The original comparison ran in April around one core argument: Zapier and Make store your connected-app credentials on their servers, n8n lets you keep them on your own infrastructure. That argument still holds completely. What's changed since April is Zapier's own pricing structure, checked directly on their live pricing page for this refresh, and it's a bigger shift than a simple rate increase.
Zapier Restructured Its Tiers, Not Just Its Prices
Zapier's pricing page no longer lists a "Starter" tier at all. The current structure is Free, Professional, Team, and Enterprise, a genuine rename and consolidation from the Free/Starter/Professional structure the original comparison described. Professional now starts "from $19.99" a month, per the page's own pricing card, which is the same number the old Starter tier used to carry, Zapier appears to have folded Starter's price point into a renamed Professional tier rather than keeping the old $49 Professional price point as a distinct step. A new Team tier starts from $69/month, sitting above Professional for organizations needing shared workspace management, a tier that didn't exist in the original comparison at all.
Practically, this means anyone who evaluated Zapier in April and wrote off Professional at $49/month as too expensive should look again, the tier structure that made that number relevant isn't the one being sold anymore. The actual task-limit and feature boundaries per tier are worth re-confirming directly against the live pricing calculator before committing, since Zapier's task-based pricing scales with volume within each named tier rather than being a single flat number.
Make's Pricing Page Is Bot-Blocked, So Here's What's Confirmed Elsewhere
Make's pricing page returned a 403 error on every path checked for this refresh, home page included, consistent with aggressive bot protection rather than a real access issue, so it is not cited directly here. The Core, Pro, and Teams tiers at roughly $10.59, $18.82, and $34.12 a month respectively have not shown any signal of changing since April in any other source checked, and Make's operations-based pricing model (rather than Zapier's task-based model) remains the core reason Make continues to win the price-per-automation argument against Zapier, even after Zapier's restructure. Worth flagging transparently: this is the one pricing claim in this refresh I could not independently re-verify against Make's own page directly, and Make's aggressive bot protection makes that harder to fix than it should be for a company selling automation tooling to technical buyers.
n8n's Pricing Page Showed Euros, Not Dollars
Checking n8n's live pricing page for this refresh turned up a currency detail worth knowing: the page displayed Starter at €20/month and Pro at €50/month billed annually, in euros rather than dollars, regardless of the browser locale headers sent with the request. That's roughly in line with the $24 and $60 figures from the original comparison once you account for currency conversion, but it's worth checking your own region's displayed currency directly before budgeting, since n8n appears to geo-price rather than defaulting to USD universally. The core value proposition has not moved either way: the Community edition remains free and fully self-hostable with unlimited workflows, confirmed directly in n8n's hosting documentation, which walks through the Docker-based self-hosting setup in enough detail that a team without prior n8n experience can get a working instance running in an afternoon. That is still the number that matters most for the audience this comparison is written for.
Cost at Real Automation Volume
A team running 5,000 tasks a month on Zapier Professional lands well within the confirmed $19.99/month starting price if that tier's task allotment covers it, but the exact ceiling needs checking against the live calculator since Zapier scales the price up within each named tier as volume grows past the entry allotment. That same 5,000-task workload on Make, billed in operations rather than tasks, a rough proxy but not an exact one, would likely land in Make's Pro tier around $18.82/month, still cheaper than Zapier's equivalent volume in most real-world comparisons Reddit's automation communities have run.
n8n Community sidesteps this math entirely: self-hosted, unlimited workflows, no task or operation ceiling to budget against at all, just the cost of running a small server (a few dollars a month on most cloud providers, or free on hardware you already own) plus the engineering time to set it up and maintain it. For a team with any DevOps capacity already in-house, that tradeoff, a few hours of setup against an unbounded volume ceiling, usually pencils out favorably within the first few months compared to any paid tier on either competitor.
Security Review Checklist for Automation Platforms
Any team evaluating these three for something beyond personal productivity should ask three questions before signing a contract: where do the connected-app credentials actually live, what happens to that data if the vendor has a breach, and can we self-host if the compliance requirement demands it. Zapier and Make answer the first two questions the same way, credentials live on their infrastructure, and a breach at either vendor is a breach of every connected credential across every customer. n8n answers all three questions the way most security teams want to hear: credentials live wherever you deploy it, a breach of n8n's own infrastructure does not touch your self-hosted instance at all, and self-hosting is not a workaround, it is the default deployment model.
The Core Argument Still Holds
Every connected-app credential you give Zapier or Make lives on their infrastructure. n8n, self-hosted via the free Community edition, keeps that data on servers you control. For a security team evaluating automation tools that will touch production API keys, database credentials, or internal system access, that distinction hasn't become less relevant since April, if anything, it matters more given how much more automation tooling now touches sensitive internal systems than it did even a year ago.
n8n's tradeoffs are unchanged too: a steeper learning curve than either no-code competitor, a UI that gets genuinely unwieldy past 50 nodes in a single workflow, and cloud-hosted plans that carry their own execution limits if self-hosting isn't an option for your team. None of that has improved or worsened since the original comparison, it's still accurate.
What This Changes About the Recommendation
The original verdict doesn't flip, but Zapier's restructuring narrows the price gap with Make at the entry level in a way worth knowing. Professional at $19.99/month is now closer to Make's Core tier at $10.59/month than the old $49 Professional price ever was, which softens (without eliminating) Make's long-standing value argument against Zapier for teams just starting to automate. Make still wins decisively on pure cost-per-operation once volume scales, that math hasn't changed.
For teams with real security requirements around where automation credentials live, n8n Community remains the only answer among these three that actually solves the problem, both Zapier and Make store your connections regardless of which tier you're on. That's still the deciding factor for any team where "where do our API keys live" is a real question rather than an afterthought.
The Recommendation, Confirmed
Choose n8n Community if credential custody is a genuine requirement and your team can handle Docker-based self-hosting, it's free and the security argument alone justifies the setup effort. Choose Zapier Professional at its confirmed $19.99/month if simplicity matters more than cost and your automations stay under a few thousand tasks a month, re-verify the exact task limit against the live calculator before committing. Choose Make if you've outgrown Zapier's pricing at any tier and don't need self-hosting, its per-operation pricing still beats Zapier meaningfully once volume grows.
For the original credential-custody argument in more depth, the original n8n vs Zapier vs Make comparison covers the full feature breakdown this refresh builds on, and for a closer look at exactly how Zapier's tiers work, the Zapier pricing breakdown is worth reading before committing to either paid platform here.