n8n vs Make vs Zapier

Pick by how many times it runs, not by features

All three will connect a form to a CRM. The feature lists are not where the decision lives. What separates them in practice is pricing shape: these tools charge by how often your workflow runs, and that is the number that surprises people.

A workflow that fires twice a day is cheap on any of them. A workflow that fires on every website visit, every inbox message, or every row of an import can cost more per month than the build did — on the platform that looked cheapest at signup.

So the first question is not which tool. It is how many times a month this will run, and that answer should come before anyone picks a platform.

Where each one genuinely fits

Treat these as starting points, not rules:

• Zapier — few workflows, low volume, and you want to be able to open it yourself and understand what it does. The interface is the best of the three and that is worth real money if you intend to maintain it in-house.
• Make — more steps, more branching, and enough volume that Zapier's pricing has started to hurt. The visual canvas handles complex flows better, at the cost of a less obvious first hour.
• n8n — high volume, unusual integrations, or a requirement that data stays on your own servers. Self-hosting removes per-run pricing entirely, but you are now responsible for keeping it running, which is a real cost even if it is not an invoice.

The thing none of them do for you

Every one of these platforms will happily run a workflow that quietly fails. A step errors, the run stops, and nothing tells anyone — the lead simply never arrives, and you find out weeks later when someone asks what happened to an enquiry.

Whichever you choose, the automation needs a visible failure path: an alert when a run fails, and the original payload stored so it can be replayed once the cause is fixed. That is a build decision, not a platform feature, and it is the difference between automation you can trust and automation you have to check.

If you are not sure

Start on whichever platform you already pay for, and only move when the bill or the complexity gives you a reason. Migrating a working automation is a few hours of work; choosing the theoretically optimal platform before you know your volume is weeks of deliberation for no gain.

I build on all three and pick based on what a business already uses and how often the thing will run — not on a preference.