Most comparisons of these three argue about features. Features are the least interesting difference between them, because all three will connect your CRM to your invoicing system. The differences that decide the answer are structural.
Where your data is processed
| Zapier | Make | n8n | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default processing | United States | European Union | Wherever you host it |
| Self-hosting | No | No | Yes |
| Regional residency | Enterprise plans only | EU by default | Your choice, including in-country |
For a great many businesses this is a preference. For some it is the entire decision. If you handle patient records, government contracts, or anything where a regulator or a client contract says the data stays in the country, two of these three are out of the conversation before you look at a single feature.
How each one charges you
Zapier bills per step. Make bills per module. n8n bills per run, and self-hosted, it does not bill per run at all.
That difference is invisible at small volume and dominant at large volume. A workflow with twelve steps that runs a thousand times a month is twelve thousand billable steps on Zapier and one bill on a self-hosted n8n. If your automation is a handful of low-volume conveniences, this never matters. If it is processing every invoice you receive, it is most of the cost.
Who has to maintain it
This is the honest counterweight, and it is where we send people away.
Zapier is right when nobody technical owns automation, the workflows are simple, and the value is in starting this week rather than starting perfectly. It is the most forgiving of the three and it will not punish you for not having an engineer.
Make is right when you have outgrown Zapier's linear model and want branching, iteration and real data manipulation, but still do not have anyone who wants to own a server. EU processing by default covers a good number of residency requirements without any work.
n8n is right when either somebody technical owns this, or the data genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure. Self-hosting is not free: it is a server, updates, backups and monitoring. If nobody is going to do those, self-hosted n8n becomes an outage waiting for a quiet week.
The AI part, which is newer than the rest
If the workflow involves an AI model doing more than one call, the three diverge sharply. n8n treats agents as a first-class thing, with native support for tool calling, memory and retrieval pipelines. The other two can call a model, which is not the same as orchestrating one.
If your automation is "when a form comes in, ask a model to classify it, then route it", any of the three will do. If it is "read this document, decide which of nine processes it belongs to, fetch what it needs, and escalate the cases it cannot resolve", that is agent work, and it narrows quickly.
How we choose
We run n8n self-hosted, in-region, because most of what we automate touches client data that should not leave. That is a reason, not a recommendation. If you have no engineer and no residency constraint, we will tell you to start on Zapier and spend the saved money elsewhere. Being the more expensive answer to a question that did not need us is not a good outcome for either of us.