Zapier, Make, and n8n all connect apps and move data between them, and all three will happily run the same simple automation. The reason people agonise over the choice anyway is that they diverge hard once the automation stops being simple — on what it costs at volume, on who holds your data, and on how much real logic you can put inside a workflow before you hit a wall.
Duskel builds on self-hosted n8n, and I will tell you exactly why further down. But I am not going to pretend the other two are bad, because they are not, and for a lot of people they are the right answer. Here is the honest version of how they differ and when each one actually wins.
The pricing models are not comparable on purpose
Zapier charges per task. Every step that runs, on every item, counts. A workflow that touches ten records and has five steps is not five tasks, it is fifty, and your bill scales with how much work your automations do. That model is fine when volume is low and predictable, and it turns into a genuine problem when an automation processes thousands of items a day, because you are metered on the exact thing you want to grow.
Make also meters, but on operations, and it tends to be cheaper per unit of work than Zapier for the same volume. It is more forgiving of multi-step, multi-item workflows, which is part of why heavier users drift toward it. You are still, however, paying more as you automate more, which is the shape of every per-usage cloud tool.
n8n breaks the pattern when self-hosted, because it is flat. You run it on your own server and it does not care whether a workflow fires a hundred times a day or a hundred thousand. The cost is the server and the maintenance, not the volume. That inversion is the whole argument: the more work you push through it, the better it looks against the metered tools, and the worse the metered tools look against it. At low volume this advantage is imaginary; at high volume it is the entire decision.
Data ownership and self-hosting
With Zapier and Make, your data passes through their infrastructure. For most automations that is completely fine and not worth losing sleep over. But if you are moving customer records, health or financial data, or anything under a compliance regime that cares where data lives, "it flows through a third-party SaaS in a region I did not choose" is a real answer you have to give an auditor, and it is not always the answer you want to give.
Self-hosted n8n runs on infrastructure you control. The data moves between your systems without a vendor in the middle holding it, you decide the region, and you can put it behind your own network boundary. For a business that already takes data residency seriously, that is not a nice-to-have — it is the reason the other two get ruled out before pricing is even discussed. This is the second half of why we default to it.
Custom logic and code
This is where the ceiling shows up. Zapier and Make are visual-first, and they have both added code steps and more sophisticated logic over time, so it is unfair to call them toys. But they are built to keep you inside their model, and when your automation needs a branch of genuinely custom behaviour — an odd transformation, a call to an internal API with bespoke auth, logic that does not map onto their blocks — you feel the walls.
n8n is the most developer-friendly of the three by a clear margin. It has proper code nodes where you write real JavaScript over the full data set, it handles branching and merging and looping without fighting you, and because you host it you can add your own dependencies and reach anything on your network. When a workflow needs to be a small program rather than a straight line of blocks, n8n lets it be one. That is the difference between an automation you can grow and one you outgrow.
The flip side is honest too: that power is also a sharper edge. n8n gives you enough room to build something fragile if nobody is minding the architecture, whereas the guardrails in Zapier and Make stop a non-technical user hurting themselves. Which is the right trade depends entirely on who is going to own the thing after it is built.
Reliability and who maintains it
Here is the fairest point in the managed tools' favour. Zapier and Make run the servers, handle the uptime, retry failures, and keep hundreds of integrations patched and working. You do not think about any of it. That is a real service and it is most of what you are paying for. When something breaks at 2am, it is their pager, not yours.
Self-hosted n8n means someone owns the server, the updates, the monitoring, and the recovery when a workflow jams. If that someone is you and you have no appetite for it, the flat pricing is a false economy — you will spend the savings on operational pain. This is exactly the gap we fill: we run the n8n instance, keep it healthy, and build the workflows on top, so a business gets the flat cost and the data ownership without having to become an n8n operations team. If you do not have someone to own it, a managed tool is genuinely the better call.
When each one wins
Zapier wins when you want the largest catalogue of integrations, the gentlest learning curve, and automations simple enough that per-task pricing never bites. For a small team wiring up a handful of low-volume workflows themselves, it is often the fastest path to done and not worth overthinking.
Make wins as the middle ground: more capable than Zapier on multi-step, multi-item work, cheaper at moderate volume, still fully managed. If you have outgrown Zapier's pricing but do not want to run anything yourself, it is frequently the pragmatic answer.
n8n wins on high volume, on data you need to keep in-house, and on workflows that need real logic — provided someone competent owns the instance. That last clause is the whole thing. Self-hosted n8n with nobody maintaining it is worse than either alternative. Self-hosted n8n that is properly run is cheaper at scale, keeps your data yours, and never makes you say no to a workflow because the tool cannot express it. That combination is why we build on it, and the maintenance being handled is why it works out that way rather than becoming a liability.