n8n vs Zapier

Pricing

Zapier prices by task. A task is one action firing inside a Zap; triggers are free, and multi-step Zaps count each action separately. The Starter plan begins around $20/month for 750 tasks, Professional is roughly $49/month for 2,000 tasks, and Team and Company tiers stack into the hundreds per month. Overages are billed at a fixed rate per task once you breach the tier ceiling.

n8n prices by workflow execution on cloud, regardless of how many steps the workflow contains. The Starter plan on n8n Cloud begins around $20/month for 2,500 executions; the Pro plan around $50/month for 10,000. A workflow with twelve steps and a workflow with two steps both consume one execution credit, which is the largest source of bill-shock difference between the two.

Self-hosted n8n is effectively free at the runtime layer. A small VPS ($5–10/month) carries several thousand executions a day before you need workers, Redis queue mode, or a managed Postgres. Zapier has no self-host option, so the cost floor is whatever cloud plan covers your task volume. The crossover where n8n becomes dramatically cheaper is usually around 5,000–10,000 monthly executions on workflows with three or more steps.

Features

Zapier’s strength is catalog. The integration directory lists roughly 7,000 apps, and most mainstream SaaS ships a Zapier app on day one because it has become the default expectation. Trigger and action coverage on the long tail is consistently good, the field mapper is the cleanest in the category, and Tables, Interfaces, and Chatbots round out a product that has grown well beyond simple if-this-then-that.

n8n’s strength is composition. The editor exposes branching, merging, looping over arrays, sub-workflows that call other workflows, and a Code node that accepts JavaScript or Python with full access to upstream data. Around 400 native nodes cover the apps most teams actually use, and the generic HTTP Request node fills the long-tail gap for any REST API. Where Zapier requires Paths and Looping bolted onto a linear chain, n8n treats those as primitives on the canvas.

Debugging splits the same way. Zapier shows task history per Zap with input and output for every step — quick to scan when a three-step Zap misbehaves. n8n lets you pin sample data on any node, re-run from a failed step with edited inputs, and watch data flow through the graph visually. For workflows past eight steps the n8n approach scales better; for a small Zap that ran once and broke, Zapier wins on time-to-fix.

Self-hosting

Self-hosting is the cleanest structural difference. n8n ships as a Docker image, a Docker Compose stack, and a Helm chart. SQLite works for small setups; Postgres is recommended for anything serious; Redis enables queue mode for multi-worker scaling. The license is the Sustainable Use License — free for internal use and modification, with restrictions on running a competing hosted n8n service. For internal automation this license is invisible in practice.

Zapier has no self-hosted edition. There is no community edition, no enterprise on-prem package, and no plan on the public roadmap to add one. Data leaves your network through Zapier’s cloud on every run, which is fine for most workloads and a hard stop for teams with strict data residency, air-gap, or HIPAA-style requirements that the vendor cannot satisfy under their standard BAA.

A self-hosted n8n on a single VPS handles workloads most small teams will ever generate. Queue mode with a Postgres primary, a Redis broker, and two or three worker containers carries tens of thousands of daily executions on modest hardware. The trade is you own backups, version upgrades, and the on-call. Teams that want the feature set without the operations buy n8n Cloud and skip this layer entirely.

AI

Both products have shipped AI features, but the depth is uneven. n8n includes an AI Agent node, LangChain wrappers, a chat memory node, and direct integrations with the major vector stores (Pinecone, Qdrant, Supabase pgvector, Weaviate). You can build a retrieval-augmented chat flow, a tool-using agent, or a multi-step LLM chain inside the same canvas you use for SaaS glue, and the model nodes accept OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and self-hosted providers through Ollama.

Zapier ships AI Actions, Zapier Agents, and a growing set of OpenAI- and Anthropic-flavored steps you can drop into a Zap. For “summarize this email and post it to Slack” or “draft a reply with GPT-4o and queue it for approval” the experience is polished and fast. For retrieval over a private corpus, branching on classifier output into different downstream chains, or a tool-calling agent that loops until it succeeds, the building blocks are thinner and the visual model fights the use case.

A useful filter: when the AI step is the workflow, n8n is the better home; when the AI step is one box inside a larger SaaS automation, Zapier is faster to stand up.

Migration

Neither product imports the other’s workflow format. Migration is a manual rebuild. The pattern most teams follow: export the source workflow as documentation, recreate it on the target, run both in parallel against the same trigger for a week, then disable the source once the new version has logged a few hundred successful runs.

Zapier to n8n is the more common direction and the easier one. Triggers map cleanly because the underlying SaaS APIs are the same; Filter and Formatter steps become n8n IF and Code nodes; Paths become branches. A typical three- to five-step Zap rebuilds in twenty to forty minutes the first time and ten to fifteen after the pattern is familiar. Harder cases are Zaps that lean on Zapier-specific helpers like Storage by Zapier or Digest — those become small custom nodes or a Postgres table.

n8n to Zapier is rarer and harder. Workflows that use sub-workflows, the Code node, or AI Agent loops do not translate cleanly to Zapier’s linear model; the rebuild usually fragments one n8n workflow into two or three Zaps with a queue or webhook stitching them together. Teams that try this direction often discover the n8n workflow was doing more than the Zapier model can express, and the answer is to keep the workflow on n8n.

Who should choose n8n

n8n is the right choice for teams with at least one engineer, workflows of three or more steps at non-trivial volume, and a preference for the option to self-host. The execution-priced cloud is materially cheaper than Zapier on multi-step work, the Code node closes the gap on any integration the catalog misses, and the AI nodes are far enough ahead that AI-heavy automations are practical without a second platform. It is also the right choice when data residency or vendor independence matters — self-hosting in your own jurisdiction, JSON workflows in version control, and a fair-code license that lets you fork are real properties Zapier structurally cannot offer.

Who should choose Zapier

Zapier is the right choice for non-technical teams who need an integration into a long-tail SaaS, want the cleanest first-day onboarding in the category, and run mostly simple one- to three-step automations. The catalog is deeper for niche tools — industry-specific CRMs, regional payment processors, smaller marketing platforms — and the field mapper makes “new form submission goes to the CRM” a five-minute job. It is also the right choice when nobody on the team wants to think about infrastructure: Zapier handles the runtime, the secrets, the retries, and the alerting, and for a team that needs automations to just work, the premium over self-hosted n8n is worth paying.