step instead of Formatter, it would bill at least one task per run, and more on a higher model tier: 15,000 tasks or more, still the 20,000 tier, with less headroom. One ambiguity sits in the published terms: Zapier says "some apps or actions may use more than one task." Check the task history of a test run before you commit to a tier.

On n8n Cloud, every run is one execution whatever the step count.

• 1 execution × 3,000 runs = 3,000 executions a month.
• Starter's 2,500 executions are too few, so the plan is Pro at 10,000.
• Pro: €50 a month billed annually (€600 a year), or €60 billed monthly.

On self-hosted n8n Community, the licence is €0. As one example of a server, DigitalOcean's pricing page lists a 2 GB Basic Droplet at $12 a month and daily backups at 30% of the Droplet price, so $12 + $3.60 = $15.60 a month. That size is our example, not a sizing recommendation from n8n, and the server is the small part of the cost (see the self-hosting section below).

Which is cheaper at 500, 3,000 and 20,000 runs a month?

Same six-step workflow, four billable Zapier tasks per run. Annual billing first, monthly billing in brackets.

The n8n Pro 50K price is the larger Pro size in the plan options on n8n's pricing page, €1,450 a year (€120.83 a month) or €145 monthly. Zapier figures are the Professional tiers from its pricing page; Team starts at $69 a month for 2,000 tasks and adds shared connections and up to 25 users.

The ratio is the thing to read. At 500 runs the Zapier figure is about two and a half times the n8n Cloud figure; at 20,000 runs, about four times. The currencies differ, but no exchange rate in recent years closes a gap that size. Add a step to the workflow and the Zapier column moves while the n8n column stays still, which is the usual reason teams start looking at zapier alternatives. Take steps away, down to a single action, and Zapier gets close: 3,000 single-action runs fit Zapier's 5,000-task tier at $89 a month against n8n's €50.

These are the vendor bills. Running costs that do not appear on either pricing page, the person handling exceptions, the owner's time, maintenance when an app changes, belong in the same comparison, and how to read an automation quote lists them.

Who maintains it: a non-technical owner or a developer?

This decides more cases than the price.

Zapier is built for the person who owns the process. Every paid plan has custom error notifications and Zap version control, and Copilot, Zapier's AI assistant for building Zaps, is on every plan. A sales operations manager can keep twenty Zaps alive without ever reading JSON. The limit is collaboration: Professional is one seat. Shared app connections and shared folders start on Team.

n8n is built for someone comfortable with data structures. n8n's own pricing page calls it "AI agents and workflows for technical teams." Simple workflows look like Zapier's, but n8n's advantage over Zapier comes from expressions, Code nodes in JavaScript or Python, HTTP requests to any API and loops over items, and those are also where its failures happen. When a run breaks, the execution log shows the data each node received, and fixing it means reading that data. n8n Cloud includes unlimited users on every plan, and the Assistant (in preview) helps build and debug, with 1,600 credits a month on Starter.

The practical test: who opens the failed run on a Monday morning? If that person would rather not look at a JSON object, the workflow belongs on Zapier, whatever the price difference. If that person is a developer, ask whether this workflow is the best use of their week, which is the question in in-house developer vs agency for automation.

Is n8n really free if you self-host?

The Community edition has no licence fee; the cost moves from the invoice to someone's calendar.

n8n's docs list what self-hosting hands you: you must provide and manage the infrastructure, maintenance is your responsibility, and technical expertise is required for installation and configuration. In practice that is four jobs.

The server. A container host, a database (the docs say to swap the built-in SQLite for Postgres in production), TLS and a domain for webhooks. Cheap in money, as the $15.60 example shows.

Updates. Between 7 September and 6 October 2026, n8n tagged 43 releases on GitHub, with a new minor version every week, from 2.39 to 2.43. You do not have to install every one, but security fixes arrive in that stream, and skipping months of them makes the eventual upgrade the risky kind. Integration nodes change with the APIs behind them, which is the failure in when the integration changes underneath you: nothing alerts, the data just goes wrong.

Backups. A Droplet snapshot is not a tested restore of the n8n database and its encryption key. n8n keeps its encryption key in its data directory or in an environment variable, separately from the Postgres database, so a backup of the database alone restores workflows whose stored credentials can no longer be decrypted.

On-call. When the server stops at 2 a.m., every workflow stops with it, and nobody at n8n is responsible. Self-built systems tend to fail exactly here, as we described in vibe coding cleanup: what breaks after the demo: the thing that worked in the demo has no backups that restore and no one who gets the alert.

Two more limits matter. The free Community edition does not include workflow and credential sharing, SSO, environments or Git version control; n8n's docs list those as paid features. The self-hosted paid tier, Business, costs €667 a month billed annually for 40,000 executions, and a Business licence key reports production execution counts to n8n's licence server daily.

…we very quickly burned through their “executions” that were allotted by our license - and that’s where we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers, load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers and backups.

• seer, Hacker News, 9 October 2025 (link)

The licence itself is the last check. n8n is released under the Sustainable Use License, which permits use "only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use," and lets you provide it to others "only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes." Running it for your own company is fine. Selling access to n8n itself, for example hosting it as a paid service for clients, falls outside those terms, so read the licence and ask n8n before you build a business on that, or look at the n8n alternatives whose licence allows it.

How do AI agents work in each?

Zapier runs agents as a separate product with its own plan. Zapier Agents is free for 400 activities a month, and Agents Pro is $400 a year ($33.33 a month) for 1,500 activities; an activity is an action the agent takes, a web browse or a knowledge lookup. Agents act only through apps you have connected and actions you set up. Inside ordinary Zaps, AI by Zapier steps are on paid plans and bill tasks by model tier. Zapier MCP, which lets an AI assistant call actions in your connected apps, is available on all plans at two tasks per tool call. Chatbots is another separate product, free for two chatbots.

n8n puts the agent inside the workflow. Every Cloud plan includes the AI Agent node, AI steps, an MCP Server Trigger and MCP Client, and human approval for tool calls, and Starter can use AI models without your own API keys. The agent's run is part of an ordinary execution, so you can put deterministic steps before and after it: validate the input, let the agent draft, require a person to approve, then write to the CRM. Self-hosted, you bring your own model keys and no credit limit applies to the Assistant.

The difference for an operator: Zapier's agent is easier to switch on and harder to constrain; n8n's is harder to set up and easier to fence in. If the agent will act on customer records or money, the fence matters more, and where the human stays in an AI workflow is the part to design first.

How much work is it to switch between them?

Neither direction imports. Plan on a rebuild.

Zapier to n8n. Each Zap becomes a workflow built by hand. Paths become IF or Switch nodes, Formatter steps become expressions or a Code node, Filters become IF nodes, and every app connection is authorised again. Every webhook URL that a form or another system calls changes, so the senders have to be updated on the day you switch. Data kept in Zapier Tables or Storage has to be exported and moved. A two-step Zap takes minutes; a branching Zap with lookups takes hours, and most of those hours go into running both versions side by side and comparing the records they produce.

n8n to Zapier. Harder, because n8n workflows often contain things Zapier has no step for: loops over items, Code nodes with real logic, direct HTTP calls. Each has to become a Code by Zapier step (30 seconds of included runtime per step on Professional), a Looping step, or a redesign.

Count your workflows and their steps before you decide to move. Ten simple Zaps fit into a week. Fifty with branching is a project with a test plan, and the arithmetic for whether it pays back is the same as for any automation, in the ROI math for automation projects.

How do you choose?

Answer three questions in order.

If question 1 has no answer, because the process has no owner or nobody has counted how often it runs, the platform is not the problem. When a company should not automate yet covers that case.