n8n vs Zapier: Which Is Cheaper, and Who Keeps It Running

You've got two tabs open. Zapier's pricing on one, n8n's on the other. Forty minutes in, the numbers look close enough to argue about and different enough to matter.

That comparison won't settle it. The two pages aren't measuring the same thing.

I do marketing at Asuri, an AI automation platform. I don't build the product. But I've spent a lot of time on what automation costs, before launch and after, and that's the part these comparisons skip.

Short version: Zapier is easier to start and harder to scale. n8n is harder to start and cheaper to scale. What decides it is how many steps your process has, and who fixes it when it stops.

They don't sell the same thing

Zapier charges per task. A task is one chargeable action inside a run, so a ten-step workflow costs ten times more every time it fires.

n8n charges per workflow execution, with unlimited steps inside. Their pricing page puts it plainly: an execution is a single run of your entire workflow, and it doesn't matter how many steps are in it or how much data it processes.

Take a process with ten chargeable steps that runs 1,000 times a month.

On Zapier that's 10,000 tasks. On the Professional plan, $129 a month on annual billing, or $193.50 without the annual commitment.

On n8n that's 1,000 executions. It fits inside Starter at $20 a month, which includes 2,500.

Picture what those ten steps are. A lead arrives and has to be added to the CRM, assigned to someone, tagged, sent a follow-up, and put in Friday's report. That's five actions. Add the lookups between them, a filter, and a branch for when something bounces, and ten arrives faster than it sounds.

So the rule is simple. Zapier bills in proportion to your steps per run. Ten steps means ten units of Zapier billing for one unit of n8n's. Two steps means two. At one step the meters more or less match.

One caveat. Zapier charges different rates for some step types, so count your own workflow rather than trusting this one.

Where each one is genuinely better

Zapier has far more connectors. 9,000+ apps against 2,367 integrations on n8n. If your stack includes something niche, that matters more than any pricing argument.

Zapier has a free tier that actually runs. $0 a month, 100 tasks, two-step Zaps. n8n's cloud has a trial, not a free plan. For testing an idea this weekend, Zapier wins outright.

n8n gives you control Zapier doesn't sell. The Community Edition is on GitHub and self-hosting is free. If your data can't leave your infrastructure, that's the whole decision. It also expects you to reach for code: JavaScript and Python steps, custom API calls, webhooks. Someone on your team has to want to open those files.

Both do AI agents now. n8n has an AI Agent node, MCP support and human approval for tool calls. Zapier has its own AI features and Copilot. Neither has a monopoly here.

The limits nobody puts in the table

On n8n's Starter plan one execution can run for five minutes, and five can run at once. Pro raises that to 40 minutes and up to 50. If your workflow calls a slow API or handles a big file, check this before the price. A run that times out still counts against your monthly executions. And unless someone set up an error workflow, the first anyone hears of it is Monday's Slack message.

n8n's Business plan is $800 a month and self-hosted only. That's a different kind of decision, not a bigger invoice.

On Zapier, anything with a filter, a lookup and a branch will outgrow the free tier's two steps. You hit that wall the first time a process has to do more than pass data from A to B.

The question that actually decides it

Both tools work, and both do most of what a small team needs. So it comes down to the bill, and to one other thing that no comparison table has a column for.

So before you compare anything else, answer this: when this breaks on a Friday afternoon, who fixes it?

If it's "me, and I don't write code", Zapier is built for you. You pay more so you don't spend your evenings reading error logs.

If it's "we've got someone who wants to own this", n8n gets much cheaper as you grow, and self-hosting becomes an option rather than a project. The person who likes opening the editor gets to keep doing that.

If it's "nobody, really", neither tool solves your problem. You'll move the work from building workflows to minding them, and the bill will be the smaller half of what it costs you. We wrote about that in what to choose when nobody wants to own the automation.

A ten-minute check before you decide

Take one workflow you already run.

Count the chargeable steps in a single run and multiply by how often it runs. That tells you which meter is kinder to you.

Then four more questions. How long does one run take? Who finds out when it fails, and how long does that take? Does anything need a person to approve it before it reaches a customer? Could anyone but the person who built it explain what it does?

The first number is a pricing problem. The other four aren't, and no cheaper platform fixes them.

Where Asuri fits, and where it doesn't

There's a third answer to the Friday question. Not that nobody owns the workflow, because someone always does. The question is how much they have to carry.

Asuri is for small teams without a developer, where work repeats and more than one person depends on getting it done.

Take a weekly business report. Someone has to pull numbers from different sources, figure out what changed, and turn that into something useful. Every Monday, the same work starts again.

With Asuri, different AI agents can handle different parts of that process: gathering information, analyzing changes, and preparing a report. The team reviews the result instead of rebuilding it from scratch.

We haven’t published pricing yet, so I can’t make a direct comparison with Zapier or n8n. And I won’t pretend otherwise.

If two apps just need to exchange information, Zapier is probably right, and cheaper. If you want to run everything on your own servers, n8n gives you control we don't. And we're the wrong choice if someone on your team already enjoys owning the automations and wants to keep it that way.

But if the Friday question has no good answer where you work, that's the one we're built for. Get early access. It's open now.