Leaving Make in late 2026 is not an escape from metered billing. You are choosing a different meter. Make counts credits per module run, n8n counts workflow executions regardless of how much work happens inside one, and Zapier counts tasks per action. Run the same 500-row job through all three and you get three invoices that differ by an order of magnitude — from the vendors’ published definitions, not from a benchmark.
Make’s meter also changed recently. On 27 August 2026 credits replaced operations as the billing unit; most actions still cost one credit, and anything leaning on Make’s AI Provider can cost more. Make is hosted-only and now sits inside Celonis. So the question is not which tool has more integrations, but which meter fits your workflows — and what you pay when one breaks.
What a run actually costs now
Make’s free plan is 1,000 credits a month with 1 MB of storage, and unused credits expire at the end of the term. The multiplication is what people miss: modules charge per bundle, so a Gmail module sending five emails consumes five credits, and a scenario iterating over 500 rows through four modules burns roughly 2,000 credits per run. Router and error-handler modules (Rollback, Break, Resume, Commit, Ignore) are free, which helps on the error path but not the happy one.
n8n inverts that. Every cloud plan includes unlimited users, workflows and integrations, priced on monthly executions “regardless of complexity” — its words. Starter is about $20/month billed annually for 2,500 executions, Pro about $50 for 10,000, Business about $800 for 40,000 and self-hosted only. The 500-row loop is one execution there, whether it runs four nodes or forty.
Zapier is the most familiar meter and the least forgiving on volume: 100 tasks a month free, and the free tier only allows two-step Zaps. Professional starts around $19.99/month, Team around $69/month for 25 users, and every action inside a Zap consumes a task. Zapier’s documentation puts an MCP tool call at two tasks, so agent work is priced at a premium.
Self-hosting is the only real exit, and it comes with a salary attached
Make and Zapier are hosted-only. Every run passes through their infrastructure, which is fine until a contract or a regulator asks where the payload went. Only n8n answers that: its Community Edition is free to run on your own machine, and Activepieces — the closer visual analogue to Make — also ships a self-hostable build.
The cost of that exit is not the licence. It is a server, backups, upgrades, TLS certificates and whoever gets paged when a credential expires at 11 p.m. For a handful of internal workflows, a $20/month hosted plan beats those hours. For a team already running infrastructure, the arithmetic flips, and the engineer maintaining the stack absorbs n8n with little marginal effort.
Connector counts: read the FAQ, not the headline
Make’s marketing claims 3,000+ native apps. The same page’s FAQ says “more than 1,000 3rd party apps” out of the box, plus custom apps for anything with a public API and 300+ REST endpoints — those endpoints manage Make itself, not your CRM. Both can be true if you count modules and templates differently; plan against the conservative one.
Zapier’s shelf is still widest at 9,000+ apps and roughly 66,000 triggers and actions, and that breadth is the product. n8n’s directory listed 2,466 integrations in late October 2026 — a fraction of Zapier’s catalogue, but app count is a weak proxy when an HTTP Request node plus a Code node can reach anything with an API. Long-tail SaaS with a polished experience favours Zapier, clean REST APIs favour n8n, and Make sits between them.
| Dimension | Make | n8n | Zapier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Credits per module run (since 27 Aug 2026) | Executions, unlimited steps | Tasks per action |
| Free tier | 1,000 credits/month, credits expire | Self-hosted Community Edition | 100 tasks/month, two-step Zaps |
| Paid entry | Core/Pro/Teams priced by credit volume (check official site) | About $20/mo for 2,500 executions | About $19.99/mo |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes, free Community Edition | No |
| Connector shelf | 1,000+ third-party apps (FAQ figure) | 2,466 integrations listed | 9,000+ apps |
| Failure visibility | Per-module operation counts, incomplete executions | Per-node input/output in execution log | Zap history, 60 days / 10,000 runs |
Where you find out it broke
Make is strongest for non-technical operators. Each module shows a bubble with its operation count, error handlers can roll a scenario back or resume it, and incomplete executions are stored — 10 MB per 10,000 credits, capped at 2 GB — so a failed run can be replayed. The weakness is visual: past twenty modules, a scenario becomes a diagram only its author can read, and the author usually left.
n8n keeps the most forensic record. Every execution stores the input and output of each node, so a malformed payload is a click away rather than a guess, and retry-on-fail plus a dedicated error workflow are built in. Self-hosted installs keep those logs on your own disk — the difference between a 30-day window and an audit trail.
Zapier’s history is readable but rationed: 60 days of run data guaranteed and up to 10,000 runs displayed, though failed runs can be replayed. Fine for a weekly marketing Zap, thin for anything you must explain to an auditor next quarter.
When to leave Make, and when leaving is the expensive mistake
Leave for n8n if your scenarios iterate over rows, files or records. Per-bundle charging is where Make’s bill grows quietly, and one execution covering unlimited steps removes that anxiety. You need someone comfortable with a server, or $20 a month to avoid one.
Leave for Zapier if the trigger is a missing app rather than a missing feature. Paying more per task to reach the tool your sales team lives in is rational; rebuilding a working scenario to save $15 a month is not.
Stay on Make if the scenarios are few, shallow and owned by someone who does not write code. A migration is a rebuild — no vendor imports another’s schema cleanly — and two weeks of rebuilding plus a month of debugging usually costs more than a year of credit overage.
Look at Activepieces if you want Make’s canvas and n8n’s escape hatch. It is the closest shape-match to Make among self-hostable options, with 1,000 free credits a month on its cloud tier.
For the billing-model deep dive, our n8n alternatives guide walks the execution-versus-task split; the Zapier alternatives guide covers what changed in that catalogue.
FAQ
Is Make still free in 2026? Yes, on 1,000 credits a month. Credits expire at the end of the term and are consumed per module run, so one looping scenario can exhaust the allowance in an afternoon.
Can I import my Make scenarios into n8n or Zapier? Not reliably. Each platform keeps workflows in its own schema, and module-to-node mappings are not portable. Budget a rebuild, then test one workflow before committing the rest.
Which is cheapest for 10,000 runs a month? It depends what a run contains. Ten thousand single-step runs are cheap nearly everywhere; ten thousand that each loop over 100 rows are cheap only on n8n’s meter. Count actions per run first.
Does Make have AI agents and MCP? Yes. Make bundles Maia, AI agents and an MCP server, and AI-heavy modules draw more credits — the pricing detail to watch when you add an agent to an existing scenario.
Do I need to self-host to keep my data in-house? With these three, yes: only n8n offers a self-hosted edition. Hosted plans route payloads through vendor infrastructure, so a residency requirement rules Make and Zapier out before features are discussed.
Pick the meter that matches your workflow’s shape, not the plan name that matches your budget. If your automations loop, n8n is the cheaper machine. If they merely connect, Make’s credit model is survivable and its canvas is still the easiest place for a non-developer to see what happened. And if neither constraint bites, the cheapest Make alternative may be the account you already know how to debug.
Details read from make.com/pricing, help.make.com/operations, n8n.io/pricing, n8n.io/integrations and zapier.com/pricing on 27 October 2026. Prices change; confirm on the official pages before subscribing.