n8n vs Zapier When You're Running a Real Business

Most people pick Zapier because they've heard of it. That's the only reason. It's a fine default if you're running 5 automations and don't want to think.

It's the wrong default if you're running 50.

I've built both. I've migrated clients from one to the other. The decision is not about features. The features are roughly equivalent for 90% of what businesses need. The decision is about how the pricing punishes you for getting bigger.

How Zapier charges you

Zapier charges per task. Every time a zap fires, it counts. Every step inside that zap counts as another task. So one trigger plus four steps is five tasks per fire.

If your zap fires 1,000 times a month and has 5 steps, that's 5,000 tasks. You're on the $73/mo plan and you've used most of your bucket.

What happens when your business doubles? Zapier doubles your cost. You did nothing. You added one new customer flow. The price went up.

That's the trap. You build automations that save you time. Then you pay for them like you're paying a junior employee, except the employee doesn't sleep or get holidays off.

How n8n charges you

n8n is open source. You self-host it on a $10/mo Hetzner VPS or a $25/mo Railway instance. You run as many workflows as the box can handle. The bill doesn't move when your business grows.

There's also n8n Cloud if you don't want to host yourself. It charges per execution, not per task inside the execution. A 12-step workflow firing once a day costs the same as a 2-step workflow firing once a day. The complexity is free.

For a small ops-heavy business this is the difference between paying $60/mo or $600/mo doing the same work.

Where Zapier still wins

Zapier wins on speed-to-first-workflow. A non-technical user can build a working zap in 10 minutes. n8n takes 30 minutes the first time even if you know what you're doing.

Zapier wins on the catalog of pre-built apps. They have more, and they're more polished, and the auth flows are tested. n8n has plenty of integrations but some require fiddling.

Zapier wins on enterprise SSO and audit logs and the kind of compliance posture that a 500-person company's IT department asks for.

If you're a 3-person team running Zapier and it costs you $99/mo, leave it alone. The migration is not worth the time.

Where n8n wins

n8n wins on complex multi-step workflows. The node graph is more powerful. You can branch, merge, loop, error-handle, retry, parallelize. You can write JavaScript inline. You can hit any API with a generic HTTP node.

n8n wins on customer data. Self-hosted means your customer data never sits on Zapier's servers. For regulated industries this is the difference between "we automate that" and "we have a compliance review meeting."

n8n wins on AI workflows. The LangChain nodes, the vector store nodes, the LLM nodes are genuinely good. You can build an AI agent that reads your CRM, drafts an email, runs it past a moderation step, and sends it. Zapier can do this too but it's clunkier and the cost-per-run is higher.

n8n wins on the long run. Every workflow you build is yours. You're not renting your automation infrastructure.

My actual call

If you're running a business doing under 1,000 zap-runs a month, stay on Zapier. It's not worth the switch.

If you're running over 5,000 zap-runs a month, you're paying $200+/mo and the math has already broken your favor. Move to n8n. Spend a week on the migration. Save thousands over the next year.

If you're spinning up new automations every week and your zap count is climbing, set up n8n now. Get it stood up before you have 50 workflows to migrate.

If you handle sensitive customer data (financial, healthcare, legal), don't even start on Zapier. Self-host n8n from day one. Your compliance review will be 10x easier.

The thing nobody warns you about

Most businesses I see have 30+ zaps and don't know what half of them do. They were built by someone who left. They fire every day. They send emails to addresses that don't exist anymore. They're costing the business hundreds a month for tasks nobody asked for in 18 months.

Before you switch to anything, audit what you have. Kill what isn't earning. The cheapest automation is the one you turn off.