Both will move data between your apps. The difference that decides it is not features, it is staffing: Zapier is a service you rent, n8n is a system somebody runs. If you can name the person who will look at the logs when a workflow fails on a Sunday, n8n is open to you. If that person would be you and you did not sign up to be an operator, it is not.
Disclosure: this site is run by Zentor, which competes with both.
Everything else follows from ownership.
Rented, and you get uptime, upgrades and connector maintenance as somebody else's job, in exchange for a bill that scales with how much work runs through it. Operated, and the licence can be free while the real cost moves into hosting, updates, backups and the evening you spend working out why one node started failing quietly.
Neither is cheaper in the abstract. They put the cost in different places, and only you know which of those you have.
Breadth of connectors and nothing to run. For most small teams that is the whole argument. It bills successful automated work rather than the existence of a Zap, and the task usage guide (zapier.com/pricing/rates) sets out rules that differ by feature, so estimate from the actions that will actually fire rather than from a plan page.
It is also the one you can hand to a colleague. That matters more than people admit when the person who built it goes on holiday.
Control, and cost at volume. Self-hosting means your data stays on infrastructure you chose, the workflow logic can go further than a managed builder allows, and heavy usage stops being a per-task bill. If you have technical capacity in-house and the volume to justify it, this is a real advantage rather than a philosophical one.
The condition is the technical capacity. It is not optional, and it does not go away after setup.
| Zapier | n8n | |
|---|---|---|
| Who operates it | The vendor | You |
| Where the cost lands | Per unit of work run | Hosting, plus the hours to keep it alive |
| Ceiling on logic | What the builder exposes | Considerably higher |
| When it breaks at 11pm | Their problem | Yours |
| Hand it to a colleague | Usually fine | Depends who the colleague is |
Do not compare the happy path; both will do the happy path in an afternoon. Build the same workflow twice, then break it deliberately: rename a field upstream, remove a required value, disconnect the destination. Watch what each one does, and whether the person who will own this can tell what went wrong without help.
Then ask that person, out loud, whether they want it.
Both of these are rule engines, and rule engines are excellent at fixed steps between known systems. They are a poor fit for the work where the right answer depends on judgement: the reply that has to know what this customer already ordered and what you promised them on Tuesday, the follow-up whose tone should firm up as an invoice ages, the listing whose copy differs by platform in ways you keep adjusting by hand.
People try to encode that anyway and end up with a workflow that grows a branch every time reality surprises them. If that describes what you are about to build, neither tool is the problem you are solving — the work simply is not a rule. Keep whichever of these handles your plumbing and move the judgement somewhere built for it.
The software can be self-hosted at no licence cost. Hosting, maintenance and the time to operate it are the real bill, and there is a managed option if you want to skip that.
Depends entirely on volume and on whether your time is free. High volume with in-house technical capacity favours n8n; low volume without it favours Zapier, usually by a lot.
Not for everything, but you need someone comfortable with infrastructure and with debugging a workflow that failed silently. Treat that as a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
Not directly. Plan a rebuild, and use it as an opportunity to drop the branches you added for cases that only happened once.
If the honest answer is "nobody", that has already decided it.
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