Zapier bills per action step and n8n bills per workflow run, so the same 12-step workflow over 500 records costs 6,000 units on one and 1 on the other. Here's the multiplication that picks the cheaper tool.
Take a 12-action workflow and run it over 500 CRM records. Zapier counts 6,000 tasks. n8n counts one execution. Any comparison that puts "2,000 tasks" next to "2,500 executions" and picks a winner is comparing the price of a brick with the price of a house.
We build and take over automations on both platforms. Almost every surprise bill we get called about has the same cause: nobody multiplied steps × items × runs before choosing the tool. That one calculation, plus an honest count of the ops hours self-hosting costs, tells you which platform is cheaper. Here's how to do it.
Zapier doesn't charge for the trigger, Filter steps or the Paths step itself. It does charge a task for every action that completes. Take a lead-routing Zap that enriches a contact, writes to HubSpot, posts to Slack and appends a row to a sheet: that's four tasks per lead. At 3,000 leads a month you're at 12,000 tasks. Zapier's Professional plan starts at 750, so that volume puts you several tiers up. On n8n Cloud the same workflow is 3,000 executions, which fits inside Pro's 10,000 for about €60 a month with 7,000 to spare.
It works the other way too. A one-action workflow that copies 20,000 form submissions a month into a CRM uses 20,000 tasks on Zapier and 20,000 executions on n8n. That's already past n8n Pro's cap. When a workflow has one action and one item, the units are identical and you're comparing price per unit, nothing more. The gap grows with actions × items. List prices change every few quarters. The units don't.
Looping by Zapier runs every step after it once per item, and each of those actions costs a task. A nightly job that pulls 400 open invoices and does three things with each one burns 1,200 tasks a night, about 36,000 a month, from a Zap that shows four steps in the editor. On one account we took over, a single sync like this was most of the bill. The owner never spotted it because usage reports group it under one Zap name. Two more traps: past your plan limit, pay-per-task billing charges 1.25x your plan's task rate, and Looping caps at 500 iterations, so invoice 501 is quietly skipped.
n8n passes arrays between nodes. All 400 invoices go through each node inside one execution, so the nightly job costs 30 executions a month. If any of your automations handle batches (sheet rows, order exports, scraped listings, CRM backfills), that usually settles it. The catch is memory. Cloud instances have a few hundred megabytes, and a 200,000-row pull loaded as JSON will die with an out-of-memory error partway through, after some writes have already landed. Make writes idempotent, chunk with Loop Over Items (formerly Split In Batches), and move heavy processing into sub-workflows so memory is freed between chunks.
The Community edition is free under n8n's Sustainable Use License, and a 4GB VPS under €10 a month runs a lot. That's where "free" ends. On the default SQLite setup, bursts of concurrent webhooks throw SQLITE_BUSY: database is locked. Production needs Postgres, a backup you've actually restored, and N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY stored somewhere other than the server. Lose that key and every saved credential becomes unreadable. Once executions overlap, you also need queue mode: EXECUTIONS_MODE=queue, Redis and separate worker containers.
n8n ships releases most weeks, and BREAKING-CHANGES.md is not optional reading. Version 1.0 alone changed how nodes with multiple inputs execute. Someone has to read the changelog, replay your critical workflows on staging and then upgrade. Budget two to four hours a month. Plan for more if you take webhooks, because during a restart the sender gets connection refused, and most form tools never retry. If nobody on your team can renew TLS and run pg_restore at 2am, stay off self-hosting.
List every automation you run or plan to build, with four columns: actions per item, items per run, runs per month and their product. The product is your Zapier task count. Runs per month on its own is your n8n execution count. Price both totals against current tiers. For self-hosting, add ops hours × your loaded hourly rate. At €80 an hour, three hours a month is €240, four times n8n Cloud Pro. Self-hosting only wins on price once your volume is past what Cloud tiers cover.
In our client work, teams under about 2,000 tasks a month with linear Zaps rarely save enough to pay for rebuilding 20 automations. Teams with batch jobs or AI steps usually come out ahead on n8n in the first month. A typical agent step fetches context, calls the model, parses JSON, validates it against a schema, retries on malformed output and writes back. That's six actions per item on Zapier, and every retry is another task. On n8n it's all one execution. Token spend comes on top of either platform and often costs more than the automation fee.
If your automations are linear, non-technical staff own them, and you're under a few thousand tasks a month, stay on Zapier and pay for the convenience. If you run batches or AI agents, or you're past 10,000 tasks a month, move to n8n Cloud and let n8n run the servers. Self-host only for data residency, volume beyond Cloud tiers or custom nodes, and only with a named person who owns upgrades and restores. Picking either tool by its headline price is the mistake, because that price is quoted in a unit your workflows don't use.
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