Zapier vs n8n
| Zapier | n8n | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | automation | automation |
| Pricing | Freemium: Free plan (100 tasks/mo); paid from $19.99/mo (Professional, annual billing) | Freemium: Free self-hosted community edition; cloud from EUR 20/mo, billed annually |
| Integrations | Slack, Gmail, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Salesforce | Gmail, Slack, Google Sheets, Notion, Openai |
The short answer
Zapier and n8n both automate the plumbing between your apps: when something happens in one tool, data flows into another without anyone retyping it. Zapier optimizes for reach and ease, with 9,000+ connected apps and recipes anyone can build. n8n optimizes for control and cost at scale: self-host it for free, drop real code into workflows, and pay per execution instead of per task. The honest fork: how technical is the person who will build and maintain your automations?
Where Zapier wins
Zapier wins on accessibility and catalog. With 9,000+ apps connected, the tool you use is almost certainly there, and building a first automation is a guided, forgiving experience. The free plan (100 tasks per month) covers a first real automation, and paid plans from $19.99 per month keep the simplicity as you add more. For a non-technical team, the difference is not marginal: Zapier automations get built, n8n instances get postponed.
The cost shape is the trade-off: per-task pricing means a busy multi-step automation consumes tasks quickly, and heavy usage climbs the tiers.
Where n8n wins
n8n wins on control, depth and economics at volume. The self-hosted community edition is free software on your own server: your data never passes through a third party, which matters for privacy-sensitive workflows. Its cloud (from EUR 20 per month, billed annually) charges per workflow execution rather than per step, so a complex twenty-step workflow costs the same to run as a trivial one. When the visual blocks run out, you write JavaScript or Python inline instead of abandoning the workflow, and its AI agent support is the deepest of the two: model-driven workflows where every decision is inspectable.
The price is the learning curve: n8n assumes comfort with data fields and, if self-hosted, with running a server.
Verdict
Choose Zapier if automations will be built by non-technical people and your volume is modest: you'll ship your first automation this week and the catalog will never be your bottleneck. Choose n8n if you have technical comfort in-house and either data-privacy requirements (self-host), complex multi-step workflows (per-execution pricing), or AI-agent ambitions. A common honest path is starting on Zapier and migrating the heavy workflows to n8n when the task bill starts to sting.
Zapier
No-code automation platform that connects 9,000+ apps so data flows between your tools automatically.
Free plan (100 tasks/mo); paid from $19.99/mo (Professional, annual billing)