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 →
At a glance
Scope = elements of the AI stack in the tool’s stated scope (dashed = honestly out of scope, never a penalty). Quality = how well it scores on what it covers. No single number — both axes, always.
The verdict
Three tools, three philosophies. n8n (Scope 17/20 · Quality 7/10) 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 (Scope 17/20 · Quality 6/10) 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 (Scope 13/20 · Quality 6/10) 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.
Where the quality sits
Family mean over covered elements only — a dash means the family is honestly outside that tool’s scope.
| n8n Scope 17/20 · Quality 7/10 audited 2026-07-05 | Zapier AI (Agents + Copilot) Scope 13/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 2026-07-05 | Make (formerly Integromat) Scope 17/20 · Quality 6/10 audited 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 | 7 | — | 6 |
| Cx Context | 7 | 5 | 7 |
| Tr Tracing | 8 | 6 | 7 |
| Lg LLM | 8 | 6 | 8 |
| Fc Function calling | 9 | 9 | 9 |
| Vx Vector store | 7 | — | 6 |
| Rg RAG | 8 | 4 | 7 |
| Gr Guardrails | 8 | 7 | 5 |
| Mm Multimodal | 6 | 4 | 6 |
| Ag Agents | 8 | 7 | 8 |
| Ft Fine-tuning | — | — | — |
| Fw Frameworks & harnesses | 9 | 6 | 8 |
| Ev Evaluations | 8 | 3 | 2 |
| Sm Small models | 7 | — | 6 |
| Ma Multi-agent | 6 | 5 | 5 |
| Sy Synthetic data | — | — | — |
| Pc Protocols | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| In Interpretability | — | — | — |
| Th Thinking models | 7 | — | 7 |
Hover any score for the written reason. Full detail: n8n passport → · Zapier AI (Agents + Copilot) passport → · Make (formerly Integromat) passport →