Make vs Zapier vs n8n for marketing automation

If you work in marketing ops, you have probably used at least one of these three platforms. Make (formerly Integromat), Zapier, and n8n are the most popular workflow automation tools for connecting the apps in your marketing stack. But they are not interchangeable, and choosing the wrong one for your team can mean either outgrowing it in six months or paying for complexity you do not need.

This comparison breaks down each platform across the dimensions that matter for B2B marketing teams: pricing, integration depth, ease of use, data handling, and scalability. We run our own automations on n8n, at app.supernodes.ai, and for this comparison we re-read each vendor's pricing page and help docs on 6 October 2026, because prices and the way each tool counts usage change often.

Zapier: Best for simple, linear integrations

Zapier is the easiest to get started with. Its trigger-action model is intuitive: when something happens in app A, do something in app B. With more than 10,000 app integrations, it almost certainly connects the tools you already use. Zapier's strength is accessibility. Anyone on the marketing team can build a zap without reading documentation.

The trade-off shows in complex workflows. Zapier handles branching with Paths, which come with the paid plans, but a Zap that looks up a lead score, checks a discount threshold and then routes to different email sequences gets long and hard to debug as a single line of steps. The Professional plan starts at USD 19.99 a month billed yearly (USD 29.99 monthly) for 750 tasks. Zapier counts a task each time an action step completes, and does not count the trigger or its built-in tools such as filters, so a five-step Zap with four actions uses four tasks every time it runs.

Make: Best for complex marketing workflows

Make (formerly Integromat) occupies the sweet spot between power and usability. Its visual editor shows the entire workflow as a connected diagram, which makes debugging and extending scenarios far easier than Zapier's linear interface. Make handles conditional routing, data arrays, aggregation, and multi-branch logic natively.

For marketing teams running multi-step automation like pulling Google Ads data, normalising it against CRM records, writing to a sheet, and triggering Slack alerts, Make is the natural choice. It has native connectors for unified ad reporting, HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Sheets, Meta Ads, and most tools a B2B team uses. The paid Make plan is USD 9 a month for 5,000 credits, and the free plan gives 1,000. A credit is one module action, and the trigger counts too: Make Academy says a trigger module uses one credit per run however many items it finds, including none. A scenario that checks for new data every 15 minutes spends 96 credits a day before it does anything else.

n8n: Best for teams that need full control

n8n is the open-source option. You can host the Community Edition yourself for free, or pay for n8n Cloud, where Starter is 20 euros a month billed yearly for 2,500 workflow executions. Self-hosted, your data never touches n8n's servers. For teams in regulated industries or handling sensitive customer data, this alone can decide the choice. n8n's node-based workflow editor is similar to Make's but with deeper technical flexibility. You can write custom JavaScript nodes, call any REST API directly, and the self-hosted Community Edition has no execution cap. Its Sustainable Use License allows use "for your own internal business purposes", which covers a marketing team automating its own work and rules out reselling n8n as a service.

The catch is the learning curve. n8n also assumes you are comfortable with JSON, API authentication, and basic scripting. A marketing ops lead with no development background will find Make or Zapier faster to be productive in. If you have someone technical on the team who can set it up, n8n gives you unlimited workflows for the price of the server it runs on. We went looking for a credible public benchmark of how much self-hosting saves on average and could not find one that traced back to real survey methodology rather than a vendor's own claim, so treat the saving as a function of your own volume: no per-execution charge, just the infrastructure bill.

Tasks, credits and executions are different units

The entry prices are hard to compare because each vendor bills a different thing. Zapier counts action steps, Make counts every module that runs including the trigger, and n8n counts one execution per workflow run "regardless of complexity". Here is one workflow priced three ways: a form submission triggers a five-step flow (the trigger, a CRM lookup, a CRM update, a Slack message to sales and an email to the lead), 800 times a month. The prices are the published entry tiers on 6 October 2026, and the unit counts are our arithmetic from each vendor's counting rule.

The gap widens with every step you add. A ten-step flow roughly doubles the Zapier tasks and Make credits and leaves the n8n count at one execution a run, so an entry price says little about what a busy workflow will cost. We would price your three busiest workflows this way before choosing.

Side-by-side comparison

Prices, counts and limits as published by each vendor on 6 October 2026.

Which platform fits your team

Zapier's own statistics roundup reports that more than 90 per cent of RevOps teams use automation, and the top three roles by AI automation usage across Zapier workflows are marketing, IT and project management. Which platform gets you there depends on your team's technical depth and how complex the workflows are.

For most B2B marketing teams, Make is the right default for building unified marketing pipelines. It handles branching and data transformation on one canvas, costs less than Zapier for the same workflow in our worked example, and does not need a developer to maintain. The visual editor makes it easy to audit and adjust workflows when your campaigns change, which they will.

Choose Zapier if your team is small, non-technical, and your workflows are simple linear connections. Choose n8n if you are in a regulated industry, run long workflows at high volume, or have a technical lead who can own the infrastructure. And if you are already using n8n for other parts of your stack, standardising on it makes sense even for the simpler workflows.

For a deeper look at how these platforms handle specific marketing use cases, check out our guide to the 10-layer AI agent stack, which covers where automation platforms fit in a broader agent architecture.

Frequently asked questions

This is something we think about a lot at Supernodes. Many teams already run at least one of these platforms, and the useful question is usually what to build on top of it. If you would like to talk through which platform fits your stack, speak with us.