n8n vs Zapier vs Make
Which automation platform should a small business build on in 2026? Scores from the RXed AI Periodic Table v1.0 — identical 20-element scale, deterministic overall. How we audit →
The verdict
Three tools, three philosophies. n8n (7.2) is the deepest AI-native harness of the trio — agents, RAG, evaluations and MCP scored 7.5+ — and the only one you can self-host for near-zero license cost, if you can spare the DevOps hours. Make (6.2) is the friendliest way to put agents to work across 3,500+ apps with zero infrastructure, but every AI action burns extra credits and its evaluation surface is thin (Ev 2). Zapier (5.9) remains the best pure connector in the business (Fc 9, 8,000+ apps via MCP), but per-task pricing punishes exactly the automations that succeed, and RAG/evals trail both rivals. Practical read: technical team → n8n; non-technical team that lives in SaaS → Make; you mainly need one app to talk to another → Zapier.
| n8n 7.2/10 17/20 elements · 2026-07-05 | Zapier AI (Agents + Copilot) 5.9/10 13/20 elements · 2026-07-05 | Make (formerly Integromat) 6.2/10 17/20 elements · 2026-07-05 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | n8n GmbH | Zapier Inc. | Make (Celonis, Inc.) |
| Origin | DE | US | CZ |
| Pricing | Community edition self-hosted free (fair-code, Sustainable Use License) · Cloud Starter €20/mo (2.5k executions) · Pro €50/mo (10k) · Business €667/mo (40k, self-hosted, SSO+Git) · Enterprise custom; annual billing. Executions priced per workflow run regardless of steps. | Free 400 tasks/month · paid from ~€18/month ($19.99) · Agents and Enterprise tiers on top; per-task economics | Free (1,000 credits/mo) · Core ~€12 · Pro ~€21 · Teams ~€38 per month for 10k credits (annual billing, USD list) · Enterprise custom. Native AI features (agents, AI toolkit) burn extra credits per action. |
| Pr Prompts | 7 | 7 | 7 |
| Em Embeddings | 6.5 | — | 6 |
| Cx Context | 7 | 5 | 6.5 |
| Tr Tracing | 8 | 6 | 6.5 |
| Lg LLM | 7.5 | 6 | 7.5 |
| Fc Function calling | 8.5 | 9 | 8.5 |
| Vx Vector store | 6.5 | — | 5.5 |
| Rg RAG | 8 | 4 | 6.5 |
| Gr Guardrails | 7.5 | 7 | 4.5 |
| Mm Multimodal | 6 | 4 | 6 |
| Ag Agents | 7.5 | 7 | 7.5 |
| Ft Fine-tuning | — | — | — |
| Fw Frameworks & harnesses | 8.5 | 6 | 7.5 |
| Ev Evaluations | 7.5 | 3 | 2 |
| Sm Small models | 6.5 | — | 6 |
| Ma Multi-agent | 6 | 5 | 4.5 |
| Sy Synthetic data | — | — | — |
| Pc Protocols | 8 | 8 | 7.5 |
| In Interpretability | — | — | — |
| Th Thinking models | 6.5 | — | 6.5 |
Hover any score for the written reason. Full detail: n8n passport → · Zapier AI (Agents + Copilot) passport → · Make (formerly Integromat) passport →